Later this year, Metro’s fleet will begin to grow as the first 7000 series railcars arrive. Those cars will need places to park and for maintenance, so WMATA is planning to enlarge the yard at New Carrollton and build a new yard at Landover station. But the Landover facility has a serious downside: it might make development harder in the future.

Photo by BeyondDC on Flickr.

Currently, the New Carrollton Yard has room for 114 railcars. Metro hopes to more than double that capacity by building space to store 120 cars more. For the most part, the new tracks will be able to fit within the existing yard boundary, though the yard will need to grow slightly next to the Amtrak line.

Image from WMATA.

But the new tracks will displace a portion of the yard that is used for maintenance and work equipment. Those facilities will have to move under this plan, which is why the agency is proposing a new yard at Landover. The Landover yard won’t hold passenger cars, but rather the work equipment evicted from New Carrollton.

Why Metro needs more yard space

The expansion is necessary for two reasons. The first is fairly straightforward: WMATA is buying new railcars, and a larger fleet needs more parking space. But Metro also needs storage in the right places to operate efficiently. Trains and train operators start and finish the day at rail yards. If there’s not enough capacity at the yard at one end of the line, a train has to deadhead (run without passengers) all the way from the other end.

This is a problem for some systems which have only one yard. For example, in Los Angeles, the Red and Purple lines operate out of a rail yard near Union Station on the edge of downtown. In the mornings, trains start their runs downtown and head out to suburban areas. In the evenings, the last train leaves downtown long before the last train leaves the outer ends. It’s the opposite of the pattern you’d expect.

In Metro’s case, all of the lines have rail yards at each end or fairly close to the end. One exception is the Silver Line, though this will be remedied when the second phase opens since it includes a new yard northwest of Dulles Airport. The Largo end of the Blue Line just has some tail tracks extending past the station which can store a few trains, though I’m not sure how much of that capacity WMATA uses on a regular basis.

Graphic by the author. Data from Metro’s Rail Fleet Management Plan.

One problem facing Metro is a structural imbalance in storage capacity. Right now, there’s more existing and planned storage capacity on the west end of the system than the east. Greenbelt Yard is much larger than necessary for the Green Line (though the new 7000 series cars will be commissioned there). But it’s not feasible to store railcars at Greenbelt and get them to the Red, Orange, Silver, or Blue lines, so that excess capacity isn’t helpful.

Metro also hopes to expand the yard at Shady Grove, though they haven’t released details about that proposal yet.

The Landover yard will cut off development opportunities

Unfortunately, there is a tradeoff with this plan. While the expansion at New Carrollton can mostly fit within the existing footprint, the new yard planned for Landover will occupy prime real estate just steps from the station.

Graphic from WMATA.

Prince George’s County and the surrounding municipalities have long hoped to transform this station site into a mixed-use community. So far, that hasn’t happened. The area is mostly industrial in nature, and surface commuter parking covers the area immediately surrounding the station. But as the region continues to grow, and with the Purple Line soon to start construction, the area will become more likely to develop.

The Landover station site already has little land you can walk to from the station because it isn’t in a good location and lacks connections to the west. Giving over a third of the station site to a rail yard will dramatically cut down on the possibility of developing the site with a mixed-use, walkable community.

While the yard will largely occupy the north third of the parking lot, Metro will replace all the lost spaces with a parking garage. This is happening even though only 41% of parking spaces at Landover are used on the average day, and parking usage has dropped every year since 2011.

Metro didn’t consider any other sites for the rail yard proposed for Landover. The environmental assessment only analyzed a build option (at Landover) and a no-build option. Metro likes this site because it’s close to the other facilities at New Carrollton, is easy to connect to the existing tracks, and because the authority already owns the land.

But foreclosing on the possibility of transit-oriented development on the station site may doom Landover permanently to being one of the least walkable stations. On the other hand, it’s even more important to find ways to increase Metro’s storage capacity, and with hundreds of railcars coming off the assembly line, the clock is ticking.