The Connection

I was kind of excited about the opening of the Reston (Wiehle-Reston East) Metro station on Saturday. In fact, Fran and I decided to take a ride on Silver—after we closed the Reston Farmers Market at noon and had our nap, of course. We could have walked to the station, but we drove instead—on the grounds that we had had our walking exercise for the day. At 3:30 parking was no problem. Inside, the station looked and felt new, and it was not crowded so we easily got to a waiting train—a long one, about half full. We noticed that our car looked new as well—it had the shiny new, easy to clean hard surface floors and the electronic signs indicating the stations. After a couple of minutes, a clear voice announced, “Welcome to the Silver Line to Largo, Maryland”, and we were off! Soon, maybe 10 minutes later, we were in Tysons. Two observations about the ride through the four Tysons stations. First, as I expected, it seemed like a long time to go a relatively short distance. This is the Silver Line’s big design flaw—two or three stations too many. But, second, Tysons does look a lot nicer from an elevated train car than it does from street level.

Then, it was on to East Falls Church where the new Silver Line track joins the existing Orange Line. Note: several people have asked us where one must change trains to go all the way from Reston to Largo, the other end of the Silver Line. The answer is nowhere. No train changes at all. You arrive in Largo in the same seat you got at Reston. The train changes designations as it goes—i.e., it starts in Reston as the Silver Line; becomes Silver and Orange at East Falls Church; changes to Silver, Orange and Blue at Rosslyn station; and, at Stadium/Armory it drops the Orange name and proceeds on to Largo as the Silver and Blue lines. In fact, we could have kept the same seat roundtrip! Because, when we got to Largo, our train simply changed directions and became the Silver Line (and Blue, etc.) to Reston!

We did get off the train at Eastern Market on our way to Largo. Eastern Market is about the oldest farmers market in the metro region, and the Reston Farmers Market’s co-Market Masters (Fran and I) could not resist the opportunity to visit one of the old classic markets. And, we got a nice surprise there. One of our Reston vendors, Wisteria Gardens, has a stand in Eastern Market. The lady tending the stand told us she’d heard Reston was a great market! Back on the train, we soon passed the Morgan Road station, just a short walk from the Fedex Field where we and daughter Jenni saw the Redskins beat the Green Bay Packers last season. It turned out to be their last win of that season. Then, we sat back and read the newspaper and watched the scenery (when above ground) on the way to Largo and then heading back home. We would make one more stop—to reward our hard work with dinner at Coastal Flats in Tysons Corner, a restaurant we had not visited because Tysons is such a hassle. But, the Silver Line changed that. We had a nice seafood dinner at the bar and walked 10 minutes back for our comfortable Silver Line ride to Reston. Love hearing the announcement as we returned westward—“This is the Silver Line to Reston!” No doubt about it. The Silver Line is a game changer for Reston. How we manage the change remains to be seen. I would feel much more confident if we were a self-governing town or city making our own decisions on how we grow from 60,000 to twice that many. There is no question however that the Silver Line will enable us to see a lot more of our region than we currently do. And, imagine walking to a comfortable train whizzing us to Dulles Airport, too.