March 27, 2026 marks 50 years since WMATA (Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority) inaugurated the Washington Metro (Metro Rail) rapid transit system in the National Capital Region. The first passenger-carrying Metro Rail trips occurred On March 27, 1976, on the 4.6 miles of Red Line connecting Rhode Island Avenue and Farragut North. We at Simmons-Boardman Publishing Corp. and Railway Age are proud to say that this publication played an important role in its development. In the late 1960s, then Railway Age Editor-in-Chief the late Luther S. Miller—my predecessor—and then Publisher the late Robert G. Lewis led tours of other rapid transit systems around the world—Paris and Stockholm, for example—for Metro Rail planners, engineers and architects to gather ideas. Interestingly, the Washington Post criticized these transit system tours as “junkets” and “boondoggles.” The Washington Post had it all wrong. Among the people participating in our tours was Stanley Nance Allen (1921-2015), longtime Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (FAIA) and past president of architectural firm Harry Weese and Associates, from which he retired in 1995. Allen’s most significant impact as an architect—indeed, his most important career achievement—was development and construction of Metro Rail, for which he was project manager from 1964 through 1977 at Harry Weese and Associates. Weese designed Metro Rail’s modern, spacious, cavernous open-concept subway stations, which at the time were a far cry from the “hole in the ground” stations typical of legacy U.S. subway systems like New York City Transit. The RATP (Paris Metro) stations inspired…
