WMATA rail maintenance machine program needs improvement, audit finds

The Washington Metrorail Safety Commission (WMSC) yesterday issued an audit of Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority's (WMATA) Metrorail roadway maintenance machine (RMM) inspection, maintenance and training program.

The WMSC, which exists to ensure continuous safety improvement at Metrorail, identified several positive practices as well as a number of areas that require improvement. As a result, the commission issued 14 findings requiring Metrorail to develop corrective action plans (CAPs).

Metrorail has 45 days to develop and submit proposed CAPs.

The audit found that Metrorail must improve its implementation of required safety reviews of, and its training on, RMMs. Safety certification practices, RMM maintenance and operations training and certification, and a number of rules and procedures must be improved, clarified or actually implemented to resolve issues, according to the WMSC audit report's executive summary.

In addition, the audit found that WMATA is not performing required safety certification for new RMMs and is not following proper safety-approval or engineering-change processes for existing RMMs. Safety-certification process concerns have been identified in connection with RMMs dating back to at least 2013, and the WMSC has identified other projects where WMATA has also not followed this process.

The WMSC's full audit report is available here.