What is that odor in Metro stations?

[Anonymous]

I know there's a bunch of jokes that could be made from the title alone, but I'm curious about this. I do some commuting on the red line and in some stations (particularly Metro Center or Union Station) there is sometimes this smell that is hanging in the air. I've never been in one, but I imagine it's what it would be like breathing in a coal mine. The air has this heavy, charcoal-ish odor and it is terrible to breathe in. I don't notice any active construction or repairs, and it doesn't happen every day, but often enough that I'm wondering what the hell I'm breathing in.

Combine this with the less often smell of rotten fish, and summer commutes are especially unpleasant.

[Anonymous]

I've read that it's a carcinogen. I try not to breath it in. It's brake dust. Metro's official word is that it's from using organic brakes. I don't believe it at all.

[Anonymous]

Incompetence

[Anonymous]

I always thought it smelled like a combination of burned rubber & ozone, and then a friend suggested it's dead rat, and now that's all I can think of when i smell it.

[Anonymous]

It's not dead rat. One of the bars in DC had dead rats in the walls behind the bathrooms and I could identify that smell anywhere.

It's kind of garbage-y, fishy, but not precisely rotting fish. (which I recognize because the asian grocery store's trash area used to vent into the merrifield golds - ewwww.) I actually kind of believe them when they say it's organic brake pads.

there's a different burning smell sometimes, that I think has something to do with electricity in the rails.

[Anonymous]

Fascinating. Along with that unique damp scum that is on some of the floor tiles.

[Anonymous]

Are you talking about the fish brake smell?

Some of the brake pads used on metro trains are made out of recycled "organic material." When the train brakes hard, it smells like fish.

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/43790/why-does-metro-smell-like-rotten-fish-sometimes-why-does/

[Anonymous]

Brake Dust. I'm sure whether or not you smell it depends on where you are standing when the train brakes.

[Anonymous]

I know what you mean, OP. Sort of a burnt fuel type of smell? I've wondered also. Its awful. I don't think it smells like a dead animal, though. That's a different smell.

[Anonymous]

We were at the end of the last train yesterday and all I could small was burning machine oil. It was pretty awful.

Some of the red line stations smell wet, since they're under the water table. Some stations smell like urine, for obvious reasons. But overall, they mostly smell like damp concrete (when it's rainy), which I don't mind.

[Anonymous]

I really wish someone would investigate this. I heard that it was a carcinogen. Either way, they need better ventilation so I don't have to breathe that smell.

[Anonymous]

OP here, it's not the fish smell. I know that one well, and it's been well documented. There's a second, different, distinctly awful smell that, as others have described, smells like burning fuel, a coal mine, or something of that nature. I can still remember a day earlier this summer when Metro Center had both of them going on at the same time, the burning, charcoal whatever combined with the fish smell. I thought I was going to heave.