The Dulles Rail Silver Line extenstion passes another hurdle by getting the sign off from the FTA for the federal contribution of 900 million to the $1.63 billion needed to build the first stage of the Metro rail extension out to Dulles Airport.

Metro has also started procurement of 64 new 7000 series metro rail cars that will look significantly different from the existing fleet. The rail cars would have a stainless steel exterior. The exterior brown paint and stripes would be gone. The Fiberglass seats would be replaced with stainless steel ones and carpet would be eliminated. They are also considering interactive linear maps, and automated announcements stating the station names. While I am all for the automated announcements, I remember the 6000’s doing it when they first started rolling out, so why don’t they do it now?

With the silver line looking like it might actually be built Track Twenty Nine has some very interesting diagrams on the capacity issues the Silver line will create at Rosslyn Station.

Metro is considering routing some blue line trans across the bridge to DC rather than going to Rosslyn as they currently do. When you add the silver line in the rosslyn tunnel it doesn’t look like metro will have any other choice than to reduce the blue line service to the station unless they expand or build another tunnel into DC.