Anyone taking the Sound Transit through Western Washington will be put to a tough test.

A breakdown in North Seattle on Saturday is just the latest in a series of issues Sound Transit is investigating.

“Especially as we expand our system, we must improve to provide the service our riders deserve,” John Gallagher, a spokesman for Sound Transit, told the Seattle Times.

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It seems that the opposite is currently the case. Saturday’s incident caused significant delays and crowded trains throughout North Seattle.

According to driver warnings, Line 1 trains ran on a single track from around 9 a.m. until after midnight. Instead of the usual 10-minute headway, passengers had to wait 30 minutes between trains from the University of Washington and Lynnwood stations.

A fire alarm also led to an evacuation of Capitol Hill Station while a fire broke out across the street.

Current issues of Sound Transit

Sound Transit has been plagued by a variety of problems recently. On August 1, a power outage near Northgate station caused trains to be closed in both directions for six hours. During work on the Lynnwood Link expansion, a power relay switch appears to have been improperly reset.

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On September 17, passengers were removed from a stalled train near the University of Washington (UW) station and traveled 300 feet through a tunnel. An arc flashed between a train and an overhead line. The following day, on September 18, a failure in a railcar’s control system indicated a brake failure, causing the operator to stop the train near the UW station, resulting in two and a half hours of use of a track.

Last spring, power outages near the Spring District station blocked trains on the Eastside Start Line for several hours, once on May 24 and again on June 18. Both failures were attributed to circuit settings.

Sound Transit CEO Goran Sparrman hired an outside team of engineers to study power systems.

Bill Kaczaraba is a content editor at MyNorthwest. You can read his stories here. Follow Bill on X, formerly known as Twitter, Here and send him an email here.