An article in the Oregonian suggests that public sector leaders my decide that after damage from recent storms the cost of repairing the Port of Tillamook Bay Railroad is simply too high.
An article in the Oregonian suggests that public sector leaders my decide that after damage from recent storms the cost of repairing the Port of Tillamook Bay Railroad is simply too high.
17 responses to “Another Rail Line Bites the Dust?”
If I’m not mistaken the article also mentioned that one possibility was extending the line to Seaside. I realize its very unlikely but it would be great to have a quality transit option to the coast.
The POTB rail operation is a shaky affair even in good weather. The poor state of their tracks and equipment make (usually minor) derailments a frequent occurrence. The track is a tough grade through some rough territory, which makes it less than ideal for operations. As a railfan, I hate to see the line go, but from a practical and economic standpoint I’m not sure that it makes sense to dump more money into it.
Why don’t they build tunnels through the mountains like they do in Europe? Is it because they would hit lava?
It isn’t feasible for POTB to bore any type of tunneling just because of the huge costs with doing so. They would benefit greatly from welded rail and such but again it comes down to cost.
The locomotives they use, EMD SD9’s are pretty dated and while they are “easy” on track, this is the advantage of 4 axle locomotives vs 6 axle. POTB can really do some savings in terms of track wear and maintenance by getting rid of the SD9’s for some type of GP power or the newer Genset locomotives…but for any short line, it always will come down to cost. 20-40 million to repair a rail line is pretty high but other factors like the economy and added trucks to roadways cause of the railroad no longer providing rail shipments.
We shall see….
Brian
If I’m not mistaken the article also mentioned that one possibility was extending the line to Seaside.
Why?
First of all you would have to find a route that doesn’t desecrate Ecola State Park.
Secondly, what is the motivation to build a multi-hundred-million-dollar rail route for what is essentially a couple thousand railcar loads?
Third, originally Seaside was served by the Astoria & Columbia River RR, later the Spokane, Portland & Seattle RR by way of the Youngs Bay Trestle from Astoria. If you were to walk to the western end of the Astoria Riverfront Trolley you can see where the trestle started; looking at Google Earth or Terraserver you can easily discern the southwest end of the trestle and the right-of-way that served Seaside as well as the branch to Fort Stevens.
At Fort Stevens State Park, some of the old railroad trestles remain, as well as rails embedded in concrete near some of the artillery batteries.
Why don’t they build tunnels through the mountains like they do in Europe? Is it because they would hit lava?
Because it costs money. (I do not think that the Coast Range is a volcanic formation, but I could be wrong. I’m not a geologist.)
If Tillamook were the size of Portland I would all but guarantee that a “European-style” railroad would be built there. However Tillamook is far too small to serve, even by European standards.
The railroad would operate a (gulp!) BUS to serve the town if it provided any service at all.
http://www.railfaneurope.net/pix/de/misc/bus/db_zoo_re_bus.jpg
(Hey! A double-decker bus! Operated by a railroad! On a commuter route! In Europe!)
I’m sure everyone is aware that there IS a bus that runs between Tillamook and Portland, it’s run by TCTD rather than the Port.
But that’s a different subject entirely.
Regarding the subject, the thing that concerned me about the O article earlier this week was the deal about “Transportation Options,” which usually seems to mean road improvements so larger trucks can go through more frequently, while at the same time the rest of the state and the world is concerned about peak oil and the end of oil.
In my opinion, if money were no object, I’d say rebuild the railroad, to make sure the rail connection remains. We live in reality though, so I’m not sure that’ll happen.
to make sure the rail connection remains
I am sure that you will recall that the “Astoria Branch”, the route that runs from Northwest Portland through St. Helens and Rainier to Astoria, was closed years ago by the Burlington Northern Railroad at its western end.
In the mid-1990s, then BNSF donated the right-of-way to ODOT, and sold the railroad to the Portland & Western Railroad. The P&W spent a good sum of money to clear several years-old landslides, repair rails, and successfully operated a locomotive to Astoria to announce the railroad was open for business.
For a few years, the Lewis & Clark Explorer Train operated during the summers, four days a week, from Linnton to Astoria. The first year the train broke even but in years two and three it lost money. This was a train that was strictly geared towards tourist traffic; it made no en-route stops (i.e. Scappoose, St. Helens, Columbia City, Deer Island, Rainier, Clatskanie). After the third year (which was the minimum commitment made by the state to fund the operations) the train stopped running.
To this day, not a single revenue freight train has returned to Astoria. P&W made some repairs to a dike that supported the railroad a few years ago despite no traffic. A couple years ago another dike broke, but this time P&W didn’t make the repairs and the railroad is still severed.
Another thought I had on the subject… if something like SR 6, US 26 or US 30 completely washed out somewhere between the metro area and the coast, we would be reading articles about how no expense to fix the highway is too great, it must be repaired and the money would have to be “found” from somewhere.
Any other mode of transportation, and most people have an anemic “who cares” attitude towards it.
Or say, a section of I-5 in Washington State didn’t wash out, but simply was underwater for a few days every 10 years, they’d be talking about spending billions to reroute it so that it could get hit with landslides instead…
I think it should be more important to determine how many people use the mode of transport to determine its value in rebuilding after a failure of any type.
For example, ODOT has spent millions on repairing Highway 35, the Mount Hood Highway, after flood damage a few years ago. IMO, this was a total waste of money – it serves only to access a ski resort and is a “scenic” route – the primary transportation corridor is I-84 to the north. (If it’s so important, why not assess a toll on this road; after all anyone that can afford a $50 ski lift ticket, $30 in gas, $400 in ski gear, snow tires, three meals on the mountain, etc. can afford another $10-20 to drive on the highway.)
The POTB unfortunately doesn’t pass the smell test. While carloadings are up from 10-15 years ago the traffic carried by the railroad is pale compared to the traffic carried by U.S. 101, Oregon 6 and regional traffic that uses Oregon 18/22 to the south and U.S. 26 to the north. Unfortunately the largest commodity in/out of Tillamook – the cheese factory – simply can’t use rail as a viable mode of transport (it’s too slow). It makes no sense for several reffer loads of cheese to take 24+ hours to get from Tillamook to, say, Fred Meyer’s or Safeway’s Distribution Centers in Clackamas, when a truck can do the same trip in less than three hours – and the cheese can be on a store shelf in 24 hours from leaving the factory.
As for whether highways always get what they want and rails not – I would disagree. MAX and Portland Streetcar seems to always gets funded, often at the expense of other needs (namely bus service and local streets). It’s no problem to find $100M for a single Streetcar project, but it’s too difficult to find a couple million for a street project in one part of Portland, a couple more for another project, and so on. $100M would go a long way towards city-wide improvements in Portland, instead of serving one small part of town with a brand new transportation infrastructure of questionable need. I believe many people are still squabbling over the Interstate and Sellwood Bridges – two pieces of transportation infrastructure that see extremely heavy use – but have no received any investment towards required improvements.
“It’s no problem to find $100M for a single Streetcar project, but it’s too difficult to find a couple million for a street project in one part of Portland, a couple more for another project, and so on. $100M would go a long way towards city-wide improvements in Portland, instead of serving one small part of town with a brand new transportation infrastructure of questionable need. ”
Uh, how can anybody argue with that?
It’s absolutely the truth.
Then again, they spend $8 billion each month to fight a war that was created on false pretenses against a population that never threatened Americans.
WE NEED A REVOLUTION AROUND HERE!
It’s no problem to find $100M for a single Streetcar project, but it’s too difficult to find a couple million for a street project in one part of Portland, a couple more for another project, and so on. $100M would go a long way towards city-wide improvements in Portland, instead of serving one small part of town with a brand new transportation infrastructure of questionable need.
Well, it did take four years of intense work to find the $72 million local piece of the Streetcar Loop project. If someone put in the same level of effort for say, adding sidewalks in SW, it would be interesting to see what the results are. But then, there’s no Federal matching fund for sidewalk improvements.
the major use of the POTB RR is hauling wood, both logs anhd finished, would be nice to have a passenger service at reasonable fares to travel to Tillamook via Salmonberry Canyon, a beautiful route not served by a highway… I would ride it.. should be plenty of fill material in the area to re-do the right-of-way, may take a while, meanwhile several locomotives are stranded at Garabaldi…
be nice to have a passenger service at reasonable fares to travel to Tillamook via Salmonberry Canyon, a beautiful route not served by a highway
Passenger service was offered as late as 2006 on an almost weekly basis.
The POTB stopped running the trains for 2007 account “focusing on freight needs”.
However “reasonable fares” – this is a railroad route that, if regular passenger service were restored, would take 12 hours to get from Banks to Tillamook, serve no communities between Banks and Mohler (except for Timber, which is not exactly a destination), and would serve no real “need” that the Tillamook County Transit District bus can’t accomplish at far less cost, and 1/6th the time (Tillamook to Union Station, with stops at Tanasbourne and Sunset TC). “Reasonable”, I presume, means “cheap enough for me, but where someone else pays for most of it.” In other words, like every other passenger train in America.
Even at the latest figure, $26 Million, fixing the Tillamook Bay Railroad (built as the Pacific Railway & Navigation Company (PR&N) also known as the Punk, Rotten & Nasty for the terrain it traversed) is a far better bargain than the $75 million requested for an Eastside Streetcar, or $88 million needed in taxpayer subsidies to construct a Convention Center hotel. Both the streetcar and the hotel will require reoccurring operating subsidies adding to the public debt. Fixing the railroad will protect approximately 500 family wage jobs now in jeopardy in a distressed county, and provide a consistent feed source route for Tillamook area dairy farmers while operating at a small profit. Furthermore, it should be also be noted that about 80 percent of the work that was done to repair damage from the 96 floods survived intact.
Fixing the railroad will protect approximately 500 family wage jobs now in jeopardy in a distressed county,
That may be the right thing to do (I don’t know enough about it), but isn’t that “socialistic”? (Like I asked earlier, it would be very helpful if you could itemize which subsidies are “socialistic” (and therefore verboten) and which ones aren’t.)