Getting there

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) allows you to borrow a car from hundreds of spots around the city from around $5 an hour.