Tag Archives: sounder

Sounder In the Fall At Picnic Point

One evening, while up near Everett, I had a bit of spare time on my hands.  I had noticed a park along the waterfront called Picnic Park and had noted that I would check it out at some point.  This was a good time to try finding out what it was like.  The weather was not great but, with time on my hands, I headed down there.  It is a small park along the water and there is a bridge across the railroad to reach it.  As I walked across the bridge, there was a nice view down to where the coast curves around and the trees along the shore had some nice fall colors.

With the sun popping in and out on a regular basis, I thought this would be a good place if a train was coming.  As it happened, the Sounder commuter rail train from Seattle to Everett was not far off so I decided to wait for it to come through.  A few minutes later it came in to view.  There was a family with a young child standing on the bridge waving to the crew and, when I looked at the photos at home, I could see both crew waving back.  It was a pretty short train.  The Sounder North has not been too successful and the commuter rail ridership is well down due to COVID.  I guess there is no need for more cars just now.

Mukilteo Rail Station

In all of my visits to the waterfront at Mukilteo, it would have been neglectful if I hadn’t had a quick poke around at the railroad station.  This is for Sounder commuter rail trains to Seattle and is across from the new ferry terminal.  It will be interesting to see whether WSDOT’s Amtrak Cascades trains stop there in the future to connect with the ferries but currently they do not (and, at the time of writing, the Cascades services north of Seattle are suspended anyway.)

The station is not that old since the Sounder service has only been around since the 2000s.  Consequently, it is a nicely thought out design rather than an old station that has been upgraded.  It includes some artwork with a local theme with stone sculptures of local boat designs.  A footbridge takes you over the tracks to the far platforms.  I doubt I will ever have the need to use it but it was fun to look around on a quiet weekend.

Sounder Locos

Scanning back through some images looking for something else, I came across these shots of some Sounder commuter rail locomotives.  I shot these as part of a shoot that had a previous post.  I hadn’t focused on the locos so much but this train had a loco leading but two locos trailing as well.  The trailing locos were the old and the new with an F59PHI and an MPX together.  No idea why three locos were on a relatively short train but I guess there was a good reason!

Sounder’s New Cab Cars

New locomotives are not the only new vehicles to have shown up in Seattle.  Sound Transit runs the Sounder commuter rail service in the area and they have been taking delivery of new cab cars.  These are built by Bombardier, as were the previous cab cars.  However, this is a new design that incorporates crash energy management technology.  As a result, they have done away with the passenger gangway on the front of the vehicle and provided a full width cab for the engineer.  It provides a slightly more elegant front end to the vehicle than the previous design.

Sounder Takes the Fans to the Seahawks

The Sounder commuter rail service takes passengers from both north and south of Seattle in to the city.  The service from the south end is a very popular one and is expanding.  The northern service from Everett has not been as popular and is not growing in the same way.  However, on both routes, special trains are run on days with big sporting events such as the Seahawks playing at home.  There is normally no service on the weekends so this is an unusual sight.

I was after some Sounder shots for possible use in a future project so headed down to Shoreline where the trains run alongside the beach.  The beach is accessed by a footbridge over the tracks.  It has some good sightlines for shots but also fencing that is not so helpful.  I tried out a location further down and close to the tracks and it was not a bad spot.  Since two trains were heading to the game about 15 minutes apart, I did go back to the bridge to see how that looked too.

As the train was past me, I could continue to watch it as it ran along the shore a good portion of the way to the city.  It did go around a headland but again popped into view as it got closer to the downtown area.