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Thursday, July 18, 2013

When Will the Silver Line Actually Open? Your Guess is as Good as Ours

Metro Silver Line delay.jpgIt's taken them a few years, but the folks building Metro's Silver Line are finally acting like the contractors that regrout your bathroom tile. Please to be enjoying the Least Surprising Blockquote in Human History:

Officials said Wednesday that completion of the first phase of Metro’s Silver Line could be delayed by at least eight weeks.
Sounds familiar.


So when will the Silver Line actually start running? No one's saying.
“There’s a real question now on when it will be complete,” Jack Potter, the head of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, told members of the MWAA’s Board of Directors at a briefing on the rail project Wednesday…

Metro spokeswoman Caroline Lukas said in an e-mail that it was too early to determine the impact that the delay could have. “There are still a number of variables, so it’s premature to say how this delay will impact the service date,” she said.
We may not be major infrastructure-building conglomerates with billion-dollar budgets (not for a lack of trying), but we do have access to a calendar. If the completion of construction is pushed back eight weeks from the end of September, that moves it to the end of November. If MWAAA still needs 90 days to test the system after it's handed over to their highly competent hands, that brings us to the end of February. Throw in a few extra days to polish up all that rad 80s glasswork and throw a fistful of scrap metal into the escalator machinery, and that puts us sometime in March… maybe.

Anyone want to make a contest of it? (We've had such good luck with contests before.) Put your guess on the first day the Wiehle Avenue Metro station will be open to passengers in the comments. The person closest to the actual date wins a brand-new Buick our deepest respect. Our own guess? Feb. 14. Hey, we like playing to lose.

But either way, we're guessing that the Silver Line Sea Monkeys aren't going to make it, the end.

7 comments:

  1. Always the cynic! I say they still make the Jan. 1 deadline -- Jan 1, 2015, that is.

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  2. I'm predicting bad winter weather, so that will add a couple of weeks. I also think they will start running on a weekend, so as not to screw up the lemmings commutes to Tysons. So... my official guess is Saturday March 1, 2014.

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  3. Ten weeks delay at the minimum--and on a weekend and preferably a holiday one.

    I'll go with Saturday, March 15, 2013. Monday, 3/17, is St. Patrick's Day--which might as well be an official holiday. Certainly people should be riding the train rather than driving that evening.

    Is the "Ides of March" an official federal holiday? If not, why not?

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  4. Monday May 12th, 2014 is my guess.

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  5. Peasant From Less Sought After South RestonJuly 18, 2013 at 5:50 PM

    The above anon beat me to it, damn it! May 12 is the feast day of St. Dominic de la Calzada, patron saint of...wait for it...civil engineers.

    According to his Wicked-pedia entry, this 11th century Spanish saint "cleared trees, cultivated the earth, and began to build a paved causeway (in Spanish, calzada), which served as an alternate route to the traditional Roman causeway."

    My second choice is April 8, feast day of another 11th century Holy Roman rock star, the French St. Walter of Pontoise, patron saint for those afflicted with job-related stress.

    Not that there's any reasons to think of "Metro commute" and "stress" in the same sentence.

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  6. Can anyone tell me the first scheduled day of winter comes to the Underworld because I'm betting that it's going to be a frost day in Hell before the Silver Line starts taking passengers.

    Does anybody know, btw, whether the Silver line is on-budget? Does this delay put them off the scheduled delivery date according to the project plan?

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  7. 27 March 2013! (Armed Forces day) Nothing says thank you to our armed forces like a metro line opening... :|

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