Light rail extension to Federal Way is 44 percent complete but still long way from Tacoma
The 7.8-mile extension of Link light rail from Angle Lake to Federal Way is now 44 percent complete, Sound Transit said this week. That figure includes elevated guideways, station construction and parking garages.
Design work on the $2.54 billion Federal Way Link Extension will be wrapped up in the first quarter of 2022, according to the agency.
When it’s operational, passengers boarding in Federal Way will be able to reach Sea-Tac International Airport in 15 minutes and downtown Seattle in 46 minutes.
The line will look close to finished by the end of 2023, said Sound Transit construction manager Nathan Monroe. After that, extensive testing will lead up to the opening date in December 2024.
Monroe said 2022 will be a “breakout year” for the project.
“We’ve been setting the table for the last two years to really have 2022 be a year where we come out of the ground,” he said. Track installation will begin in March.
The extension adds three stations to the system: Federal Way (at South 320th Street), South 272nd Street (formerly Star Lake Park & Ride) and Kent/Des Moines (near Highline College).
The new line is in various construction phases along its route, much of it visible to drivers on Interstate 5. One-third of the line is aerial and the rest is being built at ground level. The extension doesn’t use any tunnels.
Within sight of the Angle Lake station — the current southern end of Seattle Link — construction workers have been installing emergency guardrails high above Pacific Highway South at South 208th Street. It’s the only point where the line crosses state Route 99.
Down below, the highway makes a wide curve around new columns for the project. It’s temporary while the construction is underway. It’s also the point where SR 99 will pass over state Route 509 when 509 is extended from its current terminus on the western edge of Sea-Tac Airport to I-5 at South 216th Street.
The SR 509 Completion Project, a four-lane expressway, will open in 2028. Construction starts in early 2022.
Federal Way’s changing transit scene
The parking lot for Marlene’s Market & Deli at South 317th Street and Gateway Center Blvd. South was half construction zone and half filled with shoppers carrying bags of organic food to their cars last week.
Behind a chain link fence, workers were raising concrete columns and horizontal caps that will eventually hold the elevated guideway as it turns west, away from Interstate 5 and toward the new Federal Way Transit Center under construction along 23rd Avenue South.
Nearby, Gateway Movies 8’s theater now has zero movies. The building is gone, replaced by a line of columns.
From the top of the transit center parking garage, a visitor can get an overview of the new station — the most southerly on the line until 2032 — as well as a 500-stall expansion of the parking garage to the west. The line extends 400 feet south of the station and over South 320th Street to become what engineers call tail tracks. That portion allows trains to switch tracks if needed.
The current east-west aligned bus station at the transit center will be spun 90 degrees to match with the new north-south aligned Link station.
Along with the movie theater, a strip mall just south of the transit center was demolished. When the project is completed, vacated land will be turned over to developers to build transit-oriented development, Monroe said. Typically, that includes housing and retail spaces.
Before the system can be expanded south of Federal Way, a new operations and maintenance facility (OMF) where trains are cleaned, stored and maintained must be built. In mid-December, the Sound Transit board indicated they would prefer an area south of South 336th Street and west of I-5 as the OMF’s location.
That site would necessitate building an additional one-mile-long line south from the tail tracks at South 320th Street. That section of track would eventually become part of the Tacoma Link extension, said Sound Transit spokesman Scott Thompson. The facility is scheduled to open in 2029, ahead of the extension to Tacoma.
Before any OMF site is chosen, another environmental study needs to happen, Thompson said.
The Federal Way OMF will generate 470 full-time jobs, Sound Transit estimates. Sound Transit’s two other OMFs are located in Seattle and Bellevue.
Link to Tacoma
The final segment of the line, from Federal Way to the Tacoma Dome, won’t see any ribbon cuttings until 2032, Sound Transit announced last summer.
Next on that project’s to do list is a draft environmental impact statement. That should be released in 2022, Thompson said.
Construction on that $3.3 billion segment begins in 2026. It will add four stations to the system and take passengers from Tacoma to the airport in 35 minutes.
Sound Transit’s Hilltop Link Extension, a completely separate project, is now 90% complete and is scheduled to open sometime in Fall 2022.
Federal Way Link Extension construction facts
▪ Columns 68% complete, 82 columns in place.
▪ Girders 35% complete, 135 girders placed.
▪ Concrete decks 19% complete, 27 decks in place.
This story was originally published December 28, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
