Here are the answers to whichWMATA week 83

On Tuesday, we posted our eighty-third photo challenge to see how well you knew Metro. I took photos of five Metro stations. Here are the answers. How well did you do?

This week, we got 21 guesses. Eight of you got all five. Great work, Peter K, Solomon, FN, Stephen C, AlexC, dpod, Travis Maiers, and We Will Crush Peter K!

The first image shows a platform pylon at Navy Yard station. Many of you decided the cherry blossom sticker must mean that this was Smithsonian station. But during cherry blossom season, these stickers appear all over WMATA on faregates, station booths, pylons, and any other surface they easily adhere to. So in this case, it was a bit of a pink herring.

There were two real clues. The first is the word “Transportation,” which in this case is a snippet of the name of a major destination at the New Jersey Avenue end of the station: Department of Transportation. This led some of you to guess L’Enfant Plaza, where USDOT used to be headquartered.

The other clue was the fact that there are two wheelchair icons and arrows pointing in opposite directions. There are only two underground stations in the system that have two entrances that are both wheelchair accessible. The two are Friendship Heights and Navy Yard. We talked about stations with redundant elevators in a post last year.

Twelve figured out that this was Navy Yard.

The second picture is looking up at development adjacent to Morgan Boulevard station. These residences are fairly distinctive, and if you were able to narrow this down a bit, could be spotted on Google Street View.

To narrow it down, note the style of the concrete matches the style used in the three stations opened in 2004 (Largo, Morgan Boulevard, and NoMa). The concrete is split into these rectangles, unlike at other stations.

The white fencing atop the wall is also indicative of newer stations. Up until 2001, when the Adopted Regional System was completed with the opening of the Green Line extension to Branch Avenue, Metro mainly used brown for all metal surfaces. The stations built in 2004 and later have silver finishes.

Fourteen guessed Morgan Boulevard.

The third image was taken at Twinbrook. It’s the fourth time we’ve featured this station in the series.

You can tell from the image that this is a low-lying station with a Gull I style canopy with lots of surface parking.

There are 15 Gull I stations. Seven of those stations are elevated, so that eliminates them as possibilities. We can eliminate Cheverly since it has side platforms. New Carrollton, Deanwood, and Minnesota Avenue have catenary supports behind them (for the Northeast Corridor and formerly electrified Penn Central freight line). Brookland is in an open cut, so it’s out as well.

That leaves Van Dorn Street, Shady Grove, and Twinbrook. At Van Dorn Street, the parking lot is on the opposite side of Eisenhower Avenue (and downhill) from the station. At Shady Grove, from this angle, the parking garages would be visible. That leaves Twinbrook.

Additionally, you might have recognized the buildings in the background. The Maryland license plates may have also helped you narrow this down.

Sixteen guessed correctly.

The fourth image shows unique signage at Huntington’s southern entrance. As shown in week 14, Huntington has two narrow escalators on either side of a regular-width escalator. And this is the only place in the system to have narrow escalators.

In a usual arrangement, the station probably would have had three (regular-width) escalators that could be running with two in the peak direction and one in the reverse direction. But in order to make the station wheelchair accessible to the south, Metro built an inclined elevator. That left room for only two regular-width escalators.

The problem with that meant that the demand would be uneven, but the supply would be set at 50/50. A regular-width Metro escalator has room for two people to stand side-by-side. So, with three escalators, Metro could be running two down in the morning (4 people across) and one up (2 people across). But with room for just two escalators, there’d be one down (2 people across) and one up (2 people across). That’s inefficient.

The narrow escalators allow for better balancing. In the morning, one narrow escalator and the regular-width escalator are going down (3 people across) with the other narrow escalator going up (1 person across). That actually gives a better split (75% peak direction) than the three escalator option (67% peak direction), but still has a lower overall capacity (3 of 4 people width versus 4 of 6 people width).

Fifteen came to the correct conclusion.

The final image probably looked harder than it really was. It takes just a little synthesis to put together that the correct answer was Clarendon. Virginia Square was also a very good guess, but it’s not the correct answer.

What do we know from the picture?

We can see that this is a “Waffle” station [32 possible stations] that has side platforms [12 possibilities] and is served by either the Orange or Red Lines (you can see a swatch of orange in the destination sign), which leaves nine stations.

What else can we see? The far wall doesn’t have a mezzanine. That means that this is a station that does not have entrances on both ends, which eliminates all the downtown and transfer stations. That leaves just three possibilities (or five if you didn’t notice Pentagon City and Crystal City aren’t served by the Red or Orange lines).

The three stations that are left are Ballston, Clarendon, and Virginia Square.

It can’t be Ballston because at that station, the mezzanine is at the far eastern end of the platform, with its “tuning fork” style mezzanine pointed west. From this perspective at Ballston (and Pentagon City, for that matter), the mezzanine above would appear concave, not convex, and the escalators would be visible.

This perspective, with the convex shape of the mezzanine means we’re under the end opposite from the escalators, so this has to be a station with a central mezzanine. Both Clarendon and Virginia Square have this attribute.

There were two ways to get the right answer from here. The first is that at Virginia Square, the mezzanine is much closer to the western end of the station than at Clarendon. At Virginia Square, the far wall would be very close to the vantage point.

The other way to figure this out is to know where the exit is. At Clarendon, the exit is to the north (to the right if you’re facing Vienna). At Virginia Square, it’s to the south. The bridge from the mezzanine to the street escalators is visible at the top right corner, meaning this is Clarendon.

But wait! There’s one more detail. Virginia Square has a bridge like this over the Vienna platform, too. The platform elevator on either side has a bridge between the vault wall and the mezzanine. How do you know this isn’t it? Because it’s farther away from the convex point of the mezzanine. There’s a good deal of straight mezzanine railing before it starts to curve over the tracks.

Ten of you got it right.

Note: Some of you mistook electrical conduit on the far wall for knockout panels. Many stations have conduit like this, which are metal tubes with wires inside mounted on the station walls. I apologize that the photo quality wasn’t sufficient to make this clearer. But it couldn’t be Pentagon City because of the reasons outlined above.

Great work, everyone! We’ll be back in two weeks with the next quiz.

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