American passenger rail is experiencing its strongest growth in a generation. Amtrak trains carried a record 34.5 million passengers in 2025 — the second straight record year — and the company has set its sights on doubling ridership to 66 million by 2040. That growth is being driven by record federal investment in modern trains and stations, steadily improving reliability, and travelers increasingly choosing rail over congested roads and fee-laden flights.

The Pacific Northwest sits at the leading edge of this growth. Amtrak chose the Cascades corridor — which links Eugene, Oregon to Vancouver, British Columbia using a line that runs through Portland and Seattle — as the first route to receive its new Airo trainsets, a modern fleet featuring upgraded amenities and technology.

As demand rises, so does the need for the specialized infrastructure that keeps modern trains running, which is precisely where PCL Construction's Seattle team has built its reputation.

PCL has worked alongside Amtrak since 2010, delivering a range of projects that have helped expand the railroad's Northwest footprint. That portfolio includes the Seattle Train Car Wash, the Locomotive Service Facility and work at Portland's PDX Union Station. Each project added to a base of knowledge that is difficult to replicate.

"We’ve developed a really strong relationship with Amtrak,” says Cody Glasgow, a PCL project manager who has worked on five projects with Amtrak. “It's a reciprocal relationship. They hold us to a high standard, and we work hard to keep earning their business.”

Andrew Fernandez, district manager of PCL’s Seattle operations, shares that perspective.

"For over a decade, we’ve partnered with Amtrak in the Pacific Northwest,” says Fernandez. “Together, we've built a strong foundation of trust and collaboration, and our continued work with them reinforces our ability to safely deliver complex work in an active rail environment."

A centerpiece of this partnership is the Seattle Trainset Maintenance Facility at the King Street Coach Yard, on track for completion in early 2027. The project — PCL’s fourth at the yard — includes construction of a 90,000-square-foot maintenance and inspection (M&I) Facility with a 39,000-square-foot parking garage. The M&I building will house equipment used to inspect, service and perform heavy maintenance on Amtrak's expanding fleet, including the new Airo trainsets.

“Rather than just servicing the locomotive, they're servicing the entire train, all the passenger cars,” says Dan Brown, a PCL construction manager. “Cleaning out the sanitary systems, filling with water, charging batteries, as well as any mechanical work that needs to be performed. These services have been performed at different buildings on this campus before, and they're able to complete them all in one facility now.”

Brown compared it to an oil change shop, but on a significantly larger and complex scale. The M&I facility's service-and-cleaning and maintenance-and-inspection tracks are served by an overhead bridge crane, a monorail crane, a diesel exhaust system, a split-rail system and a drop table, all heavy-duty equipment that lets technicians service the trainsets end to end.

The payoff, ultimately, is a fundamentally different way of maintaining trains.

The facility was designed to support a more streamlined maintenance approach, allowing inspection, cleaning, servicing and repair activities to occur in a centralized location. By reducing operational inefficiencies and improving turnaround times, the facility is expected to help support Amtrak's ongoing fleet modernization efforts and future service needs across the Pacific Northwest.

Those efficiencies are expected to play an important role as Amtrak continues to modernize its fleet and expand service across the region.

“Facilities like this are the backbone of reliable passenger rail,” says Fernandez. “While travelers may never see it, this project will help support Amtrak's new Airo fleet and strengthen rail service throughout the Pacific Northwest.”

The maintenance facility introduces equipment rarely seen in U.S. passenger rail facilities. It features one of the country's first shallow drop tables, allowing technicians to remove and replace wheel sets and motors without the deep, 25-foot excavation required by a traditional drop pit. The facility also incorporates a source-capture diesel exhaust system that draws emissions directly from each locomotive rather than ventilating an entire building, improving air quality and worker safety. These technologies are more commonly found in modern European rail facilities and represent a significant advancement in how passenger rail equipment is maintained and serviced.

These innovations were possible because of how closely Amtrak, PCL, TKDA, the primary design team and other stakeholders worked together, a trademark of the design-build construction delivery model. Unlike a traditional model where a contractor is brought in after a design is finalized, the design-build approach brings designers and builders together from the outset to solve challenges collaboratively.

One example was the decision to replace the originally planned deep drop pit with a shallow drop table. The revised approach reduced excavation requirements, supported the project schedule and created long-term operational advantages for maintenance activities. The change demonstrates how early collaboration between the owner, design team and builder can lead to practical solutions that improve both constructability and long-term facility performance.

Throughout the project, this collaborative approach helped the team navigate complex technical requirements, maintain schedule certainty and deliver solutions that support both construction efficiency and long-term rail operations.

Building in an active, urban coach yard is a discipline in itself. Trains at the King Street Coach Yard can measure 300 to 500 feet long and need significant space just to enter, exit and be stored, which sharply limits how crews can stage their work. Complicating matters further, a highly trafficked road bisects the yard, and not every track crosses it, meaning taking a single track out of service can cut off access to several others downstream. Success depends on thinking several moves ahead.

“You can't just move these cars like in a parking lot,” says Glasgow. “When we coordinate a track outage, we must do it well in advance, because Amtrak has to find a new location for the trains that would normally be stored there. It's not like closing a lane on a road.”

That foresight is where PCL's experience shows. Rather than reacting to conflicts as they arise, the team maps out track outages, deliveries and equipment moves with Amtrak far ahead of time, sequencing the work so the railroad can keep running while construction advances around it.

Safety is the pillar of all of it, especially on a site where trains move through the work zone throughout the day. Amtrak and PCL open each day with briefings: PCL leads a morning safety talk on the topic of the day, and Amtrak follows with a rail-specific briefing on train movements. That shared planning process helps ensure lessons learned are communicated across the team and contributes to maintaining a strong safety record on the project.

Underpinning that record is a simple recognition on PCL's part: the railroad has to keep running, and construction must work around it. That understanding shapes how the team plans every day in the field, where any work near live track requires railroad worker protection. When a train needs to pass, work stops and the train takes priority.

Maintaining daily rail operations remains the project's top priority. Successfully delivering the facility has required close coordination between construction activities and train operations, with schedules, work sequences and site access carefully planned to keep both the railroad and the project moving safely and efficiently.

For PCL's Seattle team, the Trainset Maintenance Facility is both a milestone and a marker of what the group brings to complex transportation work. Delivering a first-of-its-kind facility on a constrained, active site takes more than construction know-how; it takes the ability to plan several moves ahead, solve problems before they reach the field and keep a railroad running while building around it. Those capabilities have been strengthened through years of collaboration with Amtrak and experience working within the operational realities of the King Street Coach Yard.

As Amtrak and other transportation agencies invest in the infrastructure the next generation of rail will depend on, PCL's Seattle team has earned — one project at a time — the credibility to help build it.