WASHINGTON — When a Red Line train derailed last month inside a tunnel between Metro Center and Farragut North, the train operator and a transit police officer both had trouble communicating with headquarters about what was happening. Their radios lost contact for at least 10 minutes.
And it may not have been an isolated incident.
The Washington Post reports that it counted more than a dozen incidents of radio issues in the week before that derailment, after listening to several hours of scanner traffic captured by Broadcastify.
The incidents included train operators noting garbled and indecipherable messages that had to be relayed over again. One operator was even heard conceding he had traveled into a “dead zone.”
However, Metro is downplaying the issues raised, saying listening to a sampling of scanner audio found online doesn’t offer a clear picture of what was happening, and that simply asking for a message to be repeated doesn’t mean there was a problem with the radio system.
At the same time, Metro is in the process of updating its radio system in the coming years, and the Post cites a letter sent to Senator Mark Warner by Metro that notes the planned purchase of thousands of new radios this year, a purchase that hadn’t been made public yet.
Radio issues have long plagued the system at the most inopportune times.
In 2015, when a Yellow Line train became swallowed up by smoke, leading to the death of a passenger, controllers and the operator went 11 minutes without contact.
Derailments and switch problems have also been further complicated by radio failures lasting several minutes along the Red Line.
Metro does have landline phones set up in tunnels throughout the system, and cellphones can also be used as backup communication devices in the event the radios fail.
