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The low floor on Sound Transit's Link light-rail cars means pretty much everything responsible for making them move -- except the wheels -- is on top.
"There's almost no equipment on the underside of the car," Paul Denison, Sound Transit's assistant director for operations and maintenance, said during a media tour of the agency's operations and maintenance center, in Sodo, Wednesday morning.
The visitors got to walk all around the cars, inside and out. But the could only see the roofs from an observation deck, behind Plexiglas for one very good reason -- the platforms along the tops of the cars are perilously close to the 1,500-volt direct-current lines that power the trains.
The $74-million building, which opened in 2007, is 162,000 square feet -- nearly the size of Benaroya Hall -- has nine bays and can accommodate 16 light-rail cars. It sits on a 26-acre site that can fit 105 cars.
Link's initial line opening in July between downtown Seattle and Tukwila, and December's extension to Sea-Tac Airport, will use 35 cars. The next addition, to the University of Washington in 2016, will require another 27 cars.
The East Link plan calls for a new maintenance facility on a 10- to 15-acre site on the East Side, with capacity for about 40 cars. The the facility may not be needed until the line extends past the Overlake Transit Center Station to downtown Redmond, according to the plan's draft environmental impact statement.
About 175 people work at the Sodo facility, although most were in off-site training Wednesday, Denison said. The only work going was repair of a truck (the structure that holds the wheels, attaching them to the car) that was leaking oil.
The truck was covered by a warranty from manufacturer Kinkisharyo, of Japan, Denison said. The warranty provides two years of bumper-to-bumper coverage and five years of coverage on the propulsion system and trucks.
A lift held up the 105,000-pound car whose truck was being fixed. A turntable under the lift and connecting tracks in the floor allow workers to transfer trucks to work areas.
"We can change a truck in about three hours," Denison said. "Everything's plug-and-play."
Denison worked on the same type of cars as rail maintenance oversight manager for the Hiawatha Line, in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. He moved here for the weather.
"I'll take a little drizzle over 30 below zero any day of the week," he said.
Here are some other noteworthy tidbits from the tour:
- The cars get a safety inspection every 5,000 miles -- every 10 days, on average.
- The cars have three braking systems -- dynamic braking, which uses the car's motors; hydraulic disc brakes, similar to an automobile's; and track brakes, which push down against the tracks in an emergency.
- The wheels have steel tires that have one inch of wear capacity.
- The cars are just 2.5 inches from the ground at their lowest point.
- The facility has a train wash, complete with red, yellow and green spinning brushes, and the cars get washed as needed, averaging about once a week.
- Kinkisharyo assembled the trains in leased space at Boeing's Everett plant and delivered them by flatbed truck in the middle of the night.