Northline Sounder commuter train service between Everett and Seattle is canceled due to a mudslide that occurred earlier this week. Sound Transit will provide special buses with direct service to/from Sounder stations in addition to local bus service.
If there are no additional blocking events, service will resume for the special event Sounder train service for the Seahawks game on Sunday Dec. 28.
Here is morning Edmonds-Seattle bus service for Friday:
A special bus will depart Edmonds Station at 6:41 a.m. and 7:41 a.m. at the north side of the Amtrak lot. Visit soundtransit.org for more information.
Note that Community Transit is operating on a holiday schedule so Routes 416 and 417 will not be running on Friday the 26th.
The fourth time since Thanksgiving. We might as well not have the Sounder trains.
What are the chances of the railroad addressing the actual problem, ding something to curb the slides? Steel netting? Planting? Drainage? This is ridiculous, and was not the case before over-building on the bluffs.
Hindsight is wonderful, but it seems now that when the pubic paid BNSF $250,000,000 plus for the “right to use”, we should have negotiated some way for that money be use to address the slide problem. Other reports about what BNSF has done seem to suggest that they pursue grants from others to do work. The rest of the story may be more complicated than this but on the surface it looks like we could have done a better job of negotiating a “right to use” that increased the probability that we could actually use the tracks year around.