Topic: Roads & Rails
The Seattle Renton & Southern Railway built King County's first true interurban railroad beginning in 1891, and spurred development of the then largely agricultural Rainier Valley. The line was be...
This condensed chronology traces major milestones in the evolution of public transportation in greater Seattle and was originally published in The Seattle Times on October 20, 2002. Detailed essays on...
Jared Smith was the Head of Transportation, Policy and Planning for the City of Seattle when the Nisqually earthquake hit in 2001. He worked for the city and as an independent consultant througho...
Maggie Walker, chair of Friends of Waterfront Seattle, joined former Seattle Mayor and fellow committee member Charley Royer on July 23, 2022, to talk about how they designed the process around reimag...
Paula Hammond was Washington State Secretary of Transportation from August 2007 to March 2013. She was appointed by Governor Christine Gregoire. In these audio clips she outlines her early experi...
The City of Skykomish, located in the northeast corner of King County, began in 1893 as a rail town for the Great Northern railroad. Nestled in mountain forests, and supported over the years by rail, ...
Sound Transit is a regional transit agency serving King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties with light rail, commuter rail, and express-bus service. Officially called the Central Puget Sound Regional Tran...
This essay surveys the development of Seattle's South Lake Union and Cascade communities from 1854 to 2003, with emphasis on visions for its future including Virgil Bogue's 1911 Plan of Seattle, the 1...
From 1931 to 2010, the 1931 South Park Bridge, also known as the 14th Avenue South Bridge, spanned the Duwamish Waterway, linking the Seattle neighborhood of South Park with land in the City of Tukwil...
The Spirit of Washington Dinner Train brought the romance of the rails to King County's Eastside for 15 years from 1992 to 2007. For a price guests enjoyed an excursion through the communities east of...
From 1888 to 1936, streetcars played a clanging and colorful role in the history of Spokane. The city's first streetcar was pulled down Riverside Avenue by a team of horses. Within two years, steam-po...
Washington state's second-largest logging and lumber operation during its heyday, the St. Paul & Tacoma Lumber Company controlled 90 square miles of standing timber in Pierce County and milled bil...
Before rail service reached the West Coast steamboats, stagecoaches, and wagons were the principal means of transportation to and from the inland areas of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho territories. Go...
Robert E. Strahorn (1852-1944) and his wife Carrie Adell Green "Dell" Strahorn (1854-1925) had a significant impact on the Northwest in the 1880s and 1890s, through their writings that publicized the ...
Road travel in and around Seattle was difficult and dangerous before 1884, when the first horse-drawn streetcar line was established downtown. The first cable car line was introduced in 1887, and elec...
One of Washington's first cross-state highways, the Sunset Highway provided the first automobile route over the Cascade Mountains, a range that divides the state from north to south. When it opened in...
Sound Transit's mass transportation system has some of its roots in Tacoma's trolley systems of the 1890s. The Tacoma and Steilacoom Railway Company started in 1890. The company used steam engines to ...
Seattle's taxicab industry began in 1908 with a fleet of three Stearns Landaulets operated by the Seattle Taxicab Company. Competitors elbowed in, rate wars ensued in the 1920s, and Seattle Taxic...
Resembling a long rope frayed at each end, the Oregon Trail stretched across much of nineteenth century North America, linking the populated East Coast with the remote western edge of the continent. A...
In this reminiscence, Dorothea (Pfister) Nordstrand (1916-2011) relates the story of how she learned to drive in Seattle. The year was 1936, just 36 years after the first auto arrived in Seattle in 19...
In the heyday of railroad expansion, a bold new line out of Snohomish promised to transform the underserved agricultural towns of the Snohomish and Snoqualmie river valleys. The Snohomish Valley Railr...
In the spring of 1859, after five years of study and survey, the U.S. War Department appropriated funds for the construction of a military wagon road between Fort Walla Walla in Washington Territory a...
This account of life at a Cedar Falls railroad camp (in east King County) was originally recorded on June 15, 1993 as a part of the Cedar River Watershed Oral History Project. Dorothy Graybael Scott m...
The first Europeans to see the Olympic Peninsula were stunned by the thick conifer forests that stretched from shore to as far as the eye could see. Nearly 100 years later, thousands of Americans and ...