Baltimore’s subway line will be out of service from Friday night until Monday morning to allow the Maryland Transit Administration to test a new train control system, the agency announced this week.
All 14 stations between Owings Mills and Johns Hopkins Hospital will close at 8 p.m. Friday and reopen 4 a.m. Monday. Metro SubwayLink riders can catch shuttle buses that will run every 30 minutes during regular service hours between any station while the system’s lone 15-mile line is shut down.
The state agency will be testing a new “communications based train control system” that it says will be critical for the heavy rail line’s transition to new railcars starting next year. Such a system allows for more precise tracking, which should allow riders to more reliably track trains.
Brand-new Hitachi railcars will start replacing the Baltimore Metro’s more-than-40-year-old fleet in mid-2025 — one of the largest single investments in the transit line since it opened in the 1980s. The 78 new railcars, which will replace the original 100 still in service today, are part of a $550 million-plus overhaul of the Metro system that also includes new signal and communications systems.
The new Metro railcars will be phased into service, according to an agency spokesperson. That means that a mix of old and new railcars will operate together starting next year, each with different train control systems. The agency expects additional temporary shutdowns of the Metro in the winter and spring to ensure both the current and new systems can operate together.
Metro ridership is almost back to pre-pandemic levels, with more than 538,000 boardings in August, according to agency figures. The MTA’s dashboard shows a steep jump in Metro ridership between October and November of last year, when the agency revamped how it calculated the number. Before, it relied on automated counters attached to fare gates. After those had grown faulty with age, the agency transitioned to a mix of manual counts and data modeling, an industry standard.
The new rail cars and other improvements can’t come soon enough for daily Metro riders, who have had to deal with routine minor breakdowns in recent years and even a multiday shutdown of the entire line last July. With $1.9 billion in investment needs in 2022, the Metro outpaces all other MTA services in what it needs to reach a “state of good repair” — industry-speak for keeping transportation assets working properly.
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