(Image: Sound Transit)
It has been the longest of public transit waits for Sound Transit to finally fully open its 2 Line connecting Seattle to the Eastside. This weekend will bring another round of work to prepare to connect the lines:
In order to perform work connecting East Link to the existing 1 Line, Link light rail will be temporarily suspended between Capitol Hill and SODO stations from 10 p.m. Friday, November 8 through the end of service Sunday, November 10. Normal operations will resume at the start of service Monday, November 11. During this time, crews will be commissioning a new signal house and communications system that will enable the connection of the 1 and 2 lines. Sound Transit will provide Link Shuttle buses to transport passengers. The buses will run approximately every 10-15 minutes and stop at all stations between Capitol Hill and SODO. Passengers traveling southbound from Capitol Hill station will have to get off the train and take the shuttle, reconnecting at SODO station if they are continuing to travel south. The same will be true for passengers heading north through SODO station. Link trains will be running approximately every 15 minutes between SODO and Angle Lake and between Lynnwood and Capitol Hill.
The closures have been a regular occurrence as the work continues including this similar shutdown in June.
Sound Transit expanded one end of its light rail system this summer with service connecting Lynnwood to the existing 1 Line at the end of August.
More expansion is coming including the new line connecting Seattle to the Eastside across I-90. Costly construction snafus have repeatedly delayed the opening of Judkins Park Station and the Eastside expansion line it is part of to 2025 — some eight years after the project broke ground.
Sound Transit, meanwhile, has streamlined the light rail experience for riders with a new $3 flat fare, the end of “tapping off,” and a new numbering system that assigned Capitol Hill Station the designation “1-49.”
This fall, Sound Transit also announced it was launching “a multi-year effort to modernize all 58 of our elevators and escalators at four downtown stations.”
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