Boarding estimates?

Great pics. Thanks Kelly and Cienna.

These are great pictures. I believe the official name for this station is "University of Washington Station." U-District would probably be a better name for the forthcoming Brooklyn station, which is present in the commercial core of the U-District rather than right by Husky Stadium.

Transit boner! I have a total transit boner now!

Bummer that you didn't get a peek inside the tunnels. Next time, ask, "so if this leak pumping system were to shut down, how long would it take for the entire station to fill with water?"

Great post, though. I'm always interested in seeing more details of this underground shit being constructed.

@4, thank you for clarifying that. Why Sound Transit would tell Paul this is the U District station is beyond me. The actual U District station will be the Brooklyn one, expected to open in 2020 or 2021. In the interim four years between Stadium station opening and Brooklyn station opening I believe frequent shuttles will run people from here to the actual U-District.

This thing passed underneath Seattle. Like science fiction. http://www.flickr.com/photos/startsoundt…

Oops - my saying Paul wrote this is as wrong as Sound Transit saying the Montlake stadium is in the U District.

It might take six minutes to get to this station from downtown, but once you get there, where are you? More or less nowhere. Husky Stadium is right there, and University Hospital, which admittedly is a major employment center, is close by, but anywhere else on campus is quite a trek. Even the engineering departments are going to take longer to walk to than the trains will take to get between downtown and this nowhere station.

In five years you'll be able to get to Brooklyn Station, which is nice, but it's not on campus, either.

It seems clear that UW didn't want useful light rail to campus, but why they didn't want it I cannot guess. Maybe the same reason there are virtually no bicycle facilities on campus?

It's unfixable, though.

I wonder how much faster our buses would be if we sank ever more of them down into the tunnels, bypassing the surface streets.

@12- really fast, until the next one catches fire. In the tunnel.

very cool kelly o. how exciting! can't wait.

@11: Well, gee, a 10-15 minute brisk exercise for students and faculty for a six minute ride downtown... so what?

I'd hit that. Mmm.

It's a bit disappointing that it's been 12 hours since the post appeared and there hasn't been a correction to the station name. I guess that will never never.

"U District Station" is the name of the station that will be at 45th and Brooklyn. Originally the Link people were going to call it "Brooklyn Station" but there was a big stink over that name and thankfully residents convinced them to change it to U District Station. (Some people weren't happy with the change though - too them it's too close in sound to "University Street Station", but supposedly University Street Station may be renamed in a few years.

"University of Washington Station" is the one featured in these photos.

Also..., saying "The U-District station will be Sound Transit's terminus for five years, as work on Northgate station continues" implies that they're just waiting for the Northgate station to be completed. That ignores the Roosevelt and U District stations (and all the tunneling between the stations). Since Northgate will be elevated, it's possible that station will be completed before the other two, but I haven't really looked at the scheduling.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Link

(And I like how I mistakenly wrote "never never" instead of "never happen". Oops)

Also...

"preparing to descend 900 feet down into the belly button of the earth"

As pointed out by a commenter on seattletransitblog.com, that number is way off. It's about 9 stories down (about 120 feet or so). (By comparison, the Beacon Hill station platform is about 160 feet deep.)

Let's see. 3+ years till opening. what are he odds metro and ST will coordinate bus service to the station by then...