Waiting for the DMU

One good thing about the transportation crisis is that new ideas keep popping up every day.

At a scheduled March 2 meeting of the Freight Roundtable, a subset of the local Puget Sound Regional Council, the talk will focus on the current rail corridor that passes through much of the Eastside, and what should be done with it. Early on, the rail path, part of a complicated deal that would swap property between King County and the Port of Seattle, was virtually dedicated to bicycle use. You could almost imagine the ribbon-cutting dedicating 14 miles of wide roadway to cycling enthusiasts.

But that was before the word got out that while cycling is nice, and healthy, that broad pathway — 100 feet wide in some places — is too valuable for just one use.

Dan O'Neal, a member of the Freight Roundtable and the state Transportation Commission, agreed readily by phone last week that the most important thing was to secure the corridor for public ownership, before the railroad that now owns it divides it up into saleable parcels.

"No one expects rail freight to go back on that route," O'Neal said. "Technology is not always the answer if you have no customers. That's also the problem with making rail and trucking compatible — all the little things that turn out to be big things."

But on the corridor itself, there is a regional hesitation about turning it solely into another Burke-Gilman Trail, or a duplicate of the East Lake Sammamish Trail.

At the Cascadia Center for Regional Development in Seattle, they've found a train that looks born to be working the Eastside. According to Cascadia, this is a self-propelled commuter rail car, run on diesel that gets two miles to the gallon when carrying 90 passengers. The manufacturer claims that mileage is four times better than a traditional locomotive, and you don't have to buy a locomotive to pull the cars. The one pictured can also tow two additional cars.

Bruce Agnew of Cascadia describes it as a low-impact commuter car that can run on biodiesel and be maintained by diesel mechanics from community colleges. He wants to try an experimental run between Bellingham and Everett to connect with Sound Transit's Sounder service.

Red and flashy doesn't mean we're ready to buy it off the lot today, but it does show there are fixes out there that might be just right for future generations.

"You don't know what's going to happen," O'Neal said when asked about the eventual use of the Eastside corridor. "Once a rail line is gone," he said, "it is very hard to replicate — you can't get the land back and the need for those rail cars has gone somewhere else."

A DMU (diesel multiple unit) is what the rail car is called and should be thought of as a reminder that we don't know what's going to happen, except we will grow by another million or so people, and the Eastside is already one of the major job centers for the entire West Coast. It might be fun to pedal your bike to work from Newcastle to Renton; that could still happen, but waiting for the next DMU would work, too.

"If we still had the Interurban today," O'Neal said, "we'd be in a lot better shape." And then it comes to mind: a work of public art in Bellevue, a group of people cast in bronze and titled, "Waiting for the DMU."

To Learn More:

The Puget Sound Regional Council site has links to the BNSF rail corridor study at www.psrc.org/index.htm

James F. Vesely's column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: jvesely@seattletimes.com