Amtrak Cascades boost to five daily Vancouver-Seattle trains eyed | Daily Hive

Amtrak Cascades service boost to five daily Vancouver-Seattle trains being eyed

Artistic rendering of the new Airo train model for Amtrak Cascades. (Washington State Department of Transportation)

Legislators in Washington state are seeking to drastically improve Amtrak Cascades over the coming decade by enhancing inter-city passenger rail service’s capacity, frequency, reliability, speed, and travel time.

The Intercity Passenger Rail Improvement Priorities, referred to as House Bill 1837, would require the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) to meet various new service level and performance targets by 2035.

Key to the new bill’s proposed targets, WSDOT would work towards increasing the number of roundtrip Amtrak Cascades trains.

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The route segment between Vancouver and Seattle would see at least five roundtrips daily — up from the current two roundtrips per day.

Between Seattle and Portland, the number of roundtrips would rise from the current six to 14.

As for travel times, the target is to achieve lower travel times of two hours 45 minutes each way between Vancouver and Seattle — down from the current four hours 30 minutes each way.

Between Seattle and Portland, travel times would drop from the current three hours 30 minutes each way to two hours 30 minutes each way.

Moreover, the minimum on-time performance rate would be elevated to 88 per cent.

Currently, Amtrak Cascades’ on-time performance is very low; for the period between January and October 2024, only 48 per cent of all trains arrived at their final destination within 10 minutes of their scheduled time.

The entire Amtrak Cascades corridor from Vancouver, BC to Eugene, Oregon. (Amtrak)

Amtrak Cascades. (Oregon Department of Transportation)

These new targets follow an all-time, record-breaking year for Amtrak Cascades ridership, with WSDOT recently sharing with Daily Hive Urbanized that the service saw about 985,000 passengers in 2024 — up from 746,000 in 2023, 824,000 in 2019, and 781,000 in 2014.

The bill is not directly attached to any new funding to achieve these targeted metrics, but it calls for coordination with the U.S. federal government, stakeholders, and other partners. As well, WSDOT would be required to provide annual updates to the Washington state legislature on its progress toward reaching the targets.

This includes improvements to the railway corridor used by Amtrak Cascades within British Columbia, funded by Canadian authorities.

In January 2025, WSDOT told Daily Hive Urbanized that Pacific Central Station — the northernmost terminus of Amtrak Cascades, on the edge of downtown Vancouver — is in need of station platform upgrades to handle the brand new fleet of trains for Amtrak Cascades, arriving in 2026.

Without the platform improvements, Amtrak Cascades cannot make any additional daily trips between Seattle and Vancouver, and optimize the use of Amtrak Cascades’ eight new Amtrak Airo trains — a variation of the Siemens Venture trains — and two new locomotives.

Artistic rendering of the new Airo train model for Amtrak Cascades. (Washington State Department of Transportation)

Currently, other upgrades are underway to the customs facility at Pacific Central Station. When complete in Spring 2025, the new pre-clearance customs facility will eliminate Amtrak Casscades’ train stop for southbound trips across the Canada/U.S.-border for secondary international border inspections by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers. WSDOT anticipates this border stop — involving officers boarding the train in Blaine to re-inspect passengers — will be eliminated starting later in Spring 2025, reducing the southbound travel time by 10 minutes.

Moreover, WSDOT has suggested a need to improve the railway corridor north of the Canada-U.S. border, in order to achieve better travel times and reliability. This would be reciprocal to the various railway corridor upgrades led by WSDOT south of the border, with more planned over the coming years.

Concurrently, the Washington state government is also leading efforts to plan a future high-speed rail service connecting Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland, which would replace the Amtrak Cascades service. In late 2024, WSDOT secured $50 million in the final days of then-U.S. President Joe Biden’s public transit-friendly administration — an enthusiasm not shared by his successor, U.S. President Donald Trump.

A high-speed rail service is likely decades away, and its projected cost — likely in the tens of billions of dollars — remains completely unfunded. This makes incremental yet impactful upgrades to the Amtrak Cascades service a more practical and cost-effective alternative for the foreseeable future.

Previous preliminary studies for overhauling the Amtrak Cascades route into high-speed rail estimated ridership could reach 2.1 million per year upon opening. Using conventional train technology, much slower speeds, and low frequencies, the existing Amtrak Cascades service already approached nearly half of that high-speed rail ridership in 2023.

Amtrak Cascades. (Washington State Department of Transportation)

Amtrak Cascades train in the Grandview Cut, with the downtown Vancouver skyline in the background. (Washington State Department of Transportation)

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