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High Speed Rail In The Pacific Northwest: Connecting Portland, Seattle and Vancouver!
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Mar 31, 2025
High speed rail makes the most sense, when it's able to connect major population centers in a more convenient way than either personal vehicles or airplanes. With this in mind, the Pacific Northwest makes for almost a perfect scenario for high speed rail. In this video, we break down passenger rail efforts, current rail infrastructure, and future plans and the outlook for high speed rail for the region.
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The Pacific Northwest is a powerful economic region within the United States and Canada
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With Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver leading the population in growth for the region
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it makes sense that the three would want to be even closer connected. So what would it take to bring high-speed rail to the region
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Hello, and welcome to Geography by Jeff. This is the very first video since I rebranded from What If Geography
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If you want to know why I rebranded, there's a whole video and post about that
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so go check those out. Of course, What If Geography does continue to live on through the
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podcast that I create with geography professor Hunter Shobe. So if you're interested in continuing
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to explore What If scenarios, go check out that podcast. It's also probably no surprise to any of
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my regular viewers that I love high speed rail. I don't dislike road trips or planes, but there
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really isn't anything easier or more convenient than taking a train, especially for mid-distance
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trips. So this will be a continually running series where I try and make logical high speed
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rail connections within the United States, Canada, and Mexico. So stay tuned
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Like much of the United States and Canada, passenger rail in the Pacific Northwest has
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a long history. The first documented effort began in 1864 when then-President Abraham Lincoln signed
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the Northern Pacific Charter, which gave land and funding to the Northern Pacific Railway Company
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But this wasn't to build a railway connecting the Pacific Northwest, but rather to connect
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the Puget Sound to the Great Lakes. But while this specific rail corridor was intended to run back
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east, it also spurred development of other rail lines that would connect the region of the Pacific
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Northwest overall. And the first rail line to begin that connection was from the Northern Pacific
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Railways Terminus in Tacoma up to Seattle and down to Portland. Nearly at the same time, in 1866
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Congress granted land to a rail line that was intended to travel south along the Willamette
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Valley all the way to the California State Line. The intent was to connect the Pacific Northwest
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largest city at the time, Portland, to the burgeoning California cities and rail infrastructure
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But there was one more piece to the Pacific Northwest rail infrastructure that would be needed connecting Seattle to Vancouver British Columbia Given that this rail line would connect two separate countries it came quite a bit later than either Washington or Oregon rail infrastructure
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That said, in 1890, the Great Northern Railway Company, by way of several smaller rail companies
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completed the track that would run from Seattle all the way up to Blaine, Washington
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which sits at the border of the United States and Canada. At the same time, the Canadian rail
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Company, New Westminster Southern Railway, completed their line that would run from what
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is today Surrey, British Columbia, to the US border. And with that, the three major cities
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of the Pacific Northwest were connected by rail for the first time. Well, in actuality
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it would take a few more years for Portland to be fully connected due to the Columbia River's vast
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width and the lack of a bridge. But by 1909, four daily trips ran between Portland and Seattle
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and by 1913, four daily trips ran between Seattle and Vancouver, three of which would include travel to Portland
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Unfortunately for rail, passenger service would eventually begin to decline in the early to mid-1900s
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as the personal vehicle got better, highways were built, and eventually passenger air travel became a thing
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In 1971, Hamtrak officially took over all wayward passenger service lines in the Pacific Northwest
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and would later establish the Coast Starlight Line that would run from San Diego to Seattle
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as well as a regional line that runs from Eugene to Vancouver called the Amtrak Cascades
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Passenger rail service has a long history in the Pacific Northwest, and it makes sense too
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The region is culturally and geographically connected in a way that few others truly are
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It's for this reason that the region is often looked to as a potential high-speed rail corridor
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But before we get into what high-speed rail might look like in the Pacific Northwest, if you're enjoying this video, please subscribe
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More great geography videos are just a single click away. The Pacific Northwest Corridor has regular passenger rail service today via the same two
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Amtrak rail lines that began back in 1971. The Amtrak Coast Starlight runs daily between Los
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Angeles and Seattle with 26 stops in between the two cities If you were to travel from Los Angeles to Seattle it would take approximately 35 hours with no delays which definitely happened but we get to that in a little bit All told somewhere around 352
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people ride the Coast Starlight every single year. But while the West Coast train is certainly active
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perhaps the much more relevant rail service for this video is the Amtrak Cascades, which runs
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between Eugene, Oregon, and Vancouver, British Columbia, with 16 stops in between, including the
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cities of Portland and Seattle. All told, eight trains operate daily along the route, but as of
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the publishing of this video, no train ran the entire route. If you live in Seattle, you can take
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a train either south to Portland or Eugene, or north to Vancouver. But if you live in Portland
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or Vancouver, you cannot take a single train to the other city. Instead, if you opt to purchase a
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ticket today from Portland to Vancouver on the Amtrak Cascades, you'll be given what is called
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mixed service, wherein you will take a train to Seattle and then a bus to Vancouver. In all honesty
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it kind of ruins the whole concept of a rail corridor. At a maximum speed of about 79 miles
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per hour, the Amtrak Cascades takes approximately three and a half hours to travel from Portland to
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Seattle and Seattle to Vancouver, not including customs. This actually makes it pretty competitive
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with driving by car, which takes a minimum of three hours with no traffic, but upwards of five
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hours during large parts of the day. That said, the Amtrak Cascades and Coast Starlight are liable
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to have long delays of their own. You see, the overwhelming majority of the United States Railway
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is owned by freight rail companies. In the Pacific Northwest specifically, they're largely owned by
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Union Pacific and BNSF. Because of this, freight trains get priority and can stall a passenger
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train for hours. Regardless of the speed of train, the most important improvement any passenger rail
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service can make is investing in its own railway. High-speed rail is not a new concept for the Pacific Northwest
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The idea has been studied every few years for the last 30 years
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In fact, in 1992, the Pacific Northwest Corridor was designated by the Federal Railroad Administration
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as a high-speed corridor. But it wasn until recently that the idea was studied much more intensely In full disclosure I worked on this project as a transportation planner In 2017 the Washington Department of Transportation Oregon Department of Transportation Province of British Columbia and Microsoft each contributed to conduct a business case study for
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an ultra-high-speed ground transportation route that connected Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver at a speed of 250 miles per hour or more. In that study, two things were largely determined
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Travel time along the entire corridor would take around two and a half hours, with a little over one hour in between Portland and Seattle and Seattle and Vancouver
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And it would cost somewhere between $24 billion and $42 billion to build out in 2017 dollars
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That amount might seem cost prohibitive, but when you see that the Oregon Department of Transportation is about to spend over $900 million
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to add a single lane and replace a single bridge along Interstate 205 Freeway
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in the Portland metro region over just a few miles, building out high-speed rail doesn't actually seem that expensive
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And in exchange for that money, the region would get a world-class bullet train
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that has proven to be an efficient and effective mode of transportation that greatly reduces emissions
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that would otherwise be emitted by single occupancy vehicles traveling along I-5
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or passenger airplanes which run multiple times per day between the three cities
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Today, high-speed rail within the Pacific Northwest is still being talked about and little else
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though there has been some momentum. In 2021, a memorandum of understanding
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was signed between Oregon Governor Kate Brown, Washington Governor Jay Inslee, and British Columbia Premier John Horgan
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to bring high-speed rail to the Pacific Northwest. With this level of governmental and corporate support
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the Pacific Northwest seems poised to dive into the high-speed rail game. It's a matter of when, not if
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High-speed rail is an amazing piece of transportation technology. There's a reason why countries all over the world
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are investing in it. Even Egypt has big plans to bring high-speed rail
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to their country, which is probably a future episode of mine. But the Pacific Northwest specifically
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makes for a logical and enviable corridor for a bullet train. The US and Canada just need to invest in it
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I hope you enjoyed learning about what high-speed rail might look like in the Pacific Northwest
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If you did, please subscribe to my channel. And if you want to watch more of my geography videos, you can do so here
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Thanks for watching. See you next time
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