OLYMPIA, Wash. — Washington state lawmakers have introduced legislation seeking to significantly increase Amtrak Cascades service in the Portland, Ore.-Vancouver, British Columbia corridor, as well as cut travel times.
House Bill 1857 and its Senate companion, SB 5667, call for a minimum of 14 round trips daily between Seattle and Portland and five between Seattle and Vancouver, with travel times of 2 hours, 30 minutes for the Seattle-Portland trip and 2 hours, 45 minutes between Seattle and Vancouver. Under current schedules, there are six round trips daily between Seattle and Portland, with one-way travel times of 3 hours, 25 minutes, and two Seattle-Vancouver round trips, with travel times of 4 hours, 25 minutes.
The bills call for at least 88% on-time performance, and would require the state’s Department of Transportation to “prioritize the targets” set in the legislation as the DOT identifies the infrastructure improvements and coordination with host railroads that would be required. Full text of the House version is available here.
State Rep. Julia Reed (D-Seattle) is sponsor of the House bill, with 16 co-sponsors. That bill is currently scheduled for a hearing in the House Committee on Transportation on Feb. 10. State Sen. Javier Valdez (D-Seattle) is sponsor of the Senate bill, which has six cosponsors.
The news site The Urbanist reports the bill is backed by a coalition including the Climate Rail Alliance, Solutionary Rail, and the Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility. That coalition said in a press release that the legislation “is needed to address concerns that WSDOT’s plans for the Amtrak Cascades are not sufficiently robust.”
The Urbanist also notes the legislation does not address funding to achieve its goals.
If it is anything like the NY State Empire Service west of Rensselaer, the freight railroads will do everything in their power to slow walk or use lawfare to block capacity expansion. Introducing a bill is performance art. Only through the state’s use of eminent domain and capital funding is increased speed and frequency possible. Allowing the class 1s to retain ownership and operational control so they can run 3 mile, 15000 ton freights at 40 mph dooms passenger services.
My two cents is like every good privately held corporation, in this case BNSF and UP believe, they would consider increase frequency with increase capacity paid by the state. Considering current politics it becomes of an issue of state legislatures desire to fund it.
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This is a corridor that could succeed with increase frequency and better times as a more practical approach then say some pie in sky HSR 200mph resources sucking the blood out of it.
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The low hanging fruit to me is the exiting bypass coming up Washington and cutting over to Tacoma. It seems like addressing the sharp curve as the tracks crosses over I-5 and some other improvement would offer immediate time benefits and doesn’t interfere with Freight traffic,
All very nice — except that neither Washington State nor Sound Transit owns most of the tracks. Is there anything in the legislation that would cause the freight railroads to agree to these frequencies, travel times, and OT metric? Sounds like the Washington State legislatures are playing with trains.