Silver Line Will Make It Easier to Visit Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center

When the Silver Line starts running July 26, it’ll finally be relatively easy to get to one of the finest galleries in the Smithsonian’s vast collection. Along with the Silver Line, a new Fairfax County bus route will connect the Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center with the rest of the grid.

The new bus route will run between the Wiehle-Reston East station at the end of the Silver Line and the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly every 20 minutes, the Smithsonian says in a press release. The Smithsonian bills it as a long-overdue connection between the Air and Space Museum on the Mall and the Udvar-Hazy Center, which houses artifacts such as a Concorde supersonic jet, a Lockheed SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and the space shuttle Discovery. (There’s also an Imax movie theater that shows first-run Hollywood fare in true Imax dimensions, unlike the somewhat phony “Imax experience” screens in DC multiplexes.)

Getting to the Udvar-Hazy Center from points closer won’t exactly become a quick trip, though. The bus ride between the Wiehle-Reston East station and the museum takes 42 minutes.

Benjamin Freed

Staff Writer

Benjamin Freed joined Washingtonian in August 2013 and covers politics, business, and media. He was previously the editor of DCist and has also written for Washington City Paper, the New York Times, the New Republic, Slate, and BuzzFeed. He lives in Adams Morgan.