(The following story by Steve Mayes appeared on the Portland Oregonian website on November 10.)
OREGON CITY — The city’s long and expensive effort to secure passenger rail service is five months behind schedule but will get back on track this month.
The station — across from the End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center — was supposed to open this month but was delayed by financial problems at the state level and confusion about who would pay for track improvements next to the station.
Union Pacific Railroad will make required track repairs by mid-December, and the contractor will then resume work on the partly completed passenger stop, City Engineer Nancy Kraushaar said.
The $1.55 million station should be done early next year, and Amtrak’s Cascades service, which makes two daily round trips between Portland and Eugene, should begin in March, Kraushaar said.
Getting Amtrak to Oregon City has been a drawn-out effort filled with last-minute drama that threatened to scuttle the project.
“It’s really been an uphill-downhill battle,” Mayor Alice Norris said.
State lawmakers, faced with budget problems, cut funding for the trains — about $4.4 million a year — but eventually came up with money to keep them running.
“The day after we let the bids for the station construction, we got the word funding had been pulled, and that started many of my journeys to Salem,” said Norris, who became part of a lobbying effort that rallied legislative support to restore rail funding.
In September, Union Pacific Railroad, which owns the tracks, said Amtrak would have to eliminate one of the Cascades runs because the state had failed to make $15 million in track improvements. The state quickly patched together a financial package and saved the second train.
At the same time, Union Pacific forced the city to halt the station’s construction until $100,000 in track improvements were made. The city had expected Amtrak to pay for the work and dipped into urban renewal money to cover the cost.
The city also is using urban renewal money to pay for the 189-foot-long covered platform and site improvements. Tourism hopes Oregon City will be the least busy of the Willamette Valley’s four train stops, but that could change as the town develops as a tourist destination.
“With a good marketing strategy,” Oregon City should be able to bring in 20,000 passengers the first year, said Robert Krebs, Oregon Department of Transportation intercity passenger rail coordinator.
The Albany station handles 30,000 passengers, compared with 50,000 in Salem and 100,000 in Eugene.
Oregon City will draw travelers from Canby, Wilsonville and Southeast Portland, Krebs said. “This is a south suburban station, and people won’t have to go to downtown Portland to catch the train,” he said.
Eventually, the city wants to relocate a freight storage building used when the city last had train service in the early 1950s. The building, which is a few blocks from the station, will be refurbished and used as a passenger depot. The city does not have money for that part of the project, Norris said.
Although Oregon City’s station is small, having a station at all is a big deal.
Amtrak doesn’t add stops very often, agency spokeswoman Vernae Graham said. The train service will identify the station as “ORC.”
“It’s not unusual that we add station stops, (but) it has to make good solid business sense for us to do it,” Graham said.
The city hopes the station will be a good business decision. City officials expect train service to boost tourism and attract regional and international visitors. The Cascades route connects with Vancouver, B.C.
As mayor, “I’ve probably spent more time on that issue than any other . . . because we think it’s an economic engine for the community,” Norris said. “We don’t want it derailed.”
The train station will be dedicated to former Oregon City Mayor John Williams, who spearheaded the effort to establish Amtrak service.