DC Metro heralds approval of completed NTSB safety recommendations

Washington, D.C.'s Metrorail subway system said Thursday that it has satisfied five of the National Transportation Safety Board's recommendations it has labored to address since a fatal 2009 train crash.

The effort to address the NTSB recommendations has caused delays associated with track work that have frustrated Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) riders in the capital area on nights and weekends.

But Metro Board Safety Committee Chair Mort Downey said Thursday that the agency has satisfied five of the NTSB's 27 outstanding recommendations.

“I am encouraged by this progress and want to commend Metro’s leadership for their hard work to make the system safer,” Downey said in a statement of the work. 

The recommendations Metro said were satisfactorily addressed included removing a series of railway signals that the NTSB found were susceptible to defection and improving the analysis of data collected from train tracks.

Metro has run trains manually as it addressed the NTSB's recommendations about its automatic control system.

The agency said it has submitted 12 more of the NTSB's recommendations for closure, but the safety agency has not finished reviewing documents related to those.

One of the NTSB's main recommendations following the 2009 crash of a train on Metro's Red Line that killed nine people was the removal of the oldest rail cars in the WMATA system. Metro said Thursday that it would take more time to address that recommendation because the cars were being replaced by new models being constructed in Japan for the opening of the system's extension to Dulles International Airport. 

-This post was updated from an earlier version to correct the number of recommendations Metro has addressed.

---