Union Station Layover, Washington DC

Washington’s Union Station stands a mile northeast of the National Mall, which puts the Supreme Court, the Capitol grounds and the free National Postal Museum all within about ten minutes on foot of its platforms.

The gilded barrel vault over Union Station’s Main Hall

Ninety-six feet of coffered ceiling runs the length of a hall 120 feet square, and the coffers took 70 pounds of gold leaf to finish. Daniel Burnham designed it on the model of a Roman bath house and it opened in October 1907, built to a scale that assumed everyone arriving in Washington would arrive by rail. Out front, Lorado Taft’s Columbus Fountain has stood in the plaza since 1912.

Thirty-six Roman legionnaires stand along the balcony ledge, with ten more out in the arches, and each one holds a shield in front of him from waist to sandals. The sculptor, Louis Saint-Gaudens, had asked the commission overseeing the building whether they wanted the soldiers historically accurate; they said yes, and then had to work out what to do about it once the first prototype arrived. The shields were the answer. Half the figures wear a pleated tunic behind them and half wear nothing at all.

If walking is not the plan, the open-top sightseeing buses pick up at 50 Massachusetts Avenue NE, right outside the main doors, and loop the monuments on the Mall; a day ticket booked ahead works out cheaper than paying at the kerb.

The Inverted Jenny at the National Postal Museum

Across Massachusetts Avenue, the old City Post Office building holds a Smithsonian museum whose centrepiece is a single stamp. In 1918 a single sheet of one hundred 24-cent airmail stamps went out with the biplane printed upside down inside its red frame; one of those, plus a block of four and two more singles, sits in the Gems of American Philately gallery. Entry is free, no ticket is needed, and it opens 10am to 5:30pm every day of the year except 25 December.

Union Station funnels intercity, commuter and metro passengers through one concourse and one lower-level passage, and the pinch points are at their worst in the weekday commuter peaks, which is the argument for arriving at the museum without a bag behind you.

Courtroom lectures at the Supreme Court

Docents give a free talk from the bench of the actual courtroom at One First Street, three times a day, at 10:30am, 12:30pm and 1:30pm, on any weekday the Court is not sitting. There is no ticket and no booking: you turn up, queue, and go in. The building itself is open Monday to Friday, 9am to 3pm, closed on federal holidays, and the Court’s own business can shut parts of it to the public at short notice.

A 24-minute film on how the Court works runs on a loop downstairs whether or not a lecture is going, which is the fallback on a sitting day. The 3pm closing is the thing to plan around: an afternoon arrival at the station leaves very little margin here, and it is the one stop on this walk with a hard stop in the middle of the day.

The Capitol grounds need no pass of any kind

Fifty-eight acres of lawn, terrace and curved walk surround the building, laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted from 1874, and all of it is open to walk without a ticket, a pass or a security line. The interior is a different matter and runs on timed passes through the visitor centre, but the grounds are where the view is anyway: the east plaza puts the whole dome in front of you with nothing in the way.

The Library of Congress is across First Street from the east plaza, and its Main Reading Room is worth the detour if the timed ticket and the Tuesday-to-Saturday opening happen to work in your favour; the wider Washington itinerary treats it as a stop in its own right, along with the museums further west that are too far to reach comfortably from here. Between the grounds, the Supreme Court and the Postal Museum, a five-hour gap fills itself without spending anything.

Dulles takes a change of train from Union Station

The Red Line runs from beneath the station to Metro Center, where the Silver Line takes over for the rest of the way out to Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD). Riding time is about 64 minutes with the transfer included, and the airport station links to the terminal through an indoor tunnel on moving walkways, another five to ten minutes on top of that.

Allow an hour and a half door to door and work backwards from three hours before departure, which is what most airlines here ask of international passengers. Trains run every 10 minutes in the weekday rush, every 12 off-peak and at weekends, and every 15 after 9:30pm. The fare is distance-based and this trip is near the top of the scale, around six and a half dollars on a weekday afternoon, dropping to roughly two and a half after 9:30pm or at any hour on a weekend. Tap a contactless card at the gate rather than buying a paper ticket; the fare comes off on the way out as well as the way in.