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They grew up on trains and buses, played in the back of union halls during meetings and heard talk at the dinner table about construction, accidents and oddball customers.

"I used to beg to go to work with my dad. I'd get up at 4:30 in the morning to go with him on his route," said Darryl Minor, a rail supervisor who used to ride in the bus driven by his father, James Minor. The senior Minor began his Metro career 31 years ago and is now a well-known operator on the Orange Line.

At one point, both Minors operated the same Orange Line train, with the son following the father on consecutive shifts. "I'd be done for the day and he'd be starting, and we'd pass each other," James Minor said. "I'd look for him and say 'Hello' and tell him I left him a nice train."

Gregory Garback was 10 when his father, Joe, became Metro's first contracts director in 1967. The construction sites became a playground for young Garback, who was mesmerized by the subway being built by the men who worked with his father. He became a favorite of Jackson Graham, a retired Army Corps of Engineers major general and Metro's first general manager, who would take him to inspect construction by driving the youngster on the back of his motorcycle.

"There was nothing but this incredible hole in the ground," said Garback, 43, now executive director of Metro's finance department. "You literally walked down scaffolding and saw this enormous tube being cut out of stone. Work crews mined something out of nothing with a small city on top."

Joe Garback, 85, organizes monthly luncheons for fellow Metro retirees at the China Garden restaurant, not far from Metro headquarters, at which the old-timers monitor the progress of the subway system. Greg Garback often brings in Metro officials to brief his father and the others, who are mostly in their seventies and eighties.

In the white-collar ranks at Metro, children of original employees are relatively few. But the transit system's bus garages, rail stations and mechanic shops are filled with second-generation workers. They are drawn to Metro for largely the same reasons their parents, aunts and uncles were: a secure job at good wages.

"My father made a pretty good life for us, and I thought maybe I could be as lucky," said Letroy Baker, 24, who has been driving a bus for three years.

Two weeks ago, his younger brother, Moses Deon Baker, 23, started training as a bus driver after ditching a job as a butcher at a Giant supermarket. "Being in a refrigerated environment is not good for the long term," Deon Baker said.

Their father, Moses Baker, 52, began driving a bus for D.C. Transit, the forerunner of Metrobus, in 1970. It was his dream to drive a bus since he was 9 and watched the daily Greyhound roll through his small hometown in South Carolina. "That Greyhound bus would come through, and you knew he was going to Florida or New York or someplace like that," he said. "You could see the world from that bus. And I wanted to see the world driving that bus."

His oldest child, Lorita Tetteh, 32, became a Metrobus driver 11 years ago when she was pregnant, had been abandoned by her husband and was struggling as a nursing assistant. "I needed a job that would make sure I could take care of me and my kids," said Tetteh, a single mother of three.

The top annual pay for Metro bus drivers and train operators is $47,133, but overtime can boost that salary to $65,937 for rail operators and $58,263 for bus drivers. Metro workers earn less than their counterparts in New York and Boston but rank in the middle of the pay scales of the nation's 10 largest transit agencies, said Bill Scott, Metro's director of labor relations.

About 85 percent of Metro workers are unionized; most are represented by Local 689 of the Amalgamated Transit Union. Labor relations were rocky early in Metro's history, with a wildcat strike that lasted seven days in 1978, but union and management agree things have improved.

Faced with the threat of layoffs in the early 1990s as suburbs were moving to privatize their bus routes, the union agreed to lower starting wages for bus operators. That hasn't sat well with younger employees, whose ranks are growing as Metro's original workforce retires.

Despite the strong pull of a stable job in an environment that feels like home, some children of Metro workers have mixed feelings about following in their parents' footsteps.

"Working in your parent's shadow is never easy," said Greg Garback, who joined Metro several years after his father retired. "People wonder about how you got your job. It took many, many years to overcome."

Blue-collar workers also struggle with an extra burden.

"You always expect for your kids to do better than you," said Darryl Minor, who hid the fact that he was training as a Metrobus driver from his father. "He always told me how smart I was, and I was afraid he would feel that I was wasting my talent." His father eventually found out from a co-worker.

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