Three escalators at Metro's Pentagon station will shut down Feb. 4 for a replacement project expected to last into the fall.
The escalators to be replaced are located at the station's south entrance. The north entrance will remain open.
Metro says the current south escalators were installed 18 years ago, and the company that made them stopped producing parts several years ago, making repairs increasingly difficult.
"[R]ehabilitating the aging units is neither practical nor cost-effective in the long term," Metro officials said in a release.
The new escalators standard size, transit-grade escalators similar to those recently installed at Dupont Circle's south entrance -- although those haven't been without their share of problem. They experienced 20 outages in their first 40 days, Metro officials admitted in December.
Last week, Metro awarded a$151.1 million contract
to replace or modernize an additional 128 of the system's escalators by 2020.
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