Photo by vitalyzator on Flickr.

Reader Andrew wonders what will become of Metro’s 1000-series railcars, the oldest in the system, once they are replaced with new 7000-series:

What’s going to happen to the 1000 series Metro cars when the 7000 series finally arrives? I can’t imagine Metro plans to store all of them in a railyard. I suppose it’s most likely that they will sell them for scrap, but it might be cool if you could do a post about potential uses for the cars. Ideas such as:
  • A cool low income housing project
  • Art projects
  • Turn a train into some unique restaurant or something
The new 7000-series railcars will start coming in 2013. The first 64 of them will allow Metro to expand its fleet to run the first phase of the Silver Line, to Wiehle Avenue (though the cars themselves won’t necessarily all run on the Silver Line). The rest of the current 364-car order will replace the 300 1000-series, which are very old and not as safe as the newer cars (though still safer than driving). Dan Stessel, WMATA spokesperson, said the 364th 7000-series car, which will replace the last 1000-series, is scheduled for 2016. That assumes nothing changes; he notes, “While we have not adjusted the delivery schedule due to this year’s events in Japan, we are closely monitoring supply chains and will be in a better position late this year to know what, if any, impact there may be to the production timeline.” So what will happen with the 1000s? Kurt Raschke has some thoughts:
They’ll almost certainly be scrapped, like PATH is doing now with the PA1-4 cars now that all of the PA-5s have been delivered. It would be excellent if at least one married pair were to be preserved (preferably 1000/1001 at minimum), but today’s WMATA is not a terribly nostalgic agency. Then there’s the issue of what to do with the preserved cars; you could send them to the National Capital Trolley Museum, but I don’t know if they have appropriate facilities for them (considering that they are a trolley museum), and I doubt WMATA would just leave them on the property indefinitely. As far as using the scrapped cars for various projects, that may or may not happen. As an example, London Underground is in the process of scrapping the 1967 Tube Stock fleet, and the company doing the scrapping has been instructed by Transport for London to not permit any “sizable pieces” off the property (to include whole train cars). It’s not clear why this is, but it may have to do with liability, or accounting or tax issues.
But what if some organizations could buy entire cars? What ideas do you have for interesting ways to use them?

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.