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Metro riders passing through the Foggy Bottom station can put away their climbing shoes starting Wednesday – at least for a while.
The transit agency is planning a ribbon cutting for 11 a.m. Wednesday to mark the completion of the third escalator replacement at the Orange/Blue Line station. It’s a long-awaited milestone as commuters have been grappling with temperamental escalators at the one-entrance station for years, then had to weather construction there since January as the agency replaced them. They’ve often had to hike up and down stopped escalators.
It also is the first of Metro’s 588 escalators to be replaced with entirely new equipment in more than a decade.
But the work is not completely done. The agency still has to build a new staircase in the entrance and add a canopy over the whole thing, said Metro spokesman Dan Stessel, which should occur in the first quarter of 2012. The whole $6 million project started in January, after an initial delay from a November 2010 start.
The transit agency also plans to celebrate the rehabilitation of seven escalators at Union Station on Wednesday, the busiest station in the system. It has had serious bottlenecks at its escalators.
