Some Washington Commanders fans heading home after the team’s 27-10 win Sunday night found themselves briefly stuck behind locked gates after arriving at a Virginia Metrorail station.
After the last Orange Line train from Northwest Stadium entered Vienna station early Monday morning, some fans exited to find the station gates locked, according to a video posted online by DMV Adventures, a travel vlogger based in Fairfax, Virginia.
The video, which shows its creator walking around the Vienna station as customers wait near the gates, has been viewed by more than 672,000 people on X.
The disruption lasted five minutes, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority said in a statement to The Washington Sun.
Trending
When the last passengers on the train, which arrived at 1:39 a.m., exited the station’s mezzanine area at 1:43 a.m., the station manager followed behind to unlock the gates, WMATA said in the statement.
DMV Adventures said in the post that the trip from Northwest Stadium to Vienna, which typically takes over an hour, took nearly two hours. The Commanders game ended at roughly 11:40 p.m.
On Sunday game days, WMATA typically provides extended service past 1 a.m. to those traveling to and from the Northwest Stadium in Landover, Maryland. The service was advertised for the Commanders’ Sunday match-up against the Philadelphia Eagles.
In a comment on the post, WMATA apologized for the inconvenience and said the Vienna station manager locked the outside gate “in an effort to prevent customers from entering while they performed a final station check for the night.”
Following WMATA’s apology for the late-night snafu, DMV Adventures posted an update calling the situation a “minor inconvenience” for “5-10 minutes.” The account did not immediately respond to inquiries about the posts from The Washington Sun.
“It was not the end of the world. I was frustrated at first, 5 seconds of panic, and then I just had to laugh,” DMV Adventures wrote in the follow-up post.
“The metro guy was very friendly. He hustled to get us out. He was very apologetic. The crowd had just had a very very very long 1 hour 45 minute metro ride home, but everyone was still friendly to the guy,” DMV Adventures wrote.
Authors
