State of the Union Station/Foggy Bottom Address

So Metro's throwing an escalator party!

They're celebrating their victory over escalators at Foggy Bottom and Union Station, both scenes of many a vertical transport defeat over the past several years.

Hey, it's a big day at Metro when some escalators work, and it's all befitting of some soaring, feel good rhetoric.

Here's a leaked copy of Metro GM Richard Sarles' prepared remarks to be made during today's gala events.

From a reader:

One score and 15 years ago our fathers brought forth on this city, a new subway, conceived in escalators, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equally unable to climb stairs.

Now we are engaged in a great war, testing whether that subway, or any subway so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a near final resting place for those who here gave their thighs that that subway might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and winded, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The city will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they climbed here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who trod here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored winded we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of locomotion -- that we here highly resolve that these winded shall not have nearly died in vain -- that this subway, under WMATA, shall have a new birth of escalation -- and that a subway of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Now let's pop this Cristal, beyotch! I get paid over $300K to run this sh*t! You're welcome!