This week Sound Transit announced another batch of work for which it will be “strategically closing” sections of the 1 Line for upgrades and complex maintenance. In summary:
Friday, January 9 to Sunday, January 11 (Now): Buses will replace trains between Capitol Hill and SODO each night from 10pm Friday to noon Saturday and 10pm Saturday to noon Sunday. This closure is for continued installation of advanced signals (ATP) in the former DSTT.
Tuesday, January 13 to Thursday, January 15: Buses will replace trains between Stadium and Mount Baker each night after about 9-10pm, with normal service resuming each morning. This work is part of ST’s monthly maintenance program.
Friday, January 16 to Sunday, January 18: Buses will replace trains between Capitol Hill and SODO each night from 10pm Friday to noon Saturday and 10pm Saturday to noon Sunday for continued ATP installation.
Friday, January 23 to Monday, January 26: Buses will replace trains between Capitol Hill and SODO from 10pm on Friday through the weekend with normal service resuming on Monday morning. This longer closure is for ATP installation and testing.
Check Sound Transit’s service alerts for up-to-the-minute updates. Sports fans will be enthused with a few additional updates ST included in Thursday’s press release:
Seahawks playoffs
“Sound Transit is working closely with the Seahawks to monitor the NFL playoff calendar and keep the region moving. The 1 Line will be open to serve the Seahawks playoffs and fan activity before and after games.“
Future Work
“Additional closures will be necessary as crews work to open the Crosslake Connection to extend the 2 Line from the Eastside to Seattle and prepare the system for increased demand during the FIFA World Cup. “
They have had literally years to install this signal system and they don’t even run 24 hour trains. So now they are cramming it all on weekends shutting down everything. Japan would have done it in a month, overnight, and nobody would even notice. Just who runs that circus at sound transit.
On that point, I agree with you.
Some of it is budget constraints though.
Japan throws 1,200 workers at a station, does complete conversion overnight:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_BYW4YYqG5A
I think expert who can delivery such urgent rail projects just doesn’t exist in PNW or maybe the entire North America.
What Japanese rail operator did was not necessarily more expensive. It is probably just no one here does thing this way, so no one would propose such idea.
We’ve seen roadway construction doing tons of overnight closure working on equally overwhelming task like resurfacing, large sign bridge and bridge demo even under unpredictable weather. Clearly that’s possible if somebody knows how to manage this kind of project and ST has strong opinion that service interruption is unacceptable.
I’m giving them a pass this year because they’ve announced a program to stop running things like a circus, fix up backlogged maintenance, and get everything running better.
Let’s hope they’re actually doing things right this time.
I’m also curious why signaling equipment for the new interlining was left to the nearly last minute to install? This feels like the sort of thing that you can get out of the way super early, and the 1 Line’s usual operations would give you opportunity to test and ensure it works.
Now if any of this signalling stuff goes awry, right as simulated service is going to start, we’re in for another delay.
It’s part of the projects to increase overall reliability, since the 1 Line has been having a lot of signal issue the past two years that interrupt service. I’m not sure it was known during the January 2020 “Connect 2020” 2 Line tie-in that this would be needed, or that the technology was available.
The signaling technology has been available for decades. I read a Dow quote talking about communications based train control (CBTC) as “new state of the art stuff”, despite the fact that CBTC has been around since 2003 (or earlier). I think it’s best to think of this signaling work as deferred maintenance, since the root cause is the fact that the signaling system in the DSTT was the same kind used for mixed traffic light rail. That should have been updated when the buses left the tunnel.
CBTC has been around for a while, but US only caught up with that in recent years. So Dow’s statement was not completely inaccurate.
US is not really a big market for transit tech and such technology can be sold here if the major vendors open business in the US. I think they were all very hesitant to enter the US market because of the demand. I think these all delayed the process of technology upgrade.
HZ,
One of the first commercial applications of CBTC was the SFO people mover, and projects like BART had more sophisticated signaling that Link does when they were built 50+ years ago. While there is definitely some reluctance for cutting edge tech in the US with our comically conservative railroad regulations, the signaling issues that ST has (especially in the DSTT) should have been dealt with years ago.
Obviously, the next best time is now and I’m glad the work is being done but it was always an institutional barrier and not a technological one – even in the US transit context
I’m not sure if the tunnel remained closed all day Saturday. I went downtown on the Pike/Pine buses at 12:30pm and came back at 5:30pm, and at both 5th & Pine and 6th & Pike were confused visitors/new riders trying to find the shuttle, even though normal service was supposed to have restarted at noon. Both sets of people were trying to get to Capitol Hill station to go northbound.
The first driver (westbound) told them to take a southbound shuttle one stop to 3rd & Union, and transfer to a shuttle the other way north. I shuddered thinking of them waiting 15 minutes for the first shuttle, 15 minutes for the second, and 15 minutes for Link. But I didn’t want to get involved in second-guessing the driver or trying to explain how to get to the Pike Street bus stops.
The second driver (eastbound) told them to take a shuttle to Capitol Hill station. At that point I said, “This bus goes right to Capitol Hill station”, since it was the 11. They hesitated a bit and then got on. I got off before they did, so as I was getting off I told them, “Capitol Hill station is two more stops; you’ll see it on the right”, and they were happy for that help.
I wondered whether Link was really not running downtown yet, but since I couldn’t see the station I couldn’t tell, so I had to assume it wasn’t.
Although there may be a good reason that isn’t obvious to an outsider, I find it very hard to believe that with the months and months of tunnel closures we’ve had since 2017, some of this work couldn’t have been consolidated.