SEATTLE — One of the biggest construction projects in the Pacific Northwest in recent years is actually a demolition job — the removal of a two-mile double-decker elevated highway slicing between downtown and the Elliott Bay waterfront.
And slicing under that highway structure is one of the region’s most important rail lines.
BNSF Railway’s main line runs north from King Street Station into a double-tracked one-mile-long tunnel beneath downtown Seattle, emerging along the waterfront near Pike Place Market. The line runs north to Everett, Wash., then north to Vancouver, British Columbia, or east to Stevens Pass and across the northern tier of states via the Great Northern’s route.
The downtown segment is used by freight trains, Amtrak Cascades service, Amtrak’s Empire Builder, and Sound Transit’s Sounder commuter trains. The tunnel was opened in 1904 to reduce the tangle of rail lines snarling traffic in the city.
The Alaskan Way Viaduct, built in the 1950s, was also an effort to unsnarl traffic. While bemoaned for its appearance and noise, and for serving as a barrier between the city’s center and the waterfront, it proved to be a critical corridor for traffic, handling more than 100,000 cars a day.
But damage from a previous earthquake and concerns about its stability should the Big One strike led to a proposal for, and then construction of, a highway tunnel under the city to replace the viaduct.
With the tunnel now open, work has begun on dismantling the viaduct, a tricky endeavor because of how much has been built and how close buildings, utility lines, roads, and other infrastructure items are to the highway.
The railroad was there first, and its overlap with the viaduct is short compared to buildings built within five feet of the viaduct, but it’s one more object to work around without disrupting or damaging it.
Details of how that will be accomplished are still being worked out.
“The Washington State Department of Transportation, Kiewit Infrastructure West and BNSF are coordinating all demolition efforts and there is a specific demolition plan in place for viaduct demolition that takes place over the BNSF tracks,” wrote state transportation department spokeswoman Laura Newborn wrote in an emailed statement. “All demolition work over the tracks will take place overnight on weekend hours only, when trains are not running, to ensure the impact to rail operations is minimal.”
BNSF spokesman Gus Melonas says the railroad, contractor, and the state are working out times for demolition.
The transportation department’s website on the project that both the tracks and the steep slope up to the market and Victor Steinbrueck Park “complicate this area, requiring a slower method of removal” involving sawcutting girders and removing them by crane.
Work in that segment is expected to start in late February and be done by early April.
The overall demolition project is expected to take six months.
Like putting the Central Artery underground in Boston as part of the Big Dig
John Rice … John you bring up many points. I’ve not been to Seattle so I can only react to your post by saying you know the place. Per John’s post, what cut Seattle off from its waterfront initially wasn’t the freeway, it was the railroad and the commercial docking activity. The freeway came later.
Today’s spoiled generation knows nothing of the commerce of past generations. They think waterfronts are for microbreweries, pleasure craft and outdoor cafes. They have no idea that today’s trendy cities (Boston, Brooklyn, etc.) were yesterday’s commercial ports. With all that implies including rail spurs and rail yards.
Since everyone on this forum is knowledgeable about railroads, we all should know that railroads just as much as freeways have followed the path of least resistance, which in many cases is alongside a river or a lake or the oceanfront.
Robert Moses was obnoxiously pro highway and lacked the vision to see that in the future our city streets and highways would become grid locked. As an example, he was personally responsible for preventing mass transit to be included as part of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. As a result, Staten Island is not hooked into the NYC’s subway system. Because of that, the Staten Island Expressway is at a stand still for much of the day and resembles the traffic congestion of L.A. Additionally, he marred the beauty of parks by building highways through them. This is demonstrated by his Niagara Scenic Parkway that had a spur into the Niagara Falls State Park right to the overlook of the falls. Luckily, this section has been removed, allowing park visitors to safety enjoy the beauty in peace. He definitely was not a visionary. His highways were poorly designed, he neglected mass transit, and because of this, New Yorkers continue to pay the price for his short sightedness and follies.
All of the comments here show a lack of historical knowledge on why the Alaskan Way was built in the first place.
Downtown Seattle was chock full of piers pre & post WW2. Those piers were not only providing ferry service, but also supporting several railroads taking and providing freight to the same docks. Since I-5 didn’t even exist in those days, north-south traffic for US-99 traversed the same path as the switching trains, trucks and local traffic.
The Alaskan Way (formerly called “Railroad Avenue”) elevated the regional car and truck traffic above the terminal congestion below. When Seattle won the bidding for the Worlds Fair in 1955, this road became crucial in supporting the amount of traffic entering and leaving the city.
When the piers lost their utility, they moved the Port of Seattle over to the Duwamish Plain at Harbor Island. The railroads kept their yards in SoDo, but only one line from the yard north was left fronting the piers. This later became part of BNSF. (Stacey Yard)
As the old piers transitioned from commerce to tourism, that remaining BNSF line along the piers became a stumbling point as stack trains exiting/entering Stacey Yard would tie up the waterfront at times for hours. BNSF donated it to the city in 1982 and it supported a heritage trolley line until 2005. The BNSF Stacey Yard now terminates at King Street across from the ferry terminal.
Any consists from Stacey get backed down to the yard at Boeing Field and moved up to the Interbay Yard .
After I-5 was built in the 60’s most of the regional traffic was diverted off Alaskan Way at East Marginal south of Boeing Field.
So while many “complain” that the road separated the city from its waterfront, the road was conceived in 1929, finally built in 1952, it made complete sense to build it in such a way.
It didn’t make sense to tear it down until the port moved to Harbor Island in 1967. But it took many years for the piers to decline until the city tore down the bad ones and kept the rest as part of a revitalization initiative in the late 1970’s.
Also, the Alaskan Way was intended to tie in with the western terminus of what is now I-90. Ghost ramps existed the roads entire life over Royal Brougham Blvd.. The lawsuits over connecting I-90 to Alaskan Way weren’t settled until 1988!!
I nominate the Clark Freeway on Cleveland’s East Side, never built. It would have destroyed the Shaker Lakes and the Shaker Rapid. The stub that was to be extended, I-490, is being connected to University Circle by a new surface road. It will be far less disruptive than any freeway but that hasn’t stopped litigators.
Curtis, you tell about 1% of the story (or maybe less) about the “double-deck” which would have been about a quarter-mile long. And one of those “decks” would have been below grade, the other pretty much at grade.
A more accurate description actually would have been “single deck.” Eastbound below grade on soil, westbound on a deck.
The noise level and the visual clutter in Milwaukee’s NIMBY Story Hill neighborhood would have been pretty much as it is now and has been since IH 94 was built in the early 1960’s.
Most of the Story Hill neighborhood is sheltered from the freeway anyway. It’s on the other side of the” Hill” – one can walk the streets and not know the freeway even exists. As for those on the freeway side of the “Hill””, well, you bought a house next to Wisconsin’s busiest freeway, exactly what were you expecting?
Firstly, then-governor Scott K. Walker killed the double deck. You don’t mention that. Secondly, he killed the whole project. You don’t mention either.
Thirdly, as you very well know but didn’t say, the double-deck proposal was because of the narrow ROW between two cemeteries so as to provide a safe highway cross-section without relocating graves to either side.
The ironic thing is that Story Hill is next to the baseball stadium’s “tailgate” parking lots which create infinitely more disruption in the neighborhood than the freeway does, but everyone needs to blame the freeway.
I don’t know what you mean by “twice daily traffic”. Are you implying that IH 94 is lightly loaded? Thanks to the cancellation of other freeways (as in my post below) IH-94 is considered at capacity.
The related howler here is that Milwaukee and the far-seeing highway planners wished to double deck a portion which sees twice-daily traffic. Right over the former TMER&L ROW on the near west side.
In a number of cities I have followed the debate over which highways should not have been built, and conversely, which ones not built were needed. I have followed the debates to no particular conclusion. In Milwaukee, the generation of political leaders that waged the freeway battles of the 1970’s has gone into retirement and from retirement, many have died. No conclusions have been reached, while the bus system falls deeper and deeper into failure. Clearly, the South 43rd Street freeway (never built) was unneeded and Milwaukee is better off without it. Less clear is the need/ no need for freeways not built on the north side.
In Boston, the Southwest Expressway and the Inner Belt were never built and long forgotten; the city and its transit system have prospered mightily without them. Two generations of Bostonians have never heard of these two unbuilt expressways and would choke at the thought if they knew. That debate has been settled. What’s not so settled is what Boston gained by going on the cheap on the expressways it did build (necessitating the Big Dig of the next generation).
Detroit never built the Mound Road Freeway on the northeast side nor the northeastward connection of the Davison Freeway. Needed or not, people will disagree. What’s not up to debate is that traffic congestion in northeast Detroit – the East Edsel Ford Freeway, East McNichols (East Six Mile) and East Seven Mile – is unbearable and dangerous.
Now let’s get real. Railroads have also divided communities. Rail yards have also sprawled within city limits. Railroads have, like Robert Moses’ parkways and Boston’s Storrow Drive taken the course of least resistance: along shorelines. Neither Robert Moses nor any other highway builder invented chewing up cities and parks. Railroads did that before Robert Moses came to power.
GEORGE – Robert Moses was also a visionary for parks and for the Niagara power plant. His blind spot was rail and transit, for which he was no help at all.
As for building highways along the waterfront, well railroads did that too.
Puts me in mind of how the fabled New York highway guru, Robert Moses, built similar roads that cut off access to the waterfront in many locations. A visionary at the time, not so much today.
It’s amazing how many ways highway builders managed to ruin US cities over the last 70+ years. In retrospect, maybe ruining waterfronts was the least obnoxious of the ways…
George – I was at Jones Beach in 1967. I was a twenty year old civil engineering student, old enough to know who Robert Moses was. I only found out later (from Robert Caro’s epic biography) that Moses himself was quite the ocean swimmer at his own parks!
Believe it or not I’m old enough to remember when the Cross Bronx Expressway was still being built by Robert Moses. We were visiting my (now famous, then a young child) cousin Clayton in central Bronx (you can look him up). That was around 1961.
Our last time in NYC was 20 years ago, we drove the Cross Bronx Expressway. That was 1999, the road was a wreck. The highway was what, about 35 years old in 1999, it looked decrepit enough as if the other “Moses” had built it. I learned a lesson that day in 1999 that pertained to my own career in civil engineering: whatever you build, someone else has to maintain it and eventually replace it. Rail advocates take note.
One can criticize Robert Moses or one can love Robert Moses. He got things built, he got things done. Love it or hate it, the Cross Bronx Expressway needed to be built. Robert Moses got it in the ground.
Charles – No, I don’t think railroads built highways along the waterfront. (Just joking with you, okay?) Yes, Moses had many fine achievements. Many of my best teenage days were spent at Moses’ Jones Beach with my friends and my “57 Ford convertible.