Commuters at the Foggy Bottom Metro station got to ride on a clean new escalator after enduring months of construction that forced many to wait in long lines only to climb the stalled stairs. “This is awesome,” Jennifer Bretsch yelled out, raising her arms in the air, as she rode up Monday morning.
“It’s been a nightmare,” she said. “You think you’re going to get to work at a certain time. More often than not, though, they’re down and there’s a backlog of people.”
The transit agency has been working on the project since January and finished the work on the new Schindler brand escalator Sunday afternoon. It met its first full test of commuters on Monday morning.
It is the first of Metro’s 588 escalators to be replaced with entirely new equipment in more than a decade, said spokesman Dan Stessel. Typically Metro has rebuilt escalators part by part as they tackle a long backlog of maintenance that has pulled one of every five escalators out of commission at times.
“It’s a good first milestone,” he said. “Certainly we have a long way to go…. We have a lot of work to do around escalators.”
As part of a $6 million project, the remaining two entrance escalators at Foggy Bottom also will be replaced, a staircase will be added and a canopy will be placed over the entrance by November. Workers plan to start on the middle escalator on Thursday, Stessel said.
Allison Shealy was among the escalator riders Monday morning. It was a relief for the woman who is eight months pregnant after last week’s outages, which shut down all the entrance escalators. “It was either walk all the way up or take the elevator,” she said. She opted to hike up. “And I regretted it.”
Yet many riders didn’t notice the new one was working as they left the faregates because a plywood barrier remained nearby. They queued up at the old escalator instead.
A Metro employee stood at the base directing riders to use the new one. “The escalator is going up. You don’t have to wait in line,” she called out.
A group of riders heeded her calls and veered over to the far escalator.
“No, it’s not,” said one man.
The escalator had stopped working. A switch that senses when a step isn’t aligned wasn’t in the proper position, Stessel explained. He said it was the only hiccup in Monday’s operations until at least about 5:30 p.m. and the escalator restarted within about 10 minutes.
But the riders didn’t wait. They hiked up anyway.
