GeekWire rides the world’s first floating-bridge train — Seattle tech commutes will never be the same

As the train approached the bridge Thursday morning, the anticipation built. Would the train sway more than normal as it crossed Lake Washington? Would it feel like riding a tightrope on a train track over the water? Would I plunge to my watery death on a simulated morning commute?

The answer to all of that, it turns out, was no.

Seattle-area commuters on the new Crosslake Connection portion of Sound Transit’s Link light rail 2 Line — especially those who have their eyes closed or are staring at their phones — will probably have no idea that they’re experiencing an engineering marvel.

Cruising above Lake Washington in a train on a floating bridge — a world first — at 55 mph is as quiet and smooth a ride as any passenger could hope for across the 1.2-mile span.

GeekWire joined a media preview of the region’s newest mass transit milestone on Thursday, riding between South Bellevue and new stations at Mercer Island and Judkins Park in Seattle’s Central District. The public will get to ride between Seattle and its Eastside neighbors starting on Saturday.

“Look at this. Look. At. This,” Sound Transit CEO Dow Constantine said as he gripped a train strap and watched the view of Lake Washington unfold. “You come out of the tunnel and see this, it’s just incredible.”

Gazing north up the lake or south toward Mount Rainier, the greatest joy is seeing beyond the traffic headed east and west on Interstate 90 and knowing travel habits are about to radically change between tech hubs on both sides of the lake.

Asked for a message to the thousands of tech workers at Microsoft, Amazon and other companies in the region, whose offices are spread between Seattle, Bellevue, Kirkland, Redmond and elsewhere, Constantine said to get ready for a “significant upgrade in your quality of life.”

“You will now be able to easily get back and forth between home and office, whichever side of the lake you’re on, without having to plan ahead for traffic, without having to fear that you’re going to get stuck in a traffic jam, in a predictable, reliable amount of time, every time.” he said.

He added that companies are enthusiastic about how it makes it easier for people to return to the office or how they can recruit someone who lives in a Seattle neighborhood to come work on the Eastside, or vice versa.

The roughly 13-mile drive between Seattle and Microsoft HQ — which can range from 20 minutes to two hours — has been a source of frustration for years as the region’s tech boom and subsequent population explosion clogged area roadways.

Bellevue has also grown, most notably around Amazon, as the tech giant has previously said it plans to put 25,000 corporate workers across various buildings in the city. Roughly 50,000 work in Seattle.

King County Councilmember and Sound Transit Board member Claudia Balducci, whose district includes Bellevue, Kirkland, Mercer Island and Redmond, said tech workers — her constituents — have been waiting for the link across the lake and she thinks it’s going to change their lives in one day.

“Sitting behind the wheel is completely lost, unproductive, stressful time,” Balducci said. “Sitting in a train you can read, you can do work. I think it just is going to be a game changer.”

Balducci said 10,000 people a day are already using the previously completed rail line between downtown Bellevue and the Redmond Technology Station next to Microsoft’s headquarters campus.

Sound Transit projects the fully integrated 2 Line will serve about 43,000 to 52,000 daily riders in 2026, with trains running every 10 minutes from approximately 5 a.m. to midnight seven days a week.

“People make conscious decisions about where to locate their businesses and their homes based on fixed transit,” she said. “A bus stop is not going to make you build your new tower if you’re Amazon, but you can see the Amazons, the Microsofts and tech companies generally are building around these [train] hubs.”

Light rail and the associated stations are not only attractive to tech companies. Housing development and small businesses also follow, along with riders coming and going to easily visit different parts of the region.

“I think it’s going to really shift the feel and the economy in ways that we may not be able to even predict today,” Balducci said.

While crossing the lake on Thursday, it was impossible to see or feel just how much innovation went into making it all happen from an engineering and technological standpoint. And that’s a good thing when it comes to the safety and comfort of the ride.

Train infrastructure had to be built onto the highway infrastructure that’s part of the westbound Homer M. Hadley Memorial Bridge, which opened in 1989. Tracks have to transition smoothly over the joints between fixed and floating segments of the bridge, allowing for flexing of the rails as the bridge moves.

“Once you introduce repurposing roadways and tunnels and floating bridges, there’s just more integration, more complexity. All of the systems — power, control, structural — they all have to work together,” said Craig Delalla, a longtime systems engineer with Sound Transit.

“It is a big deal going over the water,” he added.

Keep scrolling for more images from GeekWire’s ride: