Link light rail service will operate normally this weekend, Sound Transit announced Thursday, despite an earlier plan to do repair work to restore normal operating speeds through the U District.
In late October, Sound Transit had announced scheduled maintenance work December 7 and 8 in order to repair the damaged overhead contact system (OCS) close to UW Station. However, a telecom disruption caused Sound Transit to change their plan, interim Sound Transit CEO Goran Sparrman told the agency’s Rider Experience and Operations Committee in his report yesterday. Riders over the past few days will likely have noticed that real-time information signs are not displaying any arrival times.
“As of this morning, our team has made the call to postpone this weekend’s planned maintenance work in order to minimize the risk of operating a modified service while we are experiencing an unplanned disruptions in our telecom system,” Sparrman said. “Going back to yesterday, we’re having some intermittent network challenges, and we decided, out of prudence, to delay that work this week and to make sure we don’t create an unanticipated challenge for our customers. We are looking forward to perform that band work the first week in February when we have a closure planned for the same area.”
The overhead system powers the light rail cars that pass through, and Sound Transit had instituted very slow speeds through the U District section since September 17, when this span’s OCS was damaged by a train with a broken pantograph, leading some trains to stall in that section when at normal speeds.
1 Line riders will need to deal with slower trips through this section until the overhead power issue is addressed. They’re also looking at an extensive maintenance schedule in early 2025, as Sound Transit schedules a slew of closures to get them out of the way before major maintenance work starts on I-5 parallel to the 1 Line.
Based on updated plans this week, upcoming 1 Line disruptions in January and February include:
- January 10-12 – no service Westlake to SoDo.
- January 17-19 – no service Capitol Hill to SoDo.
- Feb 1-2 – no service Capitol Hill to U District.
- Feb 14-16 – no service Capitol Hill to SoDo.
Bus shuttles will bridge the gap during all of the planned weekend closures. On top of that, 1 Line headways are going from 10 to 12 minutes after 7pm on weekdays from January 4 to February 27 so that trains can single-track around roof installation planned at future N 130th Street Station. The agency is also planning to operate on those 12-minute frequencies all day on January 4 and 25 and February 8 and 15.
It’s been a rough week for light rail riders, as a wave of unplanned service disruptions have emerged. As the rider experience committee meeting, Russ Arnold, the deputy executive director for service delivery, ran through the list of unexpected disruptions that have cropped up in the last week. Some of those will add repair-related service disruptions down the road.
Sound Transit is reporting that they've had over 160 interruptions to service so far this year, stemming from three major issues 1. Siemens fleet issues 2. Signal issues 3. Traction power outages
— Ryan Packer (@typewriteralley.bsky.social) December 5, 2024 at 1:35 PM
“First, we had a circuit card failure that forced trains to turn around at angle Lake Station for about seven hours before we were able to replace the circuit card,” Arnold said. “Second, we had a broken rail between Pioneer Square and International District stations. We have made a temporary repair there, and a 10 mile per hour slow order will be in place until a full repair can be made, which will likely involve a multi-day service disruption.”
Paired with the slow order in the U District, this will significantly impact end-to-end travel times on the 1 Line until early February when repairs can finally be made.
“Third, we had about four hours of moderate delays after we had a faulty signal at Shoreline South [Station] which caused false reports of train occupancy on the tracks, we repaired the track isolation pads and removed excess ballast and the issue was resolved,” Arnold said. “Fourth and fifth, two Siemens trains had to be pulled from service Wednesday afternoon, but we use gap trains to keep delays to a minimum. And lastly, we are experiencing an ongoing communications outage that is impacting multiple systems. We’re currently working to address the issue, but do not yet know when all the systems will be back online.”
Arnold shared the agency’s working theory that the communications issue cropped up due to work to integrate the Downtown Redmond Link Extension and the Federal Way Link Extension into Sound Transit’s comms system. They’re working to confirm that theory and troubleshoot the issue.
Redmond Link is slated to open in spring 2025, though the exact date has yet to be announced. Federal Way Link is scheduled to open in 2026, following constructions issues that delayed its timeline.
Siemens has been under fire from transit agencies around the world for a wave of deliveries that included faulty trains.
Sound Transit is seeking to get its operational snags ironed out before the system expands and ridership increases, making light rail even more integral to the region’s transportation needs. Plus, board members and Sparrman referred to the need to deliver service efficiently during the 2026 World Cup matches that the region will be hosting, when ridership is expected to spike.
“We are very aware, not just of World Cup soccer in ’26 we actually have championship games — Club World Cup, it’s referred to as — coming before that,” Sparrman said. “So we are very aware that we have some looming cliffs in front of us, and we are very committed to get arms around this set of challenges that we’ve heard lots about today before then, because we have to rise to the challenge to accommodate a much larger passenger load just a couple of years down the road.”
But the 1 Line is already moving an incredibly high number of passengers, with average daily ridership in October surpassing 100,000 for the first time, thanks in large part to the 4 new stations added in late August with Lynnwood Link.
The Urbanist will follow up when we know more details about the service disruptions next year.
Ryan Packer contributed to this article.
Doug Trumm is publisher of The Urbanist. An Urbanist writer since 2015, he dreams of pedestrianizing streets, blanketing the city in bus lanes, and unleashing a mass timber building spree to end the affordable housing shortage and avert our coming climate catastrophe. He graduated from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington in 2019. He lives in East Fremont and loves to explore the city on his bike.