Half as many trains were offloaded in the first three months of 2017 as compared to the same period in 2016, Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (Metro) announced. The significant improvement in customer reliability was the result of the ongoing, accelerated retirement of all 1000- and 4000-series railcars, Metro's oldest and least reliable, respectively, combined with a "get well" maintenance program on the transit authority's other railcars to make them more reliable.
In the first three months of the year, a total of 218 trains were offloaded (a rate of 2.4 offloads per day), as compared to 433 offloads during the same period in 2016. Metro's "mean distance between delays," a metric that tracks how far a railcar travels, on average, before encountering a problem that delays a train, improved nearly 70 percent — from 48,064 miles between delays in the first quarter of 2016 to 81,451 miles in the first quarter of 2017. Specifically, propulsion-related delays were down 39 percent and door problems were down 16 percent during the period.
