Intercity Transit to Thurston County commuters: Let us help you get to Sounder

Twelve years and three weeks after launch­ing com­muter rail ser­vice between King and Pierce coun­ties, Sound Tran­sit’s Sounder is final­ly serv­ing Lake­wood via South Taco­ma instead of ter­mi­nat­ing at Freight­house Square near down­town Taco­ma. For the time being, five trains run north­bound from Lake­wood in the morn­ing, and five trains arrive south­bound from Seat­tle in the evening.

(The words for the time being are used because ser­vice may be expand­ed in the com­ing years; the orig­i­nal Sounder sched­ule had far few­er trains than the cur­rent sched­ule, which serves more sta­tions with more trains at more hours of the day).

Sounder’s expan­sion to Lake­wood is a big accom­plish­ment. It took a long time to get done, but the days of wait­ing are over. South Pierce Coun­ty res­i­dents who work up north and want to com­mute back and forth by train can now do so, bypass­ing an often-grid­locked stretch of Inter­state 5.

Thurston Coun­ty’s Inter­ci­ty Tran­sit is let­ting its rid­ers know that they, too, can make use of Sounder. In an announce­ment on Tues­day, Inter­ci­ty remind­ed res­i­dents of Thurston Coun­ty that it pro­vides a fast bus con­nec­tion to the Lake­wood sta­tion with its Olympia Express. Inter­ci­ty has timed the Express to pro­vide a smooth con­nec­tion to morn­ing and evening Sounder trains depart­ing and arriv­ing from Lake­wood. Inter­ci­ty also pro­vides ser­vice to the down­town Taco­ma sta­tion to meet trains that do not go all of the way to Lakewood.

Bus­es run­ning the Olympia Express routes are also equipped with ORCA (One Region­al Card for All) read­ers, which means that any­one in cen­tral Puget Sound need­ing to vis­it the state cap­i­tal can use ORCA to pay the fare for their entire trip, whether they go by bus, or rail and bus. (The rest of the Inter­ci­ty Tran­sit sys­tem does not yet use ORCA, but it hope­ful­ly will before too long).

Sound Tran­sit has infor­mal­ly looked at bring­ing Sounder fur­ther south from Lake­wood to DuPont, but no such expan­sion is planned or fund­ed at present. Olympia and Lacey, mean­while, are out­side of the bound­aries of Sound Tran­sit’s tax­ing dis­trict, so the agency has­n’t done any plan­ning work to explore the fea­si­bil­i­ty of com­muter rail ser­vice into Thurston County.

Amtrak’s Cas­cades does serve Olympia and Lacey sev­er­al times a day, but an Inter­ci­ty bus is still required to get from the sta­tion to Olympia prop­er (the sta­tion isn’t with­in walk­ing dis­tance of the Capi­tol Cam­pus, St. Mar­t­in’s Col­lege, or any major des­ti­na­tions with­in the area).

On a relat­ed note, this Sat­ur­day, Sound Tran­sit will oper­ate the first “game day” spe­cial Sounder ser­vice from Lake­wood to Seat­tle, for the big game between the Wash­ing­ton Huskies and USC Tro­jans at Cen­tu­ryLink Field. North­bound trains will leave Lake­wood at 1:05 PM and 1:30 PM. South­bound trains will return fans to their parked vehi­cles or to neigh­bor­hood bus routes fif­teen and twen­ty-five min­utes after the game ends. See Sound Tran­sit’s game day ser­vice page for more info.