(The following story by Susan Palmer appeared on The Register-Guard website on April 2.)
OAKRIDGE, Ore. — Limited freight train service may resume as soon as Saturday on Union Pacific’s north-south Oregon line if the weather holds as crews rebuild a rail bed scoured away by January’s massive Frazier landslide.
Union Pacific officials declined to guess when full freight and Amtrak travel will return, because of unpredictable weather and a moisture-soaked debris pile.
“Until we’re beyond weather challenges, we’re not going to be (giving) a set date. You will see some train movement in the evening, but the work is far from over,” Union Pacific spokeswoman Zoe Richmond said.
The landslide thundered down Coyote Mountain on Jan. 19, wiping out 1,500 feet of track in one place and another 150 feet farther down the mountain where the railroad switches back on itself.
The slide occurred about 8 miles southeast of Oakridge on Willamette National Forest land. Union Pacific officials estimated that 2.3 million cubic yards of debris and 700 million board feet of timber cut loose from the mountain in the 64-acre slide.
Since then, freight trains — about 15 a day — have detoured either through Bend or as far east as Salt Lake City, while Amtrak canceled its Coast Starlight passenger train service between Seattle and Los Angeles for several weeks before filling the gap with its bus service.
Cleaning up a landslide usually involves taking the rubble from the top of the slide and using it to buttress the bottom, or toe, said Bill Van Trump, assistant vice president of engineering and maintenance for Union Pacific. But the ground was too saturated to be usable, he said.
“It’s not very good for construction. … So we’ve had to move that out and move in good rock to build the railroad grade,” Van Trump said.
Van Trump has been overseeing the cleanup effort, which includes crews that have ranged from 150 to 200 people and 100 machines — back hoes, earth movers, dump trucks, locomotives and rail cars capable of dumping their loads and carting away the mucky mess.
Van Trump estimates that crews have moved 400,000 cubic yards of debris, and figures that they’re a little better than halfway done.
On Monday, under a sunny sky, crews laid the final tracks and will spend the next couple days ballasting them — packing in gravel — Van Trump said.
Mountains of dirt 80 to 90 feet high stand above the tracks and still need to be moved.
Crews will do that work during the day, with rail cars ferrying debris away to a nearby site where the dirt can be stored.
Those locations include sediment fences, berms and filtration systems to keep silt from moving into nearby streams, said Chip Weber, the Willamette forest Middle Fork District ranger.
If the weather holds this week, Van Trump expects freight trains to begin the north-south run by Saturday. Trains currently being routed through Salt Lake City will be the first to return, Richmond said. Running them at night will allow work crews to continue cleanup during the day.
They’ll travel through the slide area at 25 mph, normal track speed at that section of the line because of the curvature of the tracks.
Officials will wait until much more of the cleanup is complete to estimate when train traffic will return to normal. They declined to say just how much the cleanup has cost but confirmed that it has been millions of dollars.