It'll be interesting to see what this realignment yields, because Sounder is insanely constrained by the Seattle region's insane level of freight rail terminal fragmentation
A new future for the Sounder train? Tell us how the S Line can work better for you!
Would new Sounder trips midday, in the evenings, or on weekends work better for you than the current plan to add more capacity during peak periods?
Tell us at soundersouth.participate.onl…
2
10
1
76
North of Seattle, Sounder faces capacity constraints that look a bit more like your run of the mill capacity bottlenecks -- single track here, limited passing there, movable bridges, etc.
1
1
25
South of the city, one of the line's more tightly binding constraints are the few miles of trackage between Tukwila and Seattle. Almost all of the issues have to do with the area's pretty unbelievable levels of terminal fragmentation. You may ask: how did it get this bad?
3
3
26
Unlike in a lot of US cities, none of the four original carriers serving Seattle (+Tacoma) ever really got serious about modernized freight yards--even after two of the four became Burlington Northern.
1
1
22
In part because the PNW's traffic base, even in the heyday of logging, was just never *that* large, the region's rail traffic has ~always been handled by consolidating flows of goods from Seattle/Portland/other coastal points at yards west of the Cascades.
1
1
20
The modern BN(SF) terminal at Pasco and the now defunct UP yard at Hinkle were case studies in exactly that.
1
1
19
Without a network design that provided aggregation-worthy traffic densities in the Seattle metro area, a complex set of transfer and local freights shuttling cars to and between the region's yards remained the dominant means of handling freight into the late '70s
1
1
19
When the container shipping boom washed over the region starting in the 80s, it just made all these problems worse. Many of the older yards were converted to intermodal facilities -- but those facilities had to fit into the footprints and operations schemes set out decades before
1
2
19
So there, as in so many other American cities, railroads ended up trying to modernize operations on top of increasingly obsolete infrastructure. (for more: homesignalblog.wordpress.com…)
1
1
22
Given how badly Sounder misses density along its route, I'm not convinced that spending the billions required to carve out a dedicated passenger ROW would be worth it -- but if we're ever going to have HSR, or even more frequent Cascades service, getting this right is a must.
Oct 4, 2023 · 3:19 AM UTC
6
1
32