Does anyone know why the first Link train from Federal Way every morning is limited to 25 mph until Angle Lake?

Feels more like “I’m never leaving Federal Way”…

Anyway, I’ve been riding the 4:36am Link out of Federal Way every morning, and despite the utter darkness that envelops the route that early, preventing almost any visual aids to judge the train speed, I couldn’t help noticing that it is… slow. I was using the freeway traffic as a frame of reference, and while I know that the 4:30am commuter crowd on I-5 are a bunch of blue collar speed demons second only to the 2am hot hatch crowd attempting to recreate the Fast and the Furious franchise, the 5XX Sound Transit buses to Seattle are a reliable reference and they can’t be hauling that much ass if my train is in fact going the 55 mph maximum of the rest of the rail system.

Today I used some online GPS speedometer because I was guessing we were going maybe 35 mph, but my eyes rolled completely to the back of my head when it refused to go above 25mph after Star Lake. Okay, this was some janky online speedometer website (not even an app!) that I found at approximately 4:43am, how accurate can it be? Well, come Angle Lake, the throttle gets thrown down and the electric motors make a spooling whine that has been noticeably lacking from every station stop until this point and this speed app confidently displays a 55mph readout, precisely what I was expecting. And dreading: the 25 mph is apparently accurate.

Even if it wasn’t accurate, the Link schedule actually shows that this one train in particular, my train specifically, is slower than all subsequent trains. The gap from Federal Way->Star Lake->Kent/Des Moines->Angle Lake is 8-6-6 minutes, while all other trains are 6-4-4 minutes. And on top of that, the first southbound train from Lynwood does not have this same discrepancy!

So what gives? Is the first Federal Way train a sweeper train checking for deer, livestock, and/or homeless people that may be on the track? Does our new expansion require a 25 mph slow train to warm up the rails? Is the concrete on this whole expansion still setting, and my train is the sacrificial test train to see if anything collapses? Did I personally offend the Sound Transit schedule maker? I have been looking forward to the expansion to take me off I-5 every morning for 5 long years, I didn’t dream of this day only to take the crown from Rainier Valley for slowest section of the entire Link network. I could bike this fast if they put a bike lane on the side of the rails, sheesh.

If I really am riding the sacrificial test train for the day, could I at least die going 55mph please?