Seattle Times staff reporter
Railroads were Seattle’s local motive in 1895, when entrepreneurs started to bury the Duwamish River tideflats in fill soil. Thirteen decades later, the train business might grab more of this manufactured plain.
Amtrak and BNSF Railway are asking the city to relinquish South Holgate Street, a short walk south of the Seattle Mariners’ home plate. The railroads could then enclose a Sodo train base and remove a busy grade crossing from the regional mainline.
The proposed road closure, stretching west-east from Occidental Avenue South to Third Avenue South, supports Amtrak’s ambitious plan to operate more railcars and deploy them more quickly from the base into everyday passenger service.
This month, the Seattle Department of Transportation won $2 million from the federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, to go with $500,000 in city funds, to study the logistics, environmental justice and how to keep Sodo’s economy mobile. A final report and decisions are scheduled for mid-2026.
Half of all freight railcars in Washington cross Holgate, hauling cargoes of flammable crude oil, aircraft parts or grain for BNSF Railway. Sounder commuter trains park at the Amtrak base overnight, as do state-owned Cascades passenger trains.
Amtrak would contribute money and engineering for a walk-bike bridge, said Chase Kitchen, regional governmental affairs manager.
Six tracks and a 900-foot-long maintenance shed would be added across Holgate, uniting the north and south halves of the yard. Fences and barricades would enclose the compound.
“It’s the only active train yard in the country that’s bisected by a busy street,” said Erin Goodman, executive director of the Sodo Business Improvement Area.
Holgate Street is ranked the No. 1 most hazardous train crossing out of 2,654 in Washington. Four pedestrians and a driver died there from 2011-20, and another motorist was injured.
An enclosed base will prevent car crashes, train slowdowns, vandalism, terrorism, thefts and pedestrian injuries.
But a Holgate shutdown would reverberate across the Sodo traffic grid, the city says, especially before and after events at T-Mobile Park and Lumen Field.
Seattle DOT currently takes no position on a bridge or nearby street improvements. “We do not know the cost or feasibility, which is why we applied for the study funds,” spokesperson Ethan Bergerson said.
The street is named after John Cornelius Holgate, believed to be the first non-Indigenous person to explore the Duwamish River mouth by canoe in 1850. Within a few decades, settlers forcibly removed most of the Native people. Four square miles of estuary vanished under spoils from urban regrades, a Harbor Island ship-canal excavation, an attempted Beacon Hill canal and sawmill wastes, to be redeveloped as a semi-industrial seaport.
Seattle rejected the railroads’ Holgate closure request in 2010, but it became plausible after the Lander Street Bridge opened in 2020, the city’s grant application says.
Seattle’s $2 million award is only a nugget among the $570 million the federal government handed out to 63 projects in 32 states. These include a $40.5 million contribution to a street underpass in Washougal near Vancouver, Wash., and $2 million to study grade separations in Burlington, Skagit County.
Amtrak Cascades currently operates four daily trains each way between Portland and Seattle, and two between Seattle and Vancouver, B.C. Ridership last year was 470,000 and is expected to increase in 2023, compared to 756,000 in 2019.
Railroad growth
Two more daily round trips between Seattle and Portland will begin in October or November, Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner told a congressional committee this month under friendly questioning by Rep. Marilyn Strickland, D-Tacoma.
Amtrak Cascades’ long-term plan calls for 13 round trips, plus more service continuing to Eugene, Ore., and Vancouver, B.C., said Kitchen. Amtrak will also convert to longer trains with modern railcars.
“We’ve got over 200 train movements a day that go through here, and that’s only going to grow,” Kitchen said. “The question is, do you want us to operate as world-class or operate as is?”
President Joe Biden, a former Amtrak commuter, signed the infrastructure law that envisions $80 billion for Amtrak projects. His administration published an aspirational map of 30 new routes by 2035.
Next year, construction should begin on the first portion of the new maintenance building south of Holgate, using part of a $3.1 billion national train-base and railcar purchase fund. Whenever SDOT closes the road, Amtrak would complete a second phase of the maintenance structure and six tracks through the retired road, Kitchen said.
One of these six tracks will replace time-consuming wishbone movements by creating direct switches between the yards and the King Street Station mainline.
“Our largest trains, it can take us 45 minutes to go back and up to the station,” said Kitchen, waving his arms toward a distant turnaround spot near Lander Street. New rails over Holgate might cut that to 10 minutes, he said.
The Sodo business association endorses the study. For now, “we are not supporting the closure of Holgate; we are not opposing the closure of Holgate,” Goodman said.
The Northwest Seaport Alliance fretted about potential harm to coastal shipments, as well as local and regional warehouses, if truck drivers don’t have Holgate available. “It provides a relief valve for east-west traffic after major stadium events when routes like SR 519/Edgar Martinez Way are shut down for post-game surges of exiting traffic,” said the ports’ letter endorsing the study to U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
The passenger-advocacy group All Aboard Washington supports a Holgate closure, because less accident risk means more reliable service when trains arrive from Portland. “You’re only a few minutes from King Street Station. You feel like you’re almost there. They get on the PA and say, ‘We’re stopping.’ There’s traffic, or a truck that has blocked the intersection. That happens,” said Charlie Hamilton, co-executive director.
Hamilton said it’s possible for Amtrak to shorten its scheduled run time, which varies from 46 to 51 minutes for the Seattle-Tacoma segment, because it won’t need to factor in delays.
The city must weigh safety hazards from spillover traffic. Since 2020, a total of 10 people walking or bicycling, and five traveling in motor vehicles, have died in Sodo crashes. Besides the 14,500 daily vehicle trips on Holgate, hundreds of people bike, walk or scooter. Some travel in the gravel, some in the road. Some carry wood or recyclables; others walk to stadium jobs from their parking spots or bus stops.
Last week, pedestrians Ramon Salmeron and Earl Klein had already stepped into the five-track mainline when crossing gates flashed red and lowered behind them. The pair made it across, seconds before a Sounder train cruised past.
Sitting afterward on a concrete eco-block, the friends pondered whether they’ll live long enough to see the pedestrian flyover completed.
“It’s good. There will be less traffic, and more agreeable to the people moving, instead of having to wait for the trains,” Salmeron said. “For the generation coming, it’s good.”
Why barricade Holgate for three blocks but leave it open a couple blocks farther inland, where Sound Transit’s trains toot their way through a dangerous crossing?
One answer: The transit board in 2022 endorsed a future Holgate Street traffic overpass during its Ballard-to-downtown light-rail megaproject, aimed at the late 2030s.
During that phase, construction might further limit car and bus lanes between Sodo and downtown if politicians agree to build a Union Station transit hub. It would require crews to dismantle and replace a six-lane Fourth Avenue South viaduct.
Long before then Amtrak could be enjoying an untrammeled yard, without gates on Holgate.