UP officials said Thursday the line was back in operation. It would not discuss how many trains were blocked or whether they were rerouted. But in a notice to customers earlier in the week, UP said heavy snowfall in central Oregon had led to more than 100 trees on the line south of Eugene.
“As we begin operating trains that were held in this region, customers should expect delays of 24 to 48 hours on shipments as we manage the backlog,” the notice cautioned.
One of those trees landed in the path of the Coast Starlight, which left Seattle and Sunday and made it as far as Oakridge, 40 miles south of Eugene, where it struck a downed tree. Amtrak said 183 passengers were aboard.
Getting the train back out was complicated by other trees and power lines that were down, Amtrak said in an email statement. Passengers remained on the train until UP crews could clear the line sufficiently to bring a locomotive in and pull it back to Eugene. Passengers eventually made it back to Portland and Seattle Tuesday night. To add insult to injury, passengers headed to Seattle were also delayed by a fire on a railroad bridge north of Portland.
Amtrak promised refunds and to work with passengers individually on alternative arrangements.
In the meantime Amtrak cancelled the Coast Starlight route north of Sacramento through March 1.
Oregon hasn’t been the only trouble spot this winter for UP. In a separate customer advisory, the railroad noted that it has implemented several steps to deal with system snarls, including deploying 107 surge locomotives and adding 300 crews from its furlough and alternate work training status program in February.
It has also tried to reroute trains away from congested gateways and terminals, such as Chicago and bypassed intermediate terminals where possible.
one reason why I never travel in winter.
I had a friend on the Am Trak Eugene train that was delayed. The staff ran out of food and ran out of diapers for babies. The passengers. were dropped by Am bus to the bus station in Eugene and told they were on their own. So far, no mention of any compensation has been.posted. When will the passengers be compensated?
I agree that staff has been cut, but roads of all kinds were affected by the last snow storm. For several days there was no way to cross the Cascades by road at any place south of the Columbia River. Even our little low level road between the Coast and Eugene was out of service for a day, with 35 trees having to be removed and its highest point is 775 feet. The main east west highway was closed by two separate avalanches.
I have to say this is the NEW NORMAL for transportation in general and probably many other areas (notably air travel too). Efficiencies and mechanization have reduced the use of personnel and contingency resources in many industries, especially railroads. Once upon a time there were readily deployed armies of personnel and resources scattered all over the place along the railroads, not to mention readily usable alternate routes, spare/underutilized equipment, and flexible/adaptive personnel. Not so today with precision railroading. Now, if everything isn’t perfect, “we just can’t go … no room for error …cancel, cancel, cancel … too risky”.
The Coast Starlight and UP’s Cascade line from Eugene to Klamath Falls is a major example. In the days of the cab forwards, Oakridge was not just a major helper station, but a major snow fighting and firefighting base with considerable personnel, equipment, rotaries, and other resources. SP maintained this resource, albeit diminishing, up through the merger. Passing through Oakridge many, many times over the last 40+ years I have witnessed an inexorable decline of the railroad presence there to virtually nothing … the wye is still there and maybe the firefighting equipment and a few of the tracks from the past. Saw a Jordan spreader too.
Personnel??? Even less in Crescent Lake and not much in Eugene really.
This is one of the more difficult mountain crossings in the US (after Marias and Donner perhaps). So, if winter gets really bad and the tracks are no longer clear (all too often), a few high railers hit the roads (if the state has plowed them). The US Forest Service roads are another issue. Some places there are simply inaccessible, particularly Frazier to Cruzatte.
Ironically, the original SP line [now CORP], Eugene to Black Butte, CA is rarely if ever used as a bypass. More likely is BNSF through Bend, OR. But even this is very rare, even for freight.
No, this is not simply UP being UP … it is simply the way it is now … they are doing what they think is best for the railroad’s presentday profit and future viability. Excess capacity, especially people, is considered to be too expensive for modern corporate operation. It is not just the railroads. If your flight has a ‘mechanical’ that cannot soon be remedied, or a ‘fresh crew’, your flight gets cancelled — period!!!; there are no more ‘hot spares’. And you’re lucky if the next flight out has space.
[Some will remember a huge building downtown San Francisco on Market St with acres and acres (420,000 sq ft) of paper pushers (waybils, etc.). The building is still there; the work went digital; the floor space has gone to high tech companies (e.g. Autodesk). Now we have PTC, but only remember the ‘flimsies’ (kept a few).]
So what is Amtrak to do? There are virtually no contingency resources between Seattle and Oakland; a small hand full of personnel in Portland and a little more than that In Sacramento and no spare equipment that I can see. It is up to UP and BNSF and protocols to deal with any exigencies. Hicup!!! So out come the buses. I can’t remember the last time Amtrak rerouted through Bend [I’ve been there on excursions; most fantastic scenery; too bad.]
Sorry. That is the nature of the financial world we are now in and it is evidently necessary to sustain our standard of living. We gained a lot, really, but we have lost a lot too. We simply can’t have it both way. There is no stasis; the Universe evolves and, in microcosm, this is what that looks like.
Would love to hear from railroaders who operated out of Oakridge.
Snow comes in Winter!! Film at Eleven!!!!
In all areas that receive snow, Amtrak moving forward will suspend operations from Dec.1 until May1.
Reactionary management. Same here in MN. Sent train into the teeth of a blizzard and had to rescue it with snowmobiles. Looks like corporate knowledge of conditions has been lost in the precision management.
It should not be a surprise that UP is having issues with weather, out on the west coast we have had huge amounts of rain and snowfall in a very short period and the amount of snow in the mountains is monumental.