Senator Murray Announces $35 Million for Two New Amtrak Facilities in Seattle as part of Economic Recovery Funding

(Washington, D.C.) – Today, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) announced that two new Amtrak facilities will be built in Seattle using $35 million in funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. As Chairman of the Senate Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee, Senator Murray worked to include$1.3 billion for Amtrak investments in the Recovery Act. The two new buildings will be constructed at the Seattle King Street Maintenance Yard. The building will be used for train maintenance, inspections, storage, and employee welfare facilities.    Senator Murray helped to pass the recovery Act in the Senate on February 13th and the bill was signed into law by President Obama on February 19th.

“This project is going to create and save construction jobs in the Puget Sound at a time when our unemployment rate continues to rise,” said Senator Murray. “It will also address some of the long-term transit needs of our state by ensuring that Amtrak can service and maintain additional trains. This project is just one part of a comprehensive recovery approach that will help get our state’s workers back on the job and our economy back on track.”

The two new buildings will help to maintain, improve, and inspect current and future Cascade and other long distance trains in the region. The first building will be a roughly 75,000 square foot service and inspection building. The building will contain train maintenance facilities which will include a wheel truing machine, 200 feet of inspection track, welfare facilities employees, and material storage. The second building will be a roughly 60,000 square foot building. This building will contain material control facilities and employee welfare facilities. Current facilities are unable to properly service additional train services that have been added since 2006. Outdated facilities result in inefficiencies and higher costs to maintain equipment.