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Scratching your heads about those train numbers? They are the emergency extra trains between Seattle and Bellingham while the I-5 Skagit River Bridge is being repaired. The service started on Friday May 31 and will continue until the temporary repairs to the bridge have been completed, likely sometime in the middle of June. There is a new Talgo trainset sitting in the Talgo maintenance facility, but it hasn't been road tested yet, so it isn't available for regular service. But Sound Transit has a spare 5 car Bombardier BiLevel trainset that will be used on a new daily roundtrip between Tacoma and Seattle this fall. So Amtrak was able to borrow the spare Bombardiers from Sound Transit to run the service.
Who could resist an opportunity to take a ride to Bellingham on a Bombardier BiLevel? Apparently, just about everyone. My roundtrip journey served fewer than 35 total passengers, so there was plenty of room to stretch out on each trip. To be fair, there wasn't much publicity about the actual start of this extra train. Shortly after the bridge collapse it was announced that a 3rd northline trip would start, but there weren't any specific details and the announcement that the extra train would start running on Friday was made on Thursday night, so I'm not surprised that there were so many empty seats.
The Bombardiers are designed for commuter service and they don't have luxuries like reclining seats, window shades or a food service car. They also don't have the Talgo tilt feature, so the scheduled time to Bellingham was 2 hours and 40 minutes--about 35 minutes longer than a Talgo. Our trip to Bellingham actually took 2:35 and included a long wait before Everett while we waited for the Empire Builder to finish its station stop. Much of the trackage between Everett and Bellingham is single-tracked and busy with freight traffic, so we had a few other stretches of slow running on the northbound trip. But given the emergency nature of our train (and our light load) it would be asking a lot to expect BNSF to run our train superior to all other traffic.
The trip back to Seattle was much less congested and we arrived about 20 minutes early. I can't remember any delays or obvious slow orders, so I would say that the Talgos save about 15 minutes over the Bombardiers on a Bellingham to Seattle trip.
The crew was fine on both trips although there weren't any announcements made during the wait outside of Everett. The engineer had a few jerky starts while we were northbound with the cab car leading, but the southbound trip, with an Amtrak locomotive leading, was handled perfectly. I doubt Amtrak crews have much previous experience with Sound Transit cab cars (BNSF provides T & E crews for ST), so I have no complaints about the jerks.
The Bombardiers are fine in a pinch, but I wouldn't recommend them for any ride that lasts for more than about an hour. The commuter seats quickly get pretty hard and there are a lot of mechanical squeaks and squawks from the underside of the car. But Amtrak made it clear during the booking process that the train would be using commuter equipment and that was the point of my journey: to see how the Bombardiers would perform on the trip to Bellingham.
Also, there were quite a few heads that turned in places like Mt. Vernon and Burlington as this unusual trainset, with its flashy Sound Transit livery, passed through town.
notelvis Member # 3071
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Nice report - Thanks.
Vincent206 Member # 15447
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The temporary fix for the Skagit River Bridge has been completed and I-5 is again open to all traffic, so the 512/515 trains are no longer running. I haven't seen any ridership numbers for the special trains, but I think they ran pretty empty.
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