The Cascadia Advocate is written by the staff, board, and contributors of the Northwest Progressive Institute, a netroots powered strategy center working to raise America's quality of life through insightful research and imaginative advocacy.

NPI was founded in August 2003 and is based in Redmond, Washington.

For the past week, NPI has been offer­ing fol­low­ers on our social net­work­ing chan­nels a treat: clips of Sound Tran­sit Link light rail trains mak­ing test runs between three dif­fer­ent forth­com­ing sta­tions in Belle­vue. These test runs are part of a sys­tem tri­al that Sound Tran­sit began last month to pre­pare for the inau­gu­ra­tion of rev­enue ser­vice on its sec­ond light rail line in 2023.

Today, we are delight­ed to bring our “Trainspot­ting with NPI” series to the Cas­ca­dia Advo­cate for the enjoy­ment of more of our sup­port­ers and readers.

Each clip in our Trainspot­ting series is less than two min­utes long, and shows Kink­isharyo-made Sound Tran­sit LRVs rolling along por­tions of the new East Link/Line 2 align­ment using over­head power.

Sound Tran­sit has been doing its test­ing exclu­sive­ly at night thus far, so we’ve only seen the trains oper­at­ing in low light. For­tu­nate­ly, we were in a posi­tion to record a lot of high-qual­i­ty footage while we were out in the field!

Let’s get to the clips. Note that none of these videos have any sound.

This clip shows a test train leav­ing the Spring District/120th Sta­tion in the Bel-Red neigh­bor­hood. This sta­tion uses a trench con­fig­u­ra­tion, with the tracks and sta­tion plat­form locat­ed below street level.

This clip shows a test train going west on the ele­vat­ed tracks between Wilbur­ton and Belle­vue Down­town, prepar­ing to cross over Inter­state 405.

This clip shows a test train enter­ing the Belle­vue Down­town Sta­tion, which is locat­ed adja­cent to Belle­vue City Hall. Belle­vue Down­town marks the tran­si­tion in the align­ment from ele­vat­ed to under­ground. The sta­tion itself is at the surface.

This clip is sim­i­lar to Part II, except it shows a train going east on the ele­vat­ed tracks between Wilbur­ton and Belle­vue Down­town instead of west.

This clip shows a test train enter­ing Wilbur­ton Sta­tion, which is locat­ed near Over­lake Med­ical Cen­ter, Whole Foods, and numer­ous car dealerships.

This clip is sim­i­lar to Part II, except it was made using a high­er focal length to pro­vide a close-up view of the train as it rounds the bend.

This clip is sim­i­lar to Part IV, except it was made using a high­er focal length to pro­vide a close-up view of the train as it rounds the bend.

Sound Tran­sit’s East Link / Line 2 is slat­ed to open in mid-2023, adding ser­vice to ten new sta­tions locat­ed in Seat­tle, Mer­cer Island, Belle­vue, and Redmond.

# Written by Andrew Villeneuve :: 5:06 PM

Categories: Core Encyclopedia Topics, Public Planning

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