(Image: Seattle City Light)

In February, a three-month parade of sorts featuring a piece of machinery as heavy as a Boeing 757 made its way through Seattle, ending in the Central District in the dead of night.

Part of a multi-year project to upgrade and improve reliability of the brick-walled East Pine Substation along 23rd Ave, the mid-February process to move a new 110-ton electrical transformer into place at the facility involved a train trip, truck haul, and then a slow winding trip through the city of Seattle to 23rd and Pine.

“Transformer replacements are one of the largest single projects undertaken by our stations’ personnel, taking many months of planning, preparation, and execution and thousands of labor hours,” Hans Gutmann, electrical power systems principal engineer for Seattle City Light, said.

Transformers are large-scale pieces of electrical equipment that play a key role in power distribution, converting high-voltage electricity carried from power generation sites to substations and lowering the electric voltage level, ensuring safe power transmission.

The city says the new transformer will improve power reliability and load capacity and allow for greater control and monitoring capabilities. It has an expected lifespan of 40 to 50 years.

The new transformer hard at work at the East Pine Substation began its journey here last year.

In late 2022, the transformer was loaded onto a rail car in Montreal, Canada, and traveled to Vancouver, Washington. On February 8the, the oversized load hit the road traveling up I-5 on a 185-foot-long heavy hauler escorted by a convoy of support vehicles over the course of four nights. Heavy-haul transportation permits restrict travel to night, the city says.

Three nights later, the caravan arrived at Martin Luther King Jr Way South and was carefully maneuvered through city streets to the East Pine Substation.

The city says the final blocks of the transformer’s trip were extensively surveyed in advance. With parking restrictions and designated hold points for traffic in place, the transformer was ready to be offloaded at the substation.

At daylight on Super Bowl Sunday, workers used a system of hydraulic jacks and rails to carefully move the transformer through the substation’s main gate – just wide enough for the enormous piece of equipment to pass through. The jacks allowed the transformer to move up to 18 inches per interval between the pin locks that secured the transformer to the rails.

The city says the new transformer is part of a multi-year project to expand and upgrade the substation, which came online in 1967 and was designated a Seattle Landmark in 2019 due to its award-winning architectural design.

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