Total Elevator Outage Strikes Again.

UPDATE: "Ballston. All station escalators and elevators have returned to service." A complete tweet. Hooray!

Yesterday, many of the escalators at Wheaton, which has some of the longest in the world were down.

"No Line: Disruption at Wheaton. Due to mechanical difficulties all platform escalators are out of service. The station elevator is operat.."

Today the escalator bug has apparently hit Ballston, according to this cryptic WMATA tweet:

"No Line: Disruption at Ballston. All of the station's escalators and elevators are out of service. Shuttle bus service has been requ.."

THE ABOVE TWEET IS NOT FROM WMATA click here for details

I wonder if they know their tweets are getting cut off?

Anyone out there know what "no line" means?

Other news:
John Catoe is a brave man?

And If You Thought the Trains Were Unreliable

After our popular post on the unreliable trains, we wanted to check out the performance of the escalators.
Check out the jaw dropping list of escalator/elevator outages, presumably for today. Then check out this 2006 Examiner story about how Metro opened a $1.2 million training facility to teach mechanics how to repair the system’s elevators and escalators, which you'd think would improve the performance. Back then, Dacid Lacosse, Metro’s director of elevators and escalators, said that "On an average day, about 30 escalators and six elevators are out of service due to rehabilitation, maintenance or repairs."

“People like riding our escalators and elevators. When they are down, it is a pain in the read end, particularly for our disabled customers,” said Charles Deegan, a Maryland representative who was on the Metro Board back then. “Hopefully this [new facility] will help the reliability of escalators and elevators in our system.”

There are considerably more than 30 escalators down on the list today.

Other news:
Metro to Put Schedules, Routes on Its Web Site (Wapo)
Metro press release on the topic. See related poll over there ---->.