[Train announcement] Two Line to International District Station now arriving.
(train bell chimes)
-It is really an incredible feat of engineering.
This is the first time
that anyone has built light rail on a floating bridge
in the world.
♪♪
We are headed across the East Channel Bridge
from Bellevue to Mercer Island.
[Train announcement] Two Line to International District Station now arriving.
Please stand behind the yellow line.
-We are pulling into the Mercer Island Station,
which is just to
the north of the Mercer Island town center,
adjacent to Interstate 90.
There are entrances at both the east and west
ends of the station.
It is a short walk to both the Mercer Island
Park and Ride and the bus bays there.
Next, we are headed west into the city of Seattle
to the first
2 line station in the city of Seattle at Judkins Park.
Lake Washington is very deep, 200ft deep,
which is why we have a floating bridge.
The Judkins Park station has an eastern entrance on 23rd
Avenue and the west entrance on Rainier Avenue South.
Well, if we
rolled back about 50 years, the Homer M. Hadley Bridge,
when it was designed and built,
it really was visionary.
Those folks considered a future where high
capacity transit would use that portion of the bridge.
The design, essentially, is taking that force
that comes with the movement of a bridge
and deflecting it from a single point,
spreading it out over as long a point as possible.
♪♪
We partnered with the University of Washington.
We partnered with a local engineering firm
to create prototypes,
a series of large square bearings that sit flat
and the bearing on top is able to move.
We shipped them down to Pueblo, Colorado.
We hooked up 10,000 different testing inputs,
and we ran those trains for weeks.
So we then brought it back up to Seattle.
We installed it on the bridge
and again undertook months of testing.
And we are now running light rail
on a floating bridge for the first time in the world.
The ride quality
across the
bridge is,
the same as what you would experience
throughout the system
but the views are better.
It is going to truly be transformational.
Just giving people more options
is giving them more freedom to
connect around the region with opportunity.
And that's what, you know, really, really motivates us
and keeps us going at South Transit.