Silver Line

The Silver Line is a rapid transit line of the Washington Metro system, consisting of 34 stations in Loudoun County, Fairfax County and Arlington County, Virginia, Washington, D.C., as well as Prince George's County, Maryland. The Silver Line runs from in Virginia to in Maryland. Five stations, from both lines' eastern terminus at Downtown Largo to , are shared with the Blue Line alone; thirteen stations, from to , with both the Orange Line and Blue Lines; and five stations from to with the Orange Line alone. Only the five stations of Phase 1, which began service on July 26, 2014, and the six stations of Phase 2, which began service on November 15, 2022, are exclusive to the Silver Line. The portion of the Silver Line between its split from the Orange Line and is entirely in Fairfax County, Virginia and was constructed as Phase 1 of the Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project. Phase 2 expanded the line another to Ashburn in Loudoun County via Dulles International Airport. The $6.8 billion Silver Line is Metro's largest expansion by route mileage since its inception in 1976. History Planning The federal government of the United States, which owned and operated Dulles Airport before Congress created the MWAA, built the Dulles Access Road in the 1960s to connect the airport to Washington, D.C. by way of Virginia State Route 267. As the access road was built, the authorities opted to reserve the median of the road for some form of rail transit, and the nearby West Falls Church station was designed so that the line could eventually be extended in this direction. The original 1968 Metrorail plan included an eventual extension to Dulles airport. In 1969, U.S. Senator from Virginia William B. Spong Jr. tried unsuccessfully to have the extension to Dulles be built as part of an early stage of the system rather than having it be built at some unspecified time in the future. A 1971 study of the feasibility of Metrorail running to Dulles estimated that 30,000 people would ride the extension each day.