10 weirdest stations on the DC Metro

Most of the DC Metro's 98 stations share the same Harry Weese vocabulary: a coffered concrete vault, hexagonal floor tiles, bronze pylons. That uniformity is exactly why the exceptions stand out. A handful of stations broke the pattern because of a hill, a river, a cemetery, a runway, or a fight over a permit, and riders notice every one of them.

Here are ten stations worth a second look next time you pass through, with real reasons for each. For the full roster, the Washington explorer lists every line and station, and the daily guessing game uses all 98 of them.

1. Forest Glen has no escalators at all

At 196 feet down, Forest Glen is the deepest station in the system, deep enough that an escalator would have been unmanageably long to maintain. WMATA skipped the escalators entirely and installed six high-speed elevators instead, plus fire doors, a feature unique to this station, meant to protect riders in case of a train fire that far underground.

The emergency exit is a stairwell that runs roughly twenty storeys from platform to street. It exists for exactly one reason: if the elevators fail, someone has to be able to walk out.

2. Wheaton's escalator takes longer to ride than some train rides

Wheaton, also on the Red line, holds the escalator at the other extreme: 230 feet, the longest single-span escalator in the western hemisphere. Riding it end to end takes about two minutes and forty-five seconds, long enough that regulars know exactly which side to stand on and which to walk.

It is a Guinness-recognised record, and a direct consequence of the same deep-tunnel design that gave Forest Glen its elevators a few stops up the line.

3. Rosslyn splits its platforms by direction, not by line

Rosslyn has two platform levels, but they are not divided the way most transfer stations divide theirs. Because the Orange/Silver and Blue lines diverge an extremely short distance past the station, WMATA put trains heading one direction on one level and trains heading the other direction on the level below, purely to avoid an at-grade crossing of the tracks.

The lower platform sits 117 feet down, the deepest of the three lines that serve the station, and the tunnel beneath it dips as far as 101 feet under the bed of the Potomac. The escalator up is the fifth-longest in the entire system, at around three minutes.

4. L'Enfant Plaza runs two lines at right angles to each other

L'Enfant Plaza is the only station where five of the system's six lines meet: Green, Yellow, Orange, Silver and Blue. It manages that by stacking two separate stations on top of each other at ninety degrees, side platforms upstairs running north to south, an island platform downstairs running east to west.

It is also the point where the network's central tunnels bottleneck. Several lines share the same pair of tracks through downtown, so a stalled train on one can back up the others behind it, a direct side effect of concentrating so much traffic through one crossing.

5. Arlington Cemetery was built to serve a cemetery, and nothing else

Arlington Cemetery opened in 1977 with a single purpose: getting visitors to Arlington National Cemetery's gates. It sits on the Blue line only, has no transfer to another line, and its entire above-ground footprint is essentially a walkway into the cemetery grounds.

It is a rare case in any metro system of a station whose reason for existing is a single, specific destination rather than a neighbourhood.

6. Smithsonian's Mall entrance had to go to the White House

Smithsonian was originally planned as Independence Avenue station before being renamed in 1971. Getting it built the way it opened was harder than expected: the National Park Service initially refused Metro a permit to tunnel across the National Mall at all, and only relented after the White House ordered the Park Service to grant it and Metro to plan for a Mall-side entrance.

That entrance, on the south side of the Mall near Jefferson Drive, exists today because of a dispute that had to be settled above WMATA's head.

7. Reagan National puts you closer to the runway than most airports allow

Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport station sits on an elevated platform right beside the terminals, under the final approach path into one of the country's busiest close-in airports. Planes on their last few hundred feet before landing pass low enough to be a genuine attraction for aviation watchers standing on an open-air Metro platform, not something most transit systems offer.

It has served the airport since 1977, decades before Dulles got its own Metro connection in November 2022.

8. Tenleytown-AU sits under the highest point in the District

Tenleytown is built on Wisconsin Avenue at the crest of what is, by most reckonings, the highest natural ground in Washington, D.C., a rise long used as a lookout point before the city existed. The station itself tunnels underneath that hill rather than around it, which is a strange thing to do to the district's high ground: bury a subway platform directly beneath it.

Riders would never guess it from inside the coffered vault. The topography only becomes obvious once you're back on the street.

9. Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan never got the shortening memo

Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan packs a park, the National Zoo and a neighbouring commercial strip into one station name. Metro spent 2011 and 2012 capping most primary station names at 19 characters after complaints that names like U Street's had grown unreadable on strip maps, but this one kept its full compound name in daily use regardless.

Say it out loud on a crowded platform and you'll understand why most other triple-barrelled names on the system eventually got trimmed.

10. Eisenhower Avenue serves an office park, not a neighbourhood

Eisenhower Avenue, in Alexandria, opened in 1983 named after a person rather than a place, in the middle of a corridor of office buildings and light industry with almost no housing within walking distance. Riders getting off here are, overwhelmingly, going to work, not home.

It is a useful reminder that not every Metro stop was built around a community that already existed. Some were built to create one, or at least to try.