This week, we ride along with our host and featured guest on the 1 Line as they unpack decades of regional transit history: from the early Link light rail concept in the 1980s to its 1996 inception under Sound Transit to its expansion into a multi-regional rapid transit system across the Puget Sound Region. Hop aboard and hold on, you’re in for a ride!

This episode is hosted by Tony Williams and features guest Bruce Englehardt.

Curated HistoryLink article set for this episode includes:

• Sound Transit (King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties) by Josh Cohen
• Earl, Joni (b. 1953) by Jim Kershner
• Sound Transit begins Link light-rail service to Capitol Hill and the University of Washington from downtown Seattle on March 19, 2016. by Jim Kershner

Additional HistoryLink resources for this episode:

• Seattle Transportation: From Trolleys to Monorails, A Timeline by Walt Crowley
• King Street Station (Seattle) - HistoryLink.org by John Caldbick
• King County Metro Transit by Jim Kershner
• Interurban Rail Transit in King County and the Puget Sound Region - HistoryLink.org by Walt Crowley

For more information about Link light rail and Sound Transit, visit:

• www.soundtransit.org

For more Field Notes episodes and other HistoryLink podcasts, visit the:

• HistoryLink.org Podcast Page

Bruce: The Cross Lake Connection opened on Saturday, and we're recording a few days later, and that was an immense day. People were coming out from all over the place just for this. I had friends that came from Boston and New York and from Portland and LA just for that event.

Tony: That's awesome. Train nerds are undefeated.

Bruce: Oh, yes, they are undefeated and they are relentless. If you get anything wrong, and I'm gonna get things wrong on this podcast, they're gonna come up after me and, uh correct me. Lightly in person, but maybe, uh, flamed online.

Bruce: I've done 130,000 edits. I've written many articles that are called featured articles. That means they're quite great quality, peer reviewed, and I've done a lot of the articles on Seattle's transportation system, so transit, highways, ferries, airport stuff. You name it, I touched it.

Voice Over: Case in point, the Seattle Center Monorail article. It's the most comprehensive look at the monorail on the internet. Bruce has put more work into it than anyone else. His username over on Wikipedia is Sounder Bruce, a nod to the Sounders soccer team and the Sounder commuter rail. He met me on a beautiful spring day at the Mount Baker station, just a few blocks from my house.

But otherwise, a fairly quiet and peaceful space. We are also on hallowed ground for people that love trains because this is where it all started. The first trains out on the Link system in Seattle started here.

Voice Over: Today, Bruce is taking me on a guided tour of Link, Seattle's system, and telling me the story of how it almost fell apart before it even got started, and the woman who almost single-handedly saved it.

Tony: As we walked in, you were pointing out this plaque to me. Can you explain this plaque to me?

Voice Over: More on that in a minute. For now, we've got a train to catch.

Hi, I'm Tony Williams, and you're listening to HistoryLink Field Notes, the podcast where we explore the history of Washington State one place at a time.

This week, the patron saint of , the story of how Joni Earl saved the Link, the Seattle metro area's system. Before we get to that story, though, we need a little background about Seattle's transit history.

Bruce fills me in as we take the escalator up to the platform.

Bruce: So Sound Transit is not the first time we've had an attempt to build a giant system of trains and buses and other things in Seattle and the greater region. So back in the day, we used to have streetcars and local buses that went everywhere.

Those were all gone by the time, uh, World War II hits and, uh, things were replaced by motor buses. Later on, those got worse and worse. So we had more and more traffic.

Cities went from being built around transit to being built around cars, and Seattle was no exception.

Bruce: So we had more and more traffic, fewer buses, and people were fed up. So a few civic organizers come around and decide to create this thing called the Forward Thrust Committee.

Voice Over: The Forward Thrust Committee was an attempt by local organizers to build a modern subway system here in the Seattle metro area.

Bruce: The Americans had only experienced the old and decrepit systems of New York, Boston, and, uh, Chicago, where trains were falling apart. People were fed up with how loud they were and how awful it was to get onto those trains.

Tony: Oh, hey, here's our train.

Bruce: Oh.

Background Link Announcement: This is the 1 Line to Lynnwood City Center.

Voice Over: This is all from an awesome HistoryLink article. It's called Sound Transit Overview, and it's by Josh Cohen. As always, you can find a link to it and all the articles we talk about today in the show notes.

Bruce: So where was I? DC Metro, right? Yeah. So Seattle tried. We had two votes to try to get a, a two-thirds maj- supermajority to get that done.

Background Link Announcement: Next stop, Beacon Hill.

So instead, we got Metro Transit to come in and operate the buses, and they started planning for this new thing called , which is a fairly new technology, but also it's an old technology at the same time. They're descended from streetcars, but they're modernized. They can run faster. They can do more things, and that's why m- many American cities and Canadian cities have adopted it as their main mode.

Nice.

Tony: And I've always heard, you know, the term , but I'm like, "What's light about it? Doesn't seem very light."

Bruce: Actually, ironically, they're, they're heavier than most trains are because they have to be heavy enough to not get hit by a car and tip over. Oh, yeah. So they are strong trains, but they are light in the sense of capacity.

In 1996, they [00:08:00] got it passed on the fourth try after so many attempts, after so many years of squabbling over this thing. They had $4 billion to spend on from Seattle out to the airport and up to Northgate if possible.

Background Link Announcement: Next stop...

Bruce: With the plan to go future, in the future, go out towards the east side, out to Snohomish County, out to Pierce County, and beyond.And, uh-

Tony: But it was not that easy, was it?

Bruce: Oh, no. If it was that easy, we'd have a lot more rail across all the country right now, but we had to take the hard road to get there.

Voice Over: When he says the hard road, he's talking about what most people call the dark days of Sound Transit, a period where budget overruns, scheduling delays, and political headwinds almost stopped the Light Rail in its tracks, pun intended.

Bruce: And the reason why they endured is partially because at their darkest moment, someone stepped up to the plate and came into the role of CEO to really save the day and right the ship, and that's Joni Earl. So the history article on Joni Earl, which was written by Jim Kershner, uh, it's a great biography of her, and it's, goes, it starts with her early life, of course. She's the daughter of a former Bremerton mayor. Uh, she graduates from, uh, from Bremerton High School, goes to Washington State University. Her parents instilled the values of strong ethics in her, and that's, that really came to play as soon as she got into the workforce.

Bruce: She was the head of a department that had many people older than her, and she just got to it after a while. She learned to be a very much a one-on-one kind of person. She would always be there for her employees. She would always interview them at their desk and ask them how they're doing, and e- she would be very personal, but also expect results, and that was so important moving forward.

Tony: A billion dollars?

Bruce: A billion dollars.

Tony: How much was the total cost?

Bruce: It was only two billion or so. Oh, my God. So that's, that's a significant increase.

Tony: So they were, like, 50% over budget.

Bruce: Yep

Voice Over: This is nightmare fuel to me. Imagine starting a new job and the first thing you hear is that you have to come up with a billion dollars. What's crazy to me is that Joni Earl didn't run away from this whole situation. She stepped even further into it.

Voice Over: Now, the Bush administration wasn't huge on rail projects in general, and they definitely weren't excited to hand over another billion dollars to an agency that had already proved they were bad at budgeting.

But Bruce and I are arriving at our destination, so we're gonna take a quick detour. More on the dark days in a minute.

Bruce: So we're now entering Chinatown International District Station, which is at, at the end of the transit tunnel, which used to be a bus tunnel built by Metro, and they had the idea to build this tunnel ahead of time before the system was even a dream in the eye- eyes of Sound Transit.

Tony: Oh my God, it's beautiful.

Bruce: Yeah, the vaulted ceiling and this beautifully restored, uh, interior is just wonderful.

Tony: It's got these gorgeous jade tiles on the walls, and beige above that, and, um, a gorgeous shining tile floor.

Bruce: And there's also the gold lettering all over the place here for... There's a W for the Washington and Oregon Railroad, which was one of the railroads that helped build this thing. And above that, there's an S for Seattle.

Tony: Beautiful.

Bruce: This is the Joni Earl Great Hall.

Tony: Oh, it's named after Joni Earl.

Tony: Wow, so she's, I mean, it almost seems like she's, like, the, the patron saint of local transit.

Voice Over: Okay, back to the dark days. So Joni has been told that Sound Transit has a billion dollar shortfall. Now, their initial plan was to build a line from the airport through Rainier Valley, up through downtown and Capitol Hill, to the University of Washington, basically the center portion of the 1 Line today. But the bids for construction were coming in way over budget, so Joni had to make some real hard choices.

With that, we can get the budget down to a reasonable level. cut a few more other things out of the plan, and maybe get the federal government to fund more than they expected.

Voice Over: Now, just to be clear, nobody likes this plan. Hey, I know we said we'd build a Light Rail from the airport to UW, but actually it's gonna cost the same amount of money, but you're only gonna get a Light Rail from Tukwila to Westlake.You won't be able to take it to the airport or to Huskies games, or even to Capitol Hill. Our bad. But if this Hail Mary was what would keep the system alive, Joni was willing to fight for it, and she would have to.

Bruce: So Joni Earl, in her first few weeks as, uh, as CEO, gets to go testify in front of Congress and is grilled over how much the financial, uh, documents have been proven to be wrong and just too optimistic, that they were way out of proportion.

Joni Earl sat down with the team and they pored over this article and created a step-by-step rebuttal and got the PI to retract the article and issue a front-page correction. That's very rare in newspaper history.

Voice Over: Meanwhile, at Sound Transit, Joni created a wartime culture. Her motto was, "Optimism is not our friend," and she told staff to start under-promising and over-delivering.She also told them that no one was gonna get fired for bringing a problem to her, but people would definitely get fired for hiding a problem from her. And the culture started to change. Sound Transit was turning things around.

Voice Over: As you can probably hear, Bruce and I are back on the now, headed to our final destination for the day, the Capitol Hill Station, another place that wouldn't exist if Joni hadn't been able to convince the feds to give Sound Transit an insane amount of money.

Bruce: So she built a very strong, uh, relationship with the federal government and the officials that were tasked with looking over the finances, and they got their grant. They got $500 million from the government just for this Light Rail plan.

Bruce: So there was some money left over to help plan for the next phase, and that was parlayed into a thing called Sound Transit 2, so the second big ballot measure, a whole big package. The state government forced them to merge it with a roads and highways measure, so they called it Roads and Transit. It flamed out at the ballot box. They had the Sierra Club come out against it. They had a bunch of other people go out, come out against it because it was just irresponsible to put both those things together. So the next year-

Tony: 'Cause the car people hate the transit, and the transit people hate the cars?

Bruce: Yeah. Yeah, there's that. It was just too bloated, honestly. Yeah. And so they come out with this transit-only version the next year, and it passes handily. And this was way be- right before they opened the first section of Central Link, so people had not ridden a train yet in Seattle, but they knew with confidence that S- Sound Transit could build this thing as promised.

Tony: Yeah, so Sound Transit 2 is now complete.

Bruce: Pretty much.

Voice Over: We arrive at our destination.

Tony: Oh, yeah.

Voice Over: The fighters are nose-to-nose. They're part of a sculpture called Jet Kiss, an homage to Seattle's aviation history. They're pretty cute. They were here to greet folks at the opening party for the station, and the second part of Line 1.

Tony: So tell me about the third article you brought for me today.

Tony: Oh, you were actually there?

Bruce: Yeah. I was on the first train, and it was a beautiful day for Seattle. It was a day that really felt like a, we felt like a big subway riding city for the first time ever, even though it's not a subway.

Tony: Yeah, but I mean, you know, you could be forgiven for thinking that it's a subway. It feels like a subway station. It looks like a subway station. It quacks like a subway station.

Bruce: I don't know about quacking, but it's, it definitely feels like it with, uh, the amount of people that use the station.

Tony: Yeah.

Bruce: Yeah.

Voice Over: Unfortunately, Joni didn't get to preside over the culmination of all of her hard work.

Voice Over: But Joni was at that opening as a civilian to celebrate, and she's still around. Bruce saw her at the opening of the 2 Line a few months back.

Voice Over: Now, when exactly is that gonna happen? Who knows? Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that it's been a year full of big ups and downs for Sound Transit. They finally opened the 2 Line, crossing Lake Washington and taking riders all the way to Redmond, but they also announced that they have a pretty huge funding gap.

Bruce: Right now, they're facing a $34 billion shortfall, which makes the $1 billion we talked about earlier seem like small potatoes. There are some hard decisions to make. We have a new CEO, Dow Constantine, who's used to be part of the board himself, and, uh, it's up to the new Sound Transit to really just buckle down and channel the spirit of Joni Earl and get things done responsibly and safely, which is a very big challenge.

Bruce: I think it's important for us to provide the, the right amount of support and criticism of the agency, but rec- recognize that people in the agency are doing their best to get this thing done, get these projects out there, get things done in a good way, and sometimes they have to compromise, and that's okay. But there's a lot of great people in Sound Transit that I know of personally that just care so much for the region as a whole and the riders and the experience. So sometimes you just gotta, just gotta give them the, the straight and honest answers that they desperately need, but also give them plenty of hugs and, and support.

Tony: Totally. Well, thank you so much, Bruce. It's been so lovely meeting you and getting to chat about and ride the today.

Bruce: Yeah, it's been so much fun.

The 2 Line is the only Light Rail on a floating bridge in the world, an engineering marvel and the centerpiece of what has become an incredible transit system. The Link Light Rail carries 38 million people a year. It's the highest ridership Light Rail in the country, and if not for Joni Earl and the people around her, it wouldn't exist at all. It's a testament to how even when things look as bad as they did for Sound Transit in the dark days, astonishing things are possible if we have the drive and determination to make them happen

Jennifer: On Saturday morning, March 19th, confetti showered down on dignitaries as they cut the ceremonial ribbon at the Capitol Hill Station. Ceremonies were also held at the same time at the University of Washington Station.

Riders thronged into both stations for free rides. "We are absolutely flying," a first-day rider said. King County Executive and Sound Transit Board Chair Dow Constantine said the opening showed that the agency has matured, and we've gotten better and better at delivering these projects. One rider told a reporter that when he moved to Capitol Hill 13 years ago, Link had just been a little pipe dream.

Voice Over: Field Notes is a production of HistoryLink. You can check out over 8,000 articles about Washington history on our website, historylink.org.

And again, check out the show notes for links to audio and text versions of the articles we talked about today. If you like the show, please rate and review it on your favorite podcast app, and share it with a friend. It really helps us out. Special thanks this week to Sounder Bruce and Bruce Englehart.