(The following story by Bill Bishop appeared on The Register-Guard website on May 30.)
OAKRIDGE, Ore. — Tourists on Amtrak’s famed Coast Starlight run Thursday peered from their coach windows at the site of the most disruptive landslide to strike the Union Pacific Railroad main Oregon line in 40 years.
The line — a West Coast railroad link akin to Interstate-5 for motor traffic — reopened earlier this month after crews worked round-the-clock for 105 days to clear millions of cubic feet of mud that buried 3,000 feet of track in mid-January on the steep, heavily wooded Coyote Mountain, eight miles southeast of oakridge.
Using as many as 30 work trains per day, up to 150 pieces of heavy equipment and 200 workers, the railroad installed a million tons of rock to shore up the mountainside and replace the silty soil that slid away Jan 19.
The slide covered a section of track in mud 30 feet deep. It then split into two slides that continued downhill to cover the track again where it traverses the slope below a hairpin turn.
Railroad officials stood near the new track Thursday, overlooking a mountainside they had rebuilt below a sheer rock wall left bare at the high point of the mudslide, and reflected on the herculean task they had accomplished.
It was a big deal, even for a railroad that operates in 23 Western states with connections among the Gulf Coast, West Coast and Canada.
“This is one of those events. Once in a lifetime,” Union Pacific spokeswoman Zoe Richmond said. “And with all those challenges, there were no injuries.”
Rail crews will work through June to install an electronic fence that will immediately signal any further slide activity. They also will restore forest roads and staging areas to their preslide condition.
Work areas will be seeded and then replanted with trees to meet U.S. Forest Service specifications, said Union Pacific General Director of Construction Dave Orrell, who took over supervision of the effort in early April.
“We could not have accomplished what we did without working with the Forest Service,” Orrell said.
He said crews worked 12-hour shifts seven days a week, except for a break to watch the 2008 Super Bowl.
The restoration work created a mini-boom for Oakridge’s economy, City Administrator Gordon Zimmerman said Thursday. It was all the city could handle, and it came during the usually slow months of winter, he said.
Every motel room in the city was booked. Orrell, who is based at the railroad headquarters in Omaha, said he had to bunk with another company manager in a travel trailer at a campsite. Some motel operators even changed sheets twice a day to accommodate each work shift, Zimmerman said.
Vacant houses and spare bedrooms were rented out. Local restaurants opened early for breakfast and prepared lunches-to-go for months.
“It provided a very healthy kick in the economic pants,” Zimmerman said.
Richmond said the company’s cost for the repair has not been totaled and will be difficult to calculate fully if the expense for rerouting trains through Bend and Salt Lake City are included.
“It’s one of those hidden expenses,” she said. “The bills are still coming in.”