The proposed passenger rail line would link Portland, Seattle and Vancouver, BC. The current Amtrak Cascades line follows a similar route but is limited to 79 mph.
OLYMPIA, Wash. — The Washington State Department of Transportation is set to receive a $49.7 million grant from the Federal Railroad Administration to study the possibility of a high-speed passenger rail line linking Portland, Seattle and Vancouver, BC, collectively referred to as the Cascadia megaregion.
The funding comes from the federal agency’s Corridor Identification and Development Program and will support “technical planning across the Cascadia region” and engagement with communities along the corridor, as well as exploring potential route options. The Washington Legislature is also set to kick in $5.5 million in matching funds.
The concept of a Cascadia high-speed rail line has been discussed throughout the region for years, though without much serious movement toward actually designing and constructing the megaproject, which would likely carry a price tag in the tens of billions of dollars, if California’s experience is any indication.
But there have been signs of momentum beginning to build, particularly in Washington, which created the Cascadia High-Speed Rail and I-5 Program last year, following up on a high-speed rail study that the state completed in 2020. Microsoft President Brad Smith has also become an outspoken proponent of the idea.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek and British Columbia Premier David Eby announced the federal grant in a joint news release Wednesday in which they touted it as the “first significant investment” in the project and pointed to the region’s projected population growth over the next 25 years as a reason to begin looking at the concept in earnest.
“We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to plan for future growth and transform how our region moves, and this funding keeps us on track to seize it,” Inslee said in a statement. “Such a project has enormous potential for reducing emissions and improving quality of life for people across the Cascadia region.”
The hypothetical Cascadia line would likely run on a new purpose-built set of tracks designed for high operating speeds and reserved exclusively for passenger rail. A separate joint news release from eight members of Washington’s federal congressional delegation said the line could run at speeds of up to 250 mph.
That might be a bit optimistic — while conventional rail trains are physically capable of hitting that speed, the fastest existing lines worldwide all top out at 200-220 mph during regular operation. Still, that would leave all of the region’s existing passenger rail services in the dust.
Amtrak’s Cascades line runs on a similar route through Portland, Seattle and Vancouver, BC, but it shares tracks with BNSF and Union Pacific freight trains, leading to frequent delays and a maximum speed of just 79 mph. Seattle’s Sounder commuter rail line has the same limitations.
The Cascades line is set to receive eight new state-of-the-art new trains over the next few years as part of a nationwide Amtrak fleet upgrade, and Washington and Oregon are also working on plans to improve the frequency and reliability of the line, but the core problem of shared fright tracks and a low speed limit will remain.
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