The Washington Metro, often abbreviated as the Metro and formally the Metrorail, is a rapid transit system serving the Washington metropolitan area of the United States. It is administered by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), which also operates the Metrobus service under the Metro name. Opened in 1976, the network now includes six lines, 98 stations, and 129 miles of route.

Metro serves Washington, D.C., as well as several jurisdictions in the states of Maryland and Virginia. In Maryland, Metro provides service to Montgomery and Prince George's counties; in Virginia, to Arlington, Fairfax and Loudoun counties, and to the independent city of Alexandria. The system's most recent expansion, which is the construction of a new station (and altering the line), serving Potomac Yard, opened on May 19, 2023. It operates mostly as a deep-level subway in more densely populated parts of the D.C. metropolitan area (including most of the District itself), while most of the suburban tracks are at surface level or elevated. The longest single-tier escalator in the Western Hemisphere, spanning 230 feet , is located at Metro's deep-level Wheaton station.

In 2023, the system had a ridership of 136,303,200, or about 576,300 per weekday as of the second quarter of 2024, making it the second-busiest heavy rail rapid transit system in the United States, in number of passenger trips, after the New York City Subway, and the sixth-busiest in North America. In June 2008, Metro set a monthly ridership record with 19,729,641 trips, or 798,456 per weekday. Fares vary based on the distance traveled, the time of day, and the type of card used by the passenger. Riders enter and exit the system using a proximity card called SmarTrip.

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Reginald Fairfax Harrison (March 13, 1869 – February 2, 1938) was an American lawyer, businessman, and author. A son of the secretary to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Harrison studied law at Yale University and Columbia University before becoming a lawyer for the Southern Railway Company in 1896. By 1906, he was Southern's vice-president of finance, and in 1907, he helped secure funding to keep the company solvent. In 1913, he was elected president of Southern, where he instituted a number of reforms in the way the company operated.

By 1916, under Harrison's leadership, the Southern had expanded to an 8,000-mile network across 13 states, its greatest extent until the 1950s. In December 1917, months after the United States entered World War I in April, the federal government took control of the railroads, running them through the United States Railroad Administration, on which Harrison served. An economic boom after the war helped the company to expand its operations; Harrison worked to improve the railroad's public relations and to upgrade the locomotive stock by introducing more powerful engines. Another of his concerns was to increase the amount of the railroad's track and to expand the area it served. Harrison struggled to keep the railroad industry afloat during the Great Depression, but by 1936, Southern was once again showing a profit. Harrison retired in 1937, intending to focus on his hobby of writing about historical subjects, including the roots of the American Thoroughbred horse, but he died three months later in February 1938.

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