Enjoy part 3 below. Seattle Transit Blog has looked at special challenges involved in high-speed rail in the Pacific Northwest, between Seattle and Vancouver. I briefly explained the problem a few years ago, and earlier this year, Zach Shaner here began a series examining the Seattle-Vancouver corridor segment by segment.
Part 1 dealt with the Seattle-Everett slog, and part 2 with Everett-Bellingham, an easier but already less slow segment. In this post, I will look at Bellingham-Vancouver. Decision 4 is the subject of part 4. The legacy alignment through the city has a curve of radius feet 53 mph and grade crossings; it also has poor connections to I-5 from the south.
The only reason to use this alignment is if there are plans to never run trains that skip the city. Letting express trains skip Bellingham is fine, even desirable. Instead, trains should run alongside I-5, and serve Bellingham at an outlying locationβsee map below.
There is still a problem: I-5 is not especially straight through Bellingham. On the map, potential stations are in black, and curve radii in meters are in blue:. The tightest curve on the I-5 right-of-way has radius meters, or 2, feet, good for 78 mph.
It and the curve to its south can be eased to about 3, feet, good for mph, before they turn into an S-curve. North of the built-up area of Bellingham, I-5 runs through open land. The terrain is very flat on the American side of the border, and there is so little development that the best alignment is an area rather than a line.
