If you think Portland train delays have gotten longer and more frequent, you’re not wrong

The train-related traffic delays in Portland — especially in the city’s inner east side — have gotten worse and more frequent in recent years. As rail transportation consultant Bill Burgel told Willamette Week, that’s in large part because the average length of a freight train has doubled. Trains used to be 7,500 feet, and now they’re commonly 15,000 feet or more.

As a former employee of Union Pacific with 50 years of experience in the rail industry, and as a member of the city’s Freight Committee, Burgel pays close attention to these delays. And he has some structural ideas to solve or alleviate the delays that regularly last an hour or more. We sit down with Burgel to understand all the factors behind these mind-blowing delays and more about possible solutions.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Train-related traffic delays in Portland, especially in the city’s Inner Eastside, have gotten worse in recent years. In fact, it’s possible that you are stuck behind a train at this very moment, and that the delay could stretch for hours. As rail transportation consultant Bill Burgel told Willamette Week recently, the length of these delays is tied to the growing length of the trains themselves. Trains used to be around 7,500 feet or so. Now they’re regularly 15,000 feet or more. Burgel has 50 years of experience in the rail industry and has been a member of the city’s freight committee since its inception. He has some ideas to get around or to actually prevent these delays, and he joins us now to talk about them. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.

Bill Burgel: Thank you, Dave.

Miller: I want to start with the voicemail that we got. We got a lot of calls about people’s experience getting stuck behind trains. This is Tom in Portland:

Tom: I get a mini-heart attack, almost a full blown heart attack, every time I see those rail crossing lights go off and the rails go down, when you’re on 11th Avenue crossing over at Clinton because you never know if it’s gonna be a MAX train or a freight train, and if it’s the latter, you’re stuck there forever.

Miller: OK, so Bill, let’s start first of all just with some definitions here. As he says here, there, there are different trains that could stop you. Some of them are brief though. MAX trains are short, pretty fast, over and done in, I don’t know, 45 seconds or something. Amtrak passenger trains are a little bit longer but not that big a deal. And then there are freight trains, and even there, my understanding is there’s a couple of different kinds. But the real culprit for what could be hours-long delays are intermodal freight trains. So what are intermodal trains?

Burgel: Well, there are trains that carry containerized traffic that pretty much originates over in Asia. It’s all a manufacturing capability that we’ve outsourced. That’s all coming back to us in these containers and then it gets shipped, distributed throughout the United States from West Coast ports.

Miller: Intermodal because it could be first on a train and then go onto a semi?

Burgel: Yes, correct, into a truck. These are standardized containers that are, internationally, they’re 20-foot, domestic are usually 40-foot boxes, and they’re considered, TEU is the nomenclature, a 20-foot equivalent, and that’s how ships are rated. Most of these ships coming in are about 16,000 TEUs, and they’re now making ships that carry 24,000 TEUs into ports that can handle those.

Miller: So I mentioned the doubling or more in the average length of some of these trains. Why are these trains getting so much longer?

Burgel: Well, the actual weight per car is fairly low on an intermodal car, and so locomotives can handle quite a bit of tonnage. And so it’s a natural progression for railroads to just extend these trains longer and longer.

Miller: They get more money.

Burgel: They get more money per unit of cargo they carry. That’s correct. And then if you can make a train safely 15,000 feet or more long, then you’ll do that. And the railroads have demonstrated that they, through about three technological improvements in the last 15 to 20 years, they’ve implemented those, and these trains are quite safe to operate.

Miller: How much more efficient are trains than trucks for transporting goods?

Burgel: Typically you can put about 3.5 to 4 truckloads on one railcar. So right away you get that type of efficiency. But you can go 500 miles on one gallon of diesel fuel and take one ton of cargo that far. So it’s very efficient. In fact, when you get increased fuel prices, there’s a trend to go by train versus trucks.

Miller: Well, I’ve been wondering about that. I mean, because obviously that’s what’s happening right now with the war in Iran, but how quickly can that switch happen? I mean this gets to supply chain decisions, the kind of question that most of us weren’t asking before the pandemic, but it seems like increasingly that we’re aware of these decisions. How quickly could you switch if diesel prices go way up, say?

Burgel: So if you’re a consignee and you want to ship a container across the U.S., you will work with a freight forward or a third party logistics firm, 3PL we call them. Once you sign the contract and you have a specified time in which you want this train or truck or container delivered, you won’t know how it goes. You actually turn that over to the 3PL and that company will make that decision. And if it’s more than 500 miles, it’s more than likely to go by train.

Miller: OK. All of this is some helpful background for the real meat of this conversation, which is the delays. So, can you give us, I’m sure you could do the hour-long version, but can we get the quick version of what’s happening as an intermodal freight train stops, stopping drivers at Southeast 11th or 12th for hours, sometimes even goes backwards a little bit, what’s happening that we can’t see?

Burgel: Well, that train, it’s what they call a Chicago train and the reverse is also true. They run a train from Chicago into Portland as well, but we’ll talk about the eastbound. But basically, a container ship will call on Seattle, Tacoma, and based on longshoremen’s schedules they’ll build that, they’ll release the containers off the ship and then the train will get built, and roughly that train will be ready to go about midnight.

Miller: When you say built, you mean attaching car to car to car with the containers on top of it?

Burgel: Correct.

Miller: OK.

Burgel: Right. They’ll get the locomotives. They’ll call the crew on duty, and that train will come down and arrive in Portland. Somewhere between 6 and 10 a.m. each day, and that train will traverse through all the city streets into Portland and basically put itself into different tracks in Brooklyn Yard. At that time, then Union Pacific will call an outbound crew on duty and they’ll take all the business that comes from Northern California, all of Oregon, and Southwest Washington, which has been assembled there in Brooklyn Yard. And they’ll build that into additional cuts of cars and then the outbound train crew will then start to assemble not only the cars that just came on the inbound, but they’ll add them to those two cuts of cars and then that’s how they’ll make that 15,000-foot train.

Miller: And all that can take hours.

Burgel: Yeah, if all goes well… Union Pacific is conscious of the fact that they blocked the crossings. They’re not unaware of that, so they can get that down to 45 minutes if all goes well. But if business is good and it’s going to improve, it can take an hour and a half, and sometimes two. And if there’s a problem with the car, then they have to set that car out, and then that adds to the delay.

Miller: Let’s listen to another voicemail that came in.

Dan King: My name’s Dan King. I work for the city of Portland for Parks and Recreation. This morning I was trying to patrol a park and found that I could not reach it because the route was blocked by a train. I had to do a serious reroute, and this kind of thing happens fairly often when one is trying to work around the northern portion of downtown.

Miller: It seems like – we don’t know what Dan was talking about this morning in terms of the patrol, maybe it was just a routine patrol as opposed to say an emergency response – but how do you think about the safety implications of stopped trains?

Burgel: Again, the railroad’s very much aware when they stop on a crossing. It’s not that they’re ignorant of that. And so they’ll try to expedite the movement of that train off that crossing. These trains are very long and there’s not that many places where they can stop without blocking a crossing. So all told, in the Portland area, there’s about 150 crossings, of which about 50 are what we consider at-grade crossings. And of those 50, some of those could be eliminated, but there’s about 22 essential crossings that the railroads try to avoid blocking.

Miller: We asked folks on Facebook if they regularly get stuck at Portland train crossings for an hour or more. Tarver House said, “Many days of kids being late to school at Winter Haven,” which is in the Brooklyn neighborhood, “and late to pick up after school.” Josh Mitchell wrote, “As somebody who does food delivery via DoorDash, it has a huge impact. One, I can’t cancel for the customer’s sake. Two, I’m literally losing money because my time is what makes me money. And three, the customer now has cold food.” So let’s say that nothing changes. How much of an increase in rail traffic is Union Pacific publicly estimating right now based on what they’ve said?

Burgel: They just recently published, they’re attempting to merge with another railroad back east, and as part of that submittal, that application, they have to predict what likely the impacts are going to be at different yards throughout the United States, and they predict that the Brooklyn area will increase by about 22%. So they see business improving just as a result of the merger.

Miller: Would an increase in train traffic of 22%, I mean, is it fair to say that that would lead to a 22% increase in the number or length of existing delays?

Burgel: Yeah.

Miller: Is it pretty much a 1-to-1 comparison?

Burgel: You could make that, you could make that case, yes.

Miller: So let’s get to some possible solutions. The cheapest one by far is essentially a workaround. Can you describe what’s been called “the escape route”?

Burgel: Yeah, your first caller, Tom, mentioned that if you pull into Southeast 11th in that area, you are trapped. It’s a cul-de-sac, there’s no way out unless, and what happens, Dave, is a lot of motorists, they get fed up after sitting for quite a while. They’ll actually organize a small vigilante group that will organize the backing up of all that traffic, and there’s about 25 cars that can fit into that area between Division and the railroad tracks.

Miller: Even though it’s a one-way street, that’s the way you’re saying, vigilante style, they will realize after 30 minutes or whatever, let’s all try to go the wrong way on this one-way street and then somehow go north or east or west?

Burgel: That’s correct, yes. It’s a circus. Other motorists that are on Division and in that Southeast 11th area are all cooperative at that point because they see the dilemma. The solution that could occur, and it’s something that Union Pacific has endorsed since about 2019, as well as TriMet. TriMet used to run the number 70 bus through there, but they’ve since rerouted that. But it would just use a couple of city-owned lots that you would put in a small bypass lane where you could escape out of that cul-de-sac, going from Southeast 11th over to Southeast 12th, which there won’t be any traffic because the train’s blocking it, and you can escape that way. It’s again, it’s a workaround. It’s a band-aid.

Miller: As Willamette Week pointed out, that would mean that the city would have to forego a couple million dollars in leasing revenue.

Burgel: Well, the lane that we’re talking about would only take a small portion of those two lots and most of those lots could still be continued to be used as is. So we, that’s something that’s on the table and we should take a look at that.

Miller: What do you think has been preventing the city from doing this in the past? I mean, you’re saying that the railroad company likes this idea, that they would have to do nothing. They could continue business as usual and the city would be changing things around a little bit. Why do you think this hasn’t happened yet?

Burgel: Yeah, you’d have to ask the Portland Bureau of Transportation. I’m not sure why they haven’t explored this.

Miller: I want to listen to another voicemail. This is Ron Rasmussen from Vancouver who says that he has a solution:

Ron Rasmussen: The solution is road over rail overpasses. These work very well in Chicago. They’ve even developed a public-private partnership to build these called Create Chicago Regional Environment and Transportation Efficiency, and they’ve built several road over rail overpasses in Chicago, which has a lot of rail traffic. There’s also been several of these built across the river here in Clark County. Three have been built in Clark County. There’s another one in design. That’s soon to be starting construction on 32nd Street at Evergreen Highway in the city of Washougal in Clark County. Also, there’s another federal program available for rail safety improvements available to local governments across the country and the intersections at Southeast 8th Avenue, Southeast 11th and 12th Avenues in Portland between Division and Powell certainly qualify. The deadline for PBOT to apply is coming up quickly. It’s the 8th of June.

Miller: Alright, that’s just a week and a half away. What’s your response to this main point, we should just have crossings where cars can go over the trains?

Burgel: That’s one of the solutions that the PBOT is going to investigate. They’re about to launch a Southeast Portland railroad crossing study and that’s one component of that. But the caller is spot on in terms of, you do have to organize and you do have to plan for years in advance and create a program where you’re gonna knock off one of these overcrossings every couple of years. City of Spokane has done that. The whole Los Angeles basin has got 80 crossings, and they are at great crossing. Snd they’ve got a program. You have to have a program. We started on that, I did a study with Metro back in 2017 and we actually did that, but it hasn’t gone anywhere here in this community.

Miller: The caller there was talking about the availability of some federal money. But first of all, how much money are we talking about, say for an average crossing?

Burgel: That’s a great question, Dave. But we used to figure about $25 million a crossing, but I think with all the inflation, we’re up to maybe $50 to $60 million per crossing now, a great separation.

Miller: And would it be up to the city to come up with that money?

Burgel: Correct, yeah.

Miller: Not the railroad.

Burgel: The railroad will pay a portion of that. They typically pay about 5% of the portion of the roadway that’s on their right of way, so it’s a small percentage, but everything helps.

Miller: What would it take? So both of these that we’ve talked about so far, the kind of U-turn equivalent that’s actually safe and not vigilante style or the sort of above rail crossing, those don’t actually get to the fundamental issue here of these super long intermodal trains being built in the center of what has turned into a much denser city than it was 100 something years ago, when it was a baby city with a new railroad. What would it take to address that fundamental issue in a more effective way?

Burgel: It’s my understanding that it’s also going be a component of the Southeast Portland rail crossing study that PBOT’s going to launch. They’re going to see if there’s alternative places that we could take a look at. Union Pacific merged with Southern Pacific in ’97, and at that time, Union Pacific had an intermodal yard down at Albina yard, and Southern Pacific had this yard in Brooklyn. And so, after a few years, they decided to consolidate operations in Brooklyn. It’s a small yard, but they get a lot out of it. It’s very efficient and I think if any infusions of cash come along internally, that’s where they’ll put them to see if they can’t get more out of that yard.

Miller: We got some more comments on Facebook. CA Fry wrote, “I cross at the tracks on 12th and Clinton probably 6 to 8 times a week, but luckily I’m on my bike and the Powell underpass is not too far away, nor too much of a reroute. The city needs to do a much better job with signage of the reroutes as well as keeping the adjacent elevator clean and in working order. I’ve seen bikes and pedestrians stuck here for forever due to not knowing about the adjacent routes.”

How do you think about signage? And I saw other comments in the Willamette Week article on their website, for example, about people saying, hey, maybe the answer is just have a warning light at Division, preventing people from getting stuck on Southeast 11th to begin with. So all of these are not about changing roads as much as giving motorists or pedestrians or bicyclists a better understanding of what’s happening or what could happen.

Burgel: Yeah, I chaired an ad-hoc committee that was put together by the Central East Side Industrial Council for years, and that was the big push to try to get signage from PBOT that would help motorists, bikers, pedestrians to navigate through this very complex situation, Dave. It didn’t go anywhere. I actually put in handmade signs where motorists that are stuck at Southeast 11th could call the Hosford-Abernethy Neighborhood Association so they could let them know when they got stuck. That lasted about a year. So we’ve been trying at a grassroots level to try to raise attention to this incredibly complex and difficult situation.

Miller: I mean, but even that, so the idea of putting signs to say, hey, if you’re frustrated, you can leave a comment with the neighborhood association, that does make me wonder. You’ve said that Union Pacific is aware of this, and in fact, we know that they are, that we have a statement from them saying that we know it can be frustrating for the community, and we’ve collaborated with TriMet in the city to reduce the issue while we develop longer term strategies. So, obviously they’re aware of it, but do they have any incentive to minimize the disruptions their trains cause in terms of their bottom line?

Burgel: Well, that’s again, any money that goes into a grade separation actually helps their competition, trucking, so to speak. So it kind of works against the railroad to come to the table, but they also understand that grade separations help them. And again, if we were to put grade separation in this quarter, Dave, they would be able to then use these main lines to build trains without really hurting the traveling public.

Miller: They said in that same statement to us this morning, quote, “We committed $90 million in capital investment in Oregon last year, enhancing capacity and fluidity at Brooklyn Yard.” Do you know what they mean by that? I mean, what the money, this $90 million that they say that they committed in capital investment in Oregon last year, what that actually is going to go towards?

Burgel: Yeah, I’m not aware of any particular infrastructure improvements. Now they may have bought additional gantry cranes or something to do internal of the yard. I’m not aware of those.

Miller: Those trains would be for picking up and moving the boxes?

Burgel: Yes, to and from trains, and then trucks bring the containers into the yard, and they are compartmentalized within the yard and then put on the appropriate train. I do know that Union Pacific is extending a lot of sidings between here and where their main line is in Wyoming, so between Idaho and Oregon, they’re extending sidings and making them about 4 miles long so they can meet and pass these long trains.

Miller: We got a comment about the timing of these trains. Leslie Rangel wrote, “Thank you for bringing attention to this. I’ve been stuck too many times to count. A train blocking traffic for 45 minutes during rush hour is ridiculous.” Now, at the very beginning of our conversation, you were talking about ships arriving in Seattle or Tacoma, building trains there, and then coming down between, say, 6 and 10 a.m. How much control does Union Pacific have about when they run their trains and what would prevent them from saying, you know what, since this is going to be such a headache for Portlanders, we’ll have it be at 4 in the morning when we’re more likely to be stopped for an hour than at 9 a.m.?

Burgel: When a company elects to ship a container on a train, it’s usually on a really tight time constraint. Again, these are all the goods that Amazon and all these other expediting type companies bring to your door. So they’re going to be reticent, reluctant to slow a train down.

Miller: I mean, the rejoinder is the people getting stuck behind trains. They also are under tight time constraints, whether they’re delivering food or delivering babies or going to work or whatever. They too have their schedules.

Burgel: Yeah, that’s very true, yeah. What dictates the schedule is basically when the trains are released to Seattle, Tacoma and when they arrive here, and typically the railroad will do, this is an incredibly hot train, a very expedited train, so they do not do anything to slow this train down.

Miller: Let’s listen to another voicemail that came in.

Moira: Hi, this is Moira. I’m from Oregon City. I work in Portland off of Front Avenue, and I almost every day get stuck at the Steel Bridge, with that train crossing there for about anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes early in the morning. I’m down to wait for however long that that operator needs to safely get that train across because of where I work at Metro, I’m right next to the Kinder Morgan fuel tank farm and quite familiar with the sketchiness and how much train traffic is coming through this area and I just wanna avoid an incident like Palestine, Ohio.

So in my opinion, while I’m waiting and watching this train go through is just, gee, how many carts are there on this thing and you know, are they pushing their limit, are they exceeding their limit? And I just feel like the amount of traffic and the type of traffic going through Portland is increasing and also exceeding its hazardous limits. I just hope that we’re following everything safely and that everything can be going through OK.

Miller: So this is important to bring up because it’s not about the slowdown in inner Southeast Portland. This is about hazardous cargo and safety. Can you remind us what happened three years ago in East Palestine, Ohio?

Burgel: That was a situation where a bearing on a wheel burned up and there’s detectors along the tracks and typically in the railroad industry, if you have a bearing that’s about to fail, it’ll fail in about 20 miles. And so the railroad industry has used that somewhat as a standard to put these hot box detectors every 20 miles. In this particular case, the warning, the train went by and it was failing just as it went by one detector and it was below the limits, the threshold, and by the time it got that 20 miles down the stream, it burnt up. And when the engineer was alerted by the detector, he applied the brakes, and that’s when the derailment happened.

Miller: And what did that mean for the town?

Burgel: Well, it was a release of cars on the ground, and a couple of those cars were hazardous material, and they ruptured, yes.

Miller: I want to bring one more voicemail into the conversation. This is Mo Singer near Cascade Locks.

Mo Singer: Where I live, I am regularly blocked in or out by a train to the point that it’s been, sometimes up to three days, usually closer to 20 minutes to 2 hours, but I have missed work appointments, family events. Yes, it’s annoying, but I also have some grace towards the trains, knowing that so much of our goods and freight is brought via train. Trains keep America running, as they say, but I have learned to live with it. It is one of those things that has taught me patience and how to adapt.

Miller: OK, so a little bit of zen there from Mo. What advice do you have for people who are at risk of or actually just are regularly getting stuck behind trains?

Burgel: Well, and if you know that we have a problem crossing, you best avoid it. Again, that would be one thing. To talk to your caller from Cascade Locks, Union Pacific is modifying all the tracks in that area. That’s one area where they’re going to put in a long crossing. So her particular situation may get alleviated, but that’s to be seen. But she should contact the port of Cascade Locks and let them know. But yeah, if you can best avoid chronic at grade crossings such as Naito Parkway, that would be one.

Miller: Bill, thanks very much.

Burgel: All right, thank you, Dave.

Miller: Bill Burgel is a longtime rail industry expert and consultant, longtime member of the Portland Freight Committee.

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