An afternoon Sounder loads up at King Street Station.

The Sounder trains from Seattle to Everett and Tacoma are largely for commuters to Seattle, which is the first thing you notice when checking out their schedules (it’s an hour trip for both destinations). The bulk of the runs to Seattle are in the early morning, then back to Tacoma and Everett in the evening. And of course it’s weekdays only.

You only have one or two chances to make a reverse commute, depending on where you’re headed, but it is possible. If you want to spend the night is Tacoma or Everett, then everything becomes easy as pie. Either way, at just $4.50 (Everett) or $4.75 (Tacoma) each way, it’s a bargain, and one that you can use your new ORCA card to pay for, if you’re so inclined.

If you disembark from the last train in the evening, you may hear the engine chugging away for some time. Electro-Motive Diesel, Inc., supplies the F59PHI locomotives, and tells me that the engine is usually busy recharging batteries and otherwise transitioning from its day’s work. It’s self-monitoring and can shut itself off when all systems are back to “green.” Even idling, these are large engines and I wondered how green they really were.

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Sound Transit runs 11 of the F59PHI locomotives, which emerged from the factory with an EPA Tier 0 rating. “In 2008 we switched to a low-sulfur fuel that burns much cleaner in our locomotives than the previous fuels,” says ST’s Kimberly Reason. “We replaced all of our Head End Power (HEP) units with a new Tier 2 unit in 2008 as well–the HEP is the smaller engine on a locomotive that provides support electricity to the coach cars for lights, heat, AC, etc.”

In 2012, Sound Transit will begin rebuilding the engines to convert to the EPA’s Tier 3 rating, which requires tighter regulation of oxides of nitrogen (NOx), hydrocarbons (HC), carbon monoxide (CO), particulate matter (PM) and smoke–in the case of particulates, nitrogen oxide, and hydrocarbon, the reductions range from between 50 to 75 percent compared to Tier 0.