As an eight-year veteran of D.C.’s Metro system, six of those years spent traveling to the Shady Grove station in question, I’m pretty sure I know what happened.
The operator in question who left the train at 7:12pm no doubt was scheduled to end their shift at 7pm. Metro and its operators are hypersensitive about overtime. Big, public mass transit systems constantly fret about operating costs and relations with labor.
Operators hate, hate, hated to ride all the way out to Shady Grove, deep in the suburbs of Maryland, to end their shift if they lived back towards the other end of the line or if they had their car parked near downtown. For all I know, they are not technically off the clock until they exit the system.
Many, many times I would sit close enough to the operator’s cab to hear radio chatter with central dispatch, much of it about when who’s shift ended when. It was perfectly common for an operator to be told to hold at certain station so a replacement driver could board. Waits of 10-15 minutes for this process were a little long, but not unheard of. No doubt the localized terror alerts for DC spooked Metro riders into noticing and wondering what the hold up might be this time. Bomb? Ricin?
This all adds up to yet another reason why rail transit for the Triangle and Charlotte is such a horrid idea. Back in the 1950s and 60s when Metrorail was launched, one could reasonably say no one knew about the assorted disfunctions of fixed-rail transit. Everything was seen through a kinda World’s Fair pair of rosy glasses.
Today that view cannot be sustained. It is no longer rosy — more like certifiable.
