The records of the DC Metro network

Fifty years of building one network under a capital city, with its geology, its politics and its budget fights, tends to produce extremes. The DC Metro has a deepest station, a longest escalator, a station where five of its six lines meet, and a name so long that the agency eventually wrote a rule against it.

None of the records below are guesses. Each one traces back to WMATA's own figures or documented history. The Washington explorer has the full line and station list if you want to check any of them against the map, and the daily station game draws from all 98 stations.

1. Deepest station: Forest Glen, 196 feet

Forest Glen, in Montgomery County, is the deepest station in the system, deep enough that WMATA gave up on escalators there entirely in favour of six elevators. The runner-up isn't close: Rosslyn's lower platform, built to keep the Orange/Silver and Blue lines from crossing at grade just past the station, sits 117 feet down, with the tunnel beneath it reaching as far as 101 feet under the bed of the Potomac.

2. Longest escalator: Wheaton, 230 feet

Wheaton's escalator is the longest single-span escalator in the western hemisphere, a Guinness-recognised record. End to end, the ride takes about two minutes and forty-five seconds. Rosslyn's escalator, at roughly three minutes, is actually the slower ride of the two, but it ranks only fifth-longest systemwide because part of its length is split across more than one run.

3. Oldest stations: the 27 March 1976 opening day

Metro's original 4.6-mile stub of Red line opened with only five stations: Rhode Island Avenue, Union Station, Judiciary Square, Gallery Place and Farragut North, later joined the same year by Dupont Circle, Metro Center, Fort Totten and a few others as the first Red line segment filled in. Every other station in the system, all 90-plus of them, opened after that first day.

4. Newest station: Potomac Yard, 2023

Potomac Yard, on the Blue and Yellow lines in Alexandria, is the most recent addition, an infill station squeezed into an already-operating line. It is only the second infill station Metro has ever managed, after NoMa-Gallaudet U in 2004, and it took a shutdown of the Potomac River bridge segment in late 2022 to physically tie it into the network.

5. Most lines through one station: L'Enfant Plaza, five of six

L'Enfant Plaza is the only station touched by five of the system's six lines: Green, Yellow, Orange, Silver and Blue. It does it by stacking two stations at right angles, one level running north to south, the other east to west. No other station comes within two lines of that total.

6. Longest and shortest names

Before WMATA capped primary station names at 19 characters in 2011, the record holder was U St/African Amer Civil War Memorial/Cardozo, 44 characters on a strip map built for about a third of that. Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan kept a similarly long compound name in daily use regardless. At the other end, several stations tie for shortest at six letters: Vienna, Tysons, McLean and Takoma.

7. Two airports, 45 years apart

Reagan National has had a Metro station since 1977, on an elevated platform beside the terminals. Dulles didn't get one until 15 November 2022, even though engineering studies had proposed a Dulles rail link as early as 1971. No other DC-area record spans that many decades between a project being proposed and a station actually opening.