(The Oregonian posted the following article by Fred Leeson on its website on February 6.)
PORTLAND, Ore. — Despite golf course fairways that buffer his Eastmoreland home from Union Pacific railroad tracks, Stephen Bader hears diesel locomotives with thousands of horsepower idling almost any given night.
As a train starts up or comes to a halt, Bader hears the rumbling ripple of steel railroad car hitches banging from one end of a train to the other.
Now in his 11th year as an Eastmoreland resident, Bader, a physician, thinks the train noise has gotten worse in the past couple years. “What they’ve done is extend Brooklyn Yard activity south of where they should,” he said of Union Pacific.
Bader isn’t alone. Residents on both sides of railroad tracks running from Brooklyn Yard to Southeast Tacoma Street say railroad noise has become more pervasive, usually during late night and early morning hours.
Their concerns could rekindle a legal issue that has festered to differing degrees for more than 70 years along a railroad main line alongside McLoughlin Boulevard that splits two Southeast Portland neighborhoods.
The last time the neighbors squared off in court against the railroad — then Southern Pacific — was 1956. They won a U.S. District Court judgment that professed to regulate railroad activity “until the character of Eastmoreland and Westmoreland area as a high-class residential neighborhood has changed.”
Residents on both sides of the line think the railroad is violating the 1956 order. “I think it’s going to wind up in litigation,” said Michael Merchant, a Portland attorney who is chairman of the Eastmoreland Neighborhood Association.
It’s a prospect that the neighborhoods don’t take lightly. “The railroad is a pretty large obstacle to move around,” said Robert Schmidt, president of the Sellwood-Moreland Improvement League.
“They clearly have the resources to out-lawyer us,” said Kevin Downing, a Sellwood-Moreland resident who is chairing a neighbored committee to examine legal options. “But it appears we might be headed toward some kind of legal action.” Downing said his committee hopes to reach a recommendation next spring.
So far, Union Pacific has listened to the neighborhood complaints and made efforts to reduce noise in Brooklyn Yard. But the railroad has remained “adamant” about not changing its operations between the yard and Tacoma Street, Downing said.
The 1956 federal court ruling said the railroad could operate only “main line movement of trains” from approximately one quarter of a mile south of Southeast Reedway Street. Neighbors contend that Union Pacific is parking and idling trains south of the Bybee Boulevard overpass, which is beyond the cutoff point.
Residents also say that railroad operations personnel have admitted violating the ruling and that the railroad’s attorneys doubt its continuing validity.
But when asked to comment for this article, Mike Furtney, a Union Pacific spokesman in San Francisco, said the railroad “is doing our very best to comply” with the 1956 ruling.
“Railroads are inherently somewhat noisy,” he said. “We’ve tried to be very cooperative. We have met many times with the neighborhood and we’re happy to continue meeting with them. But at a certain level, people have to understand there is a certain amount of noise associated with running a railroad.”
As a result of neighborhood concerns, the railroad hired an acoustical engineer to perform sound tests. Furtney said the tests showed that railroad noises were no greater than existing sources, primarily traffic noise from McLoughlin Boulevard.
That conclusion surprised Downing and other residents. “Railroad noises are different,” he said. “They are sudden, short, pronounced and unexpected.” He also said noise on McLoughlin slows during the middle of the night when the train noises become most noticeable.
Downing said residents asked the railroad for time restrictions on nighttime operations. “They completely rejected that,” he said. “They said they couldn’t be competitive if they did that.”
A new option for rail movements between Tacoma Street and the Brooklyn yard opened recently, when a siding track that was disabled for decades was restored to service.
The Oregon Department of Transportation assisted in reconstructing the track, known as the Reed siding, to speed the pace of Amtrak passenger trains using the adjacent Southern Pacific main line.
“Just the fact that that siding is back in use means more activity,” said Claudia Howells, manager of state transportation department’s rail division. “It gives clearance to passenger trains which otherwise could lose up to a half hour right there.”
Terms of the 1956 court order include the same operational limits on the siding as on the two through tracks. “We went through the legal issue very carefully,” Howells said.
If residents take the railroad back to court, it will be for the third time over similar issues.
Residents of the developing Eastmoreland and Westmoreland areas first sued the Oregon & California Railroad in 1924 after the railroad proposed adding several tracks for yard operations. Those suits were dropped in 1929 when Southern Pacific, successor to the O&C, agreed to limits much like those that would resurface in 1956.
Rail activities at Brooklyn yard expanded during World War II, followed by another legal showdown that ran from 1952 to 1956. “It must have been like a heavyweight title fight,” said Merchant, an Eastmoreland resident, who has sorted through a large box of briefs and exhibits from the case.
The litigation featured two of the city’s largest law firms and included testimony from prominent Portlanders in the stylish Eastmoreland area, including a federal bankruptcy judge and presidents of the city’s two largest banks.
The case was decided by a visiting federal judge from Arizona, selected perhaps for reasons of maintaining impartiality. Judge Dave M. Ling was clearly impressed about the value of the neighborhoods and the potential loss of property value if Southern Pacific expanded its yard operations south to Tacoma Street.
In an era when elegant homes sold for $30,000, an appraiser valued homes affected by railroad noise at $20 million.
“The combined area constitutes one of the best residential neighborhoods in the city of Portland, and reasonably may be expected to maintain its status as a high-class residential neighborhood for at least the next 50 years,” Ling wrote.
Now that 50 years have almost passed, the same issues could be headed to court again. “It would be interesting,” mused Merchant, the Eastmoreland chairman, “to get new numbers on the value of the neighborhood.”