Mudslides have cancelled special Sounder service from Everett to tomorrow night’s Sounders FC playoff game. Trips from Lakewood will continue as planned.
The transit alternative is the 512 from Everett, although fans from Edmonds and Mukilteo will have to find a way to one of the stops along I-5 without the help of Community Transit.
Monday’s North Sounder trips are also cancelled.
Beat me to it Martin. Good save.
:-)
I’m gonna take a wild guess and assume a landslide?
Only a “wild” guess if you skip over literally the first word of the article.
Boy, it’s a good thing Amtrak kept us all up to date of the train cancelation, and we’re not in Vancouver with a non-existent ride home, tomorrow.
Oh, wait, that’s exactly what happened. And, yes, they’ll probably provide bus service, but we paid a significant premium for a train, which we’re not going to be on, tomorrow.
Amtrak buses between Everett and Seattle when there is a slide on the Scenic sub.
Thanks. Amtrak has yet to tell us this, and probably won’t until we’re actually on-board.
The @amtrak_cascades twitter hasn’t been posted to in 4 days. Seems an ideal place to forward service-alerts.
Customer service fail.
http://www.amtrak.com/service-alerts-and-notices
Now South Sounder service is cancelled too.
http://www.soundtransit.org/Schedules/Alerts/Sounder-FC-Train-Canceled-11-30-14
If you ask to be notified by phone the auto meter system will call you and let you know when this happens. Or, at least it has done so for me.
You can also be notified by text message if you ask for it when you make a reservation. This has also worked just fine for me when I have done so.
Most people would probably not cancel their travel plans just because the train is now a bus. That’s how their system is set up to work.
South Sounder to the Sounders FC game is back.
“Most people would probably not cancel their travel plans just because the train is now a bus. That’s how their system is set up to work”
A lot of people did cancel when the whole route was substituted with a bus, but now when there’s a mudslide between Everett and Seattle, they only have to endure the bus for short time.., so not as many as before .
Looking at the Amtrak Cascades twitter feed, there are all of 2,103 people that follow it.
Seems to me the service alerts page is the place to put these types of things, seeing how that is where everyone is told to look for such things.
The Cascades twitter feed seems more like a publicity thing from one of the funding states or something, and probably isn’t even maintained on weekends since it doesn’t seem to be official news from Amtrak.
I think it might be fair for ST to refund the difference, Jeff. Might help the agency retain ridership and curtail exhausting polluting and road blocking driving in future.
But real problem is cost of either rendering that stretch of coast slide-proof, or relocating a heavily-used piece of track.
Maybe the companies that dirty and threaten our part of the country so they can sell their coal and and dangerous, worst-quality oil to China, will at least pay us to keep a line open.
But passenger or freight, good cargo or bad, preventing or avoiding those ‘slides will cost a huge amount of money. So whether you’re ticked about bait-and-switch tickets or bad railroads, tell your Congessmen what you’ll pay for, and how much.
Mark Dublin
Is it my imagination or has the mudslide problem increased on the BNSF tracks between Seattle and Everett? My impression is that the frequency of slides is correlated to the growth of residential construction on the crest of the bluff during the past ten-fifteen years. I don’t know if this has been investigated or discussed earlier. Do property holders on the crest of a bluff have any obligation in law to preserve the slope? I doubt it, but am curious.
That is likely part of the problem, considering that a Railway Age article some months back said the BNSF were offering rebates to homeowners that corrected their drainage routing.
A similar problem also was going on near Kelso for a whole, but that one got ugly enough there were some expensive lawsuits between the developer and other parties. At least one house was in danger of winding up in the main line.
Eventually, this spot will probably wind up the same way, and there will probably be at least one house falling off the hillside before anyone up there actually solves the problem. This is based on what happened at Kelso and various other places near me where stuff like this has happened.
Back in the 1920s, they found out the hard way that parts of Portland’s west hills were subject to landslides. They came up with a fairly nice method of keeping the water out of the area so it no longer acted as a lubricant between the ground and the bedrock under it. Sadly, not much has changed since then: you have to have at least one house lost until anyone is interested in solving these issues.
Can we throw in the towel on Sounder North at least with this alignment?
ST has taken the position that people voted for Sounder so it would be wrong to contradict that. It would take enough Snohomans telling their boardmembers to cancel it. So far they’ve been saying “More Sounder parking” instead.
Sort of building a new line along I-5 or rebuilding the east side line through Bellevue, there is no alternative alignment. It’s the only remaining north-south route.
Yeah — you need a route for Amtrak Cascades to get to Vancouver BC.
Personally I think the state should rebuild one of the inland routes (at a cost of billions!) but that’s not been suggested by anyone in power. I prefer the East Side Line + Burke-Gilman Trail route, but I suppose that would incur the wrath of the Big Trail lobby.
Given that they announced this and people may have made plans around it, combined with the ridiculous CT Sunday situation, they really should run an express shuttle from Edmonds and Mukilteo for the game.
… or at least a shuttle between Edmonds Station and Lynnwood TC and a shuttle between Mukilteo Station and Ash Way P&R.
That would be sufficient. At the cost of a tiny handful of service hours.
Seriously, ST3 is still on the boards. And after that, maybe 3.5 or four. During which time, maybe there’ll be an Administration and Congress that’ll decide to put budgetary amount of money into transit instead of losing another useless war.
Which if it doesn’t reduce the amount of oil we use, or the number of cars we fuel with it, at least it’ll raise the quality of our fuel, since we’re no longer selling it to China, which will buy and burn anything.
And also save a horrible incendiary weapon as a last resort for our defense- or preferably forbidden for anything-rather than daily threatening our cities with worse damage than any enemy has done us in 200 years of history.
Mark Dublin
“During which time, maybe there’ll be an Administration and Congress that’ll decide to put budgetary amount of money into transit instead of losing another useless war.”
We can wish, but I don’t see how to make this happen in the next decade or two.
Lessee — Carter didn’t (preferred to spend money on the Cold War), on Reagan didn’t (preferred to spend money on military contractor graft and corruption), Bush I didn’t (actually won a war), Clinton didn’t (but didn’t get involved in wars either), Bush II didn’t (preferred to spend money losing lots of wars), and Obama didn’t (preferred to spend money losing wars), though there was the one lump of money from the “stimulus” pacakge.
What was our last sustained federal funding for public transportation? There was the UMTA in 1964, the UMTA in 1970, the NMTA of 1974, and it’s basically gone downhill since then. The states and localities have stepped up in a *big* way, but the feds have been pretty awful about transit funding for my entire lifetime.
I think it’s actually more likely that the feds will start starving highway funding too — which would at least restore parity. :-(