The electric line is a literal ‘third rail’


||| FROM CASCADIA DAILY NEWS |||  REPRINT AT REQUEST OF ORCASONIAN READER


There’s light rail; there’s high-speed rail and there’s ultra-high-speed rail. Then there’s the “third rail,” the electrified line that provides a metaphor for controversial topics you’d best not touch.

A relatively modest $150 million investment in the $16.8 billion state transportation budget — Move Ahead Washington — that Gov. Jay Inslee recently signed raises issues that may end up touching all four rails.

That $150 million was set aside as seed money to attract possible federal matching funds — between $600 million and $700 million — for advanced planning for a dedicated 300-plus-mile ultra-high-speed rail line serving Portland, Ore., Seattle and Vancouver, B.C., with other stops likely, including Bellingham and Everett.

As planned, the line — separate from the existing rail line used for Amtrak, Sounder and Burlington Northern Santa Fe’s freight service — would run 260-passenger electric “bullet” trains, reaching speeds of 220 mph, up to 30 times a day and serving 2.1 million riders annually when service starts in 2035, and 3.3 million passengers by 2055.

Passengers between Portland and Seattle would make the trip in about an hour, as would those between Seattle and Vancouver, B.C. Current passenger rail travel times are three-and-a-half hours between Seattle and Portland and between Seattle and Vancouver, when service to Canada resumes in June.

That $150 million investment, and others in aviation electrification, low-carbon aviation fuels and more, said state Sen. Marko Liias, D-Everett, chairman of the Senate’s transportation committee, in an interview last week, represent a “1 percent investment in the future of transportation that will provide solutions as the region grows.”

If federal funding is secured, a total of up to $850 million would be spent for design work, route planning, engineering, environmental reviews and community outreach in coming years to develop, Liias said, “a fully baked proposal we can all consider.”

There’s already concern, however, that the state and federal funds could allow enough momentum to gather behind the proposal to prevent stopping the train before arrival at Boondoggle Station; and perhaps will divert investments needed elsewhere by a similar upgrade of the existing rail line and efforts to keep Sound Transit’s regional Link Light Rail system connecting Everett, Seattle, Bellevue and Tacoma on its already delayed schedule.

An earlier study has set the cost for the cross-state bullet train project — dubbed Cascadia — at between $24 billion and $42 billion to complete, depending on final land acquisition costs, eminent domain legal fights and how much tunneling would be involved.

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