Here are the answers to whichWMATA week 164

On Tuesday, we featured the 164th challenge to see how well you know the Metro system. Here are the answers. How’d you do?

This week, we got 14 guesses. Five of you got all five. Great work Isaac Alvarez, Kevin M, Felix C, Peter K, and Justin…!

There was no theme this week. When copying in the HTML for the quiz post, I neglected to delete that line from the previous quiz, which did have a theme. I apologize for the error. I hope it didn’t throw any of you off.

The first image looks southwest from the platform at Braddock Road. There were several clues here, including the Alexandria Peak canopy, present at only two stations, and the triple-track non-electrified railroad in the background. Several of you guessed King Street, which has a very similar layout and setting as Braddock Road, but had this been King Street, the George Washington Memorial Masonic Tower would be much closer to the station, and the Alexandria Amtrak/VRE station would be visible.

Eight of you knew this one.

Metro Center was the next station. The pylon indicating that the Red Line is one level down should have been a hint that this was a station with more than one line on more than one level. With an underground setting, that should have narrowed it down to Metro Center and Gallery Place.

But this can’t be Gallery Place for three reasons. First, since Glenmont is shown on the left side platform, we must be looking westward from the eastern mezzanine. At Gallery Place, that would put us directly under the crossvault, but the crossvault is actually visible in the picture. Additionally, the eastern mezzanine at Gallery Place doesn’t have escalators directly down on to the Red Line platform parallel to the tracks. Instead, they descend perpendicularly to the tracks to a “lobe” of the platforms that extend above the Green/Yellow platforms. Finally, the crossvault at Gallery Place has a mezzanine under it, so that mezzanine would be clearly visible in this picture, if we were at Gallery Place.

Ten of you got this one right.

The third image shows the triple tuning-fork mezzanine at Ballston. At Metro’s waffle side platform stations, the mezzanine-to-platform escalators are arranged like tuning forks. At virtually every station, there are just two in sequence per mezzanine. But at several stations, there are three in sequence. Ballston is the only such station with the triple tuning fork escalators connecting to the Orange/Silver Line.

Thirteen of you figured this one out.

The fourth image looks down on the southern end of the Union Station platform. Note that this picutre was taken before the vault was painted a few years back. From the pylon, you can tell that this is a Red Line station. The center platform and waffle vault narrow this down to one of just two stations: Farragut North and Union Station. But this has to be Union Station since Farragut North has an extended mezzanine. Additionally, Union Station has shallower coffers (the indentations in the vault) and test signage with backlit lettering.

Twelve of you guessed correctly.

The final image was challenging. Most of you were able to narrow it down to a choice between two stations, but it is possible to know definitively which one this is.

Since the pylon indicates that the station is served by the Green and Yellow Lines, we can narrow this down to one of the 13 stations shared by the two lines. We can further narrow this down to one of the five Waffle-style stations of the initial set. L’Enfant Plaza can be discarded because it has side platforms and Gallery Place can be discarded because it has an extended mezzanine above the Green and Yellow platform.

That leaves three stations. In the distance you can see a second mezzanine. That eliminates Archives, which only has one. So now we’re down to two: Shaw and U Street. But which is it?

Both U Street and Shaw have mezzanines at either end, a center platform, and a waffle vault. There are some subtle differences that a few of you hit upon, such as the extra trackway drains at Shaw (barely visible in the left-most trackway) and the single-line station wall signs at Shaw versus the two-line signs at U St/African-Amer Civil War Mem’l/Cardozo.

The other critical difference has to do with the shape of the mezzanines themselves. At U Street, the mezzanines at both ends are shaped like a spatula. The exit from the mezzanine toward the street is a tunnel through the station’s end wall parallel to the tracks. At Shaw, both mezzanines are shaped like a golf club. The exit from the mezzanine toward the street is a bridge over one track and then a tunnel through the vault. You can clearly see the bridge over the Greenbelt track leading to the S Street entrance near the center of the photo. That makes this Shaw.

Eight of you came to the correct conclusion.

Great work, everyone. Thanks for playing! We’ll be back in two weeks with challenge #165.

Information about contest rules and submission guidelines is available at http://ggwash.org/whichwmata.