Washington DC Hotel map and travel info
Getting there
Planes, trains, automobiles, or maybe even helicopter – we tell you the best way to go.
- Planes
- About 40 minutes’ drive from the city centre, Dulles International is one of the USA’s major transport hubs and hosts a huge variety of national and international flights. Ronald Reagan National Airport is only about 10–15 minutes from Capitol Hill, and mainly operates flights from within the US and Canada.
- Trains
- Washington’s Beaux Arts marvel, Union Station is on the main Amtrak line from New York’s Penn Station (it’s a three-hour trip between the two), which continues south as far as Florida and southwest to New Orleans (www.amtrak.com). The five colour-coded lines of DC’s Metrorail (www.wmata.com) service cover 86 stations around the city, extending into the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia.
- Automobiles
- From New York, you can reach the capital in four hours driving down the I-95 through Pennsylvania, dependent on traffic. Avoid the centre of town if you can, though, as it can get clotted with cars during rush hours. There’s a choice of car-hire firms at Dulles airport – try Hertz (www.hertz.com), or if you want a car for a single journey, or a short period of time, Zipcar (www.zipcar.com) allos you to borrow a car from hundreds of spots around the city, from around $5 an hour.