SEATTLE — Beginning Monday, March 6, Amtrak adds a morning departure from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Portland, Ore., and drops in a mid-afternoon northbound frequency from Portland that departs Seattle at 7 p.m. and arrives into the Canadian city at 11 p.m.
Including the Seattle-Los Angeles Coast Starlight, this will increase the number of Seattle-Portland round-trips from four to five; two of those continue to and from Eugene, Ore.
Although Amtrak continues to only supply timetables on demand that are cumbersome to print, the state-supported Amtrak Cascades website provides comparative grid schedules. Those effective Monday, March 6, are available here and timetables in effect through March 5 can be accessed here.
Union Pacific trackwork, which has causing intermittent conversion of an afternoon Portland-Eugene round trip to buses since January, is set to conclude next week after the new schedule is implemented, with the last outage set for March 7 through March 12.
Summary of changes
The additional round trip restores Cascades frequencies to departure similar to those before service cuts occurred in March 2020 as a result of the COVID 19 pandemic. Southbound, the change inserts a critical midday frequency out of Seattle into what had been a 4½ hour gap between the Coast Starlight and train No.505.
The new afternoon departure from Portland to Vancouver, B.C., is scheduled to leave less than an hour before the northbound Starlight. But the train from Los Angeles is often hours late because of freight train interference, or has been periodically cancelled outright when there were track issues along its 1,377-mile route.
With a reduced schedule that was initially slow to regain frequencies compared to other state-supported corridors, Cascades ridership and revenue for the most recent complete quarter (October-December) is well ahead of 2021 but significantly behind 2019, as shown in the table at left.
Equipment stopgaps
Along with reduced frequencies, a contributing reason patronage has lagged may be the Washington State Department of Transportation Rail Division’s decision to not renew its maintenance contract with Talgo during the 2020 service lull. A unique appeal of the Cascades was the introduction of five big-windowed, imaginatively-designed Talgo Series VI trainsets in 1999, replacing comparatively-sterile Amtrak-owned Horizon and Amfleet coaches and cafes.
With the help of federal stimulus funds, Oregon added two updated Talgo Series 8 trainsets in 2013. Capacity and signaling investments set the stage for all seven Talgos to operate with expanded schedules on a new route beginning Dec. 18, 2017, but poor operating personnel training led to the fatal derailment of one of the Series VI trains during the first revenue trip on the new route.
Two more Seattle-Portland round trips, in addition to the fifth being restored next week, never operated. The Oregon Talgos handled assignments during the pandemic’s early days under a modified maintenance agreement. Then Amtrak started moving Horizon coaches and cafes from the Midwest and California to the Pacific Northwest once Washington passed on acquiring Series 8’s Amtrak and Talgo had been modifying in Milwaukee [see “Never-used Talgo trainsets find buyer in Africa,” Trains News Wire, Jan. 18, 2022]
By February 2023, eight Horizon coaches and four business class/cafes were spread among four equipment sets, in addition to the two Talgo trainsets. The 12 Horizons expand to 20 cars beginning March 6. Next week’s consist assignments, obtained by Trains News, Wire shows four three-car sets (two coaches and one cafe) and two four-car sets (three coaches and one cafe) rotating among the 10 trains. The Talgo sets usually run on Nos. 500 and 505, the morning departure from Eugene and the mid-afternoon train out of Seattle.
Reduced capacity to date has triggered sellouts during heavy travel periods; the “fare per passenger” metric is up over 13% for the October-December average in 2022 compared to the same months in 2021, and a 3% increase for all state-supported trains.
When more Horizons become available after the Midwest’s Siemens Venture equipment finally is cleared to operate, the Cascades’ capacity crunch could be alleviated; a sixth Seattle-Portland round-trip is planned for the fall. But the comfort and “wow” factor won’t be rectified until 2026, when the new Airo trainsets based on the Venture design are slated to arrive [see “Amtrak Cascades to add second train …,” News Wire, Jan. 16, 2023].
I am probably in the minority here, but I intensely disliked the Talgo’s, I am not sad at all to see then go. I found all the hype about how smoothly they rode to not be true and even with bigger windows the cabins had a small, cramped feel to them. But since you were so low to the ground you did have an excellent view of the wheelsets of passing trains (sarcasm intended).
Describing Horizon equipment as “sterile” is putting it mildly. I’ll wait till 2026 before travelling between Vancouver and Seattle on Amtrak.