Metro was bracing for crushing crowds on Monday — the night of the Washington Nationals’ first weekday night game — but riders said their commute was pretty painless.
“I work near here, and it’s a lot more crowded today,” said Bryce Onaran, waiting in his Nationals hat at L’Enfant Plaza for a Green Line train to the Navy Yard station. “I mean it’s not terrible, but there aren’t usually this many people here.”
Transit police and yellow-vested station managers dotted the platforms at Gallery Place-Chinatown and L’Enfant Plaza — the two major transfer stations to the Green Line — shepherding riders between trains with calls of “baseball this way!” and “use the escalator to your right for the Nationals game.”
Traffic picked up at both stations close to 6 p.m., but while Green Line trains were packed, few people were left waiting on the platforms.
“Oh, the Green Line’s been pretty full,” station manager Denise Foreman said, in between joking with riders on the platform and answering questions. “But the flow has been pretty good.”
More than 20,000 Nationals fans were expected to cram onto rush-hour trains to get to the 41,000-seat stadium in time for the 7:10 p.m. game against the Florida Marlins.
Metro added a new, six-car train to the Green Line last month to help prepare for the crunch, but the agency has been unable to add rail cars to the other lines during rush hour because it already deploys all of its available trains, officials have said.
The transit agency placed extra station managers, rail supervisors and transit police at the Gallery Place-Chinatown and L’Enfant Plaza transfer stations, and at the Navy Yard Green Line station that services the ballpark.
After the game, Metro was scheduled to add 10 extra trains to the Green Line, four extra trains to the Red Line, and five to the Orange and Blue lines to get fans home.