'Intense' Metro Track Work Forecasted For Next Four Years

If you ride Metrorail, you've probably already experienced delays because of repairs both unscheduled and scheduled, particularly on the weekend. As Metro's general manager Richard Sarles said on WAMU's The Kojo Nnamdi Show Monday, your pain isn't going away anytime soon.

Track repairs on metro will disrupt service every weekend for the next six months, but this is a just a taste, an appetizer if you will, of things to come.

"I looking at the forecast of work we have to do to just get us back to where we were ten years ago; it'll take us about another four years of that intense work," Sarles said. "It'll move around the system depending on were you have to do the work to do the reconstruction."

Of course, that doesn't mean all disruptions from repairs will go away in 2017. Far from it.

"After that, there's still preventive maintenance that has to be done, and reconstruction, but it won't be as intense," Sarles said.

Sarles says the intense work is meant to undo more than a decade of disrepair and also to implement federal safety recommendations made before and after a deadly metrorail accident in 2009.