From the archives: Westside construction

A while back I started taking PMLR/Orange Line progress pics (posted here and here with SW Lincoln, then I never got around to posting any others but here’s a recent one, quite a change from the tree-lined street it had been):

Looking east from the end of Lincoln

However, I also have a bunch of donated/archived pics of westside rail construction that I don’t think have been published elsewhere, at least not all of them, and I thought readers here might find them interesting:

Portland before westside rail

MAX originally ran from Gresham to downtown, ending at 11th Avenue, which is the terminus just west of the Galleria and Library platforms.

Starred path showing where rail would extend beyond 11th Ave

Area around Kings Hill and Jeld Wen Field (then called Civic Stadium)

Out West

Willow Creek/185th, the original proposed end of the west side line

Willow Creek can function as the end of a line (and many Red Line trains will terminate there to go back into the yard), but then-mayor of Hillsboro Shirley Huffman was a very vocal advocate of extending the line further, which is why the Blue Line runs all the way out to Hillsboro.

Elmonica Yard, 1995. The area around it has gotten more built up since then.

Construction of the Main Street Bridge (and how it looks now)

Al Gore speaking at the opening ceremony

Tunneling the West Hills

The most significant undertaking of the westside expansion was the tunnel. If you take the train to Washington Park (the only stop in the tunnel) and ride the elevator up, you’ll find yourself on the Les AuCoin Plaza. You’ll see a sort of cross-section of the bore with tunnel trivia engraved in one segment. For those of you not following me on Twitter, that’s where the 54,962 cups of coffee consumed by tunnel workers fact came from. For the record, they also wore out 1481 pairs of rubber boots.

This is what the 278-foot tunnel boring machine (affectionately nicknamed “Bore Regard”) looked like. Over the course of the project, the machine wore out 341 cutter discs, each weighing  400lbs, and it averaged through about 80 feet of rock per day, with one day setting a record for progressing through 181 feet of rock. The boring machine was used from the eastern side heading west for about 2 miles in. From the western side heading east for about a mile in, explosives were used. The two sides of the first bore (the one used primarily now for westbound trains) met around 16 months after construction began. The tunnel now used for eastbound trains was faster to complete, taking only about 4 months. At $184 million to build, the tunnels actually came in over budget (for the curious, the entire cost of the 18-mile westside expansion was $963.5 million).

One bore has been concrete-lined, the other is still in progress (126,100 cubic tons of concrete used altogether to line both bores)

Construction near Goose Hollow

West portal as it looks nowadays

Operator view going through the tunnel
(old pic, that cab radio is practically an antique)

Westside construction fun fact, especially for those of you who, like Dr. Jeff, would rather pretend that the tunnel part of your MAX commute doesn’t exist:  TriMet had to move 14 bodies in the cemetery above the tunnel during the tunnel construction project. Tell me I’m not the only person who thinks of this…

#askneil

Thus concludes TriMet General Manager Neil McFarlane’s hour long Twitter chat on the budget. Just for record keeping, I posted the entire thing behind the jump (and apologies to the RSS readers because I don’t know if that will work for you so this is probably ridiculously long).

Edit - Since this was getting a lot of hits, I cleaned up the Twitter chat for readability, deleting a lot of the whitespace & redundant hashtags and resorting it so that top to bottom reads oldest to newest. I’d like to thank the “Find/Replace” and “Sort” functions of Microsoft Excel for making this possible.

The format of this is still a little choppy, so if you prefer, you can also read the chat on Twitter. You shouldn’t need a Twitter account for though sometimes older posts don’t load if you aren’t logged in. All of the chat and other posts tagged with #askneil can be accessed here.

What a difference a few weeks makes

Before is on the left, after is on the right.

Well now that certainly looks different

Not much in the way of commentary, just a series of pictures showing SW Lincoln St before and after the tree-cutting began as part of the Portland-Milwaukie light rail project / Orange Line construction, more or less taken from the same perspectives. As always, click for larger. If anyone really wants to see the full-sized versions I can provide them; I just did a quick and dirty 25% reduction here to match them to the “before” pictures without having obscenely large file sizes.

These next two sets are of that pedestrian path halfway down the street, where I think the platform is going to be:

And these didn’t have matching “before” pictures:

The bushes lining the aforementioned pedestrian path weren’t spared

Click for full-size if you feel like counting the rings

All things considered, “knowledgeable care for trees” is quite the euphemism for the recent work on Lincoln Street…

A last look at Lincoln

It’s only relatively recently that I’ve made a concerted effort to take rail photos (and nowadays it’s usually the result of seeing something and thinking “this would be a good thing to write about”). But I used to just take pictures when I happened to think of it and had a camera with me, and now in retrospect I wish I’d gotten a lot more pictures during past rail construction projects- Interstate, the transit mall, the I-205 tie-in at Gateway, etc. So I figured I’d make it a point to take pictures of Milwaukie/Orange Line related work.

I decided to start with Lincoln Street.

SW Lincoln Street has achieved a certain level of notoriety of late, due to plans to remove 50-60 of the trees lining Lincoln, which is pretty shocking for tree-hugging Portland. John Charles of the Cascade Policy Institute took up this cause recently, which is unsurprising considering CPI’s anti-public transit stance, though admittedly it was a well-executed move for them as they want to drum up opposition to the Orange Line. As an overall rule, we love public transit in Portland so CPI never got much of a following for being against the Orange Line in general, but they rallied quite a bit of support in their opposition to cutting down the trees on Lincoln. Know how to play to your audience, I suppose.

The street was quiet save a few pedestrians when I was out there, so I don’t know if these were CPI signs or if anyone else had protested here

On a personal level, I feel strange agreeing with CPI on something. I mean, I don’t know John Charles, and he doesn’t know me, but I’m pretty sure based on his speeches and writings that we would not get along (e.g. he feels operator benefits are gratuitous; meanwhile as long as my friends and coworkers keep dying from job-related illnesses before the age of 60, I am going to disagree with him that operator health benefits are overly generous.) Still, à la “even a broken clock is right twice a day”, I agree with his apprehension at clearing out all of the trees on Lincoln. No, Lincoln isn’t exactly on par with the Park Blocks, but clearing out 60 trees is still pretty significant. On top of that I still have a hard time reconciling TriMet’s capital project spending when operations and maintenance are taking such severe cuts because of no money, so I’m not personally excited about this particular project.

While walking up and down Lincoln, I made the assumption that trees with a painted white dot and the green/black ties were tagged for removal. One thing that CPI didn’t mention is that TriMet will be replacing some of these trees as part of the rail project. According to the Oregonian, these are all London Plane trees currently on Lincoln, and evidently TriMet wants to avoid a “monoculture of one tree species” when replacing them.  The Oregonian lists the new varieties of trees that were selected and provided a statement from TriMet as to why those new varieties were chosen (including that they are drought resistant… was that really a concern for Portland?) Personally, at no point have I ever thought that Lincoln would be better if only the trees were more varied, but then again, I’m no arborist.

Even though the London Plane trees are going to be replaced, I doubt the new Lincoln Street is going to have the same leafy overhang of the current one. Leaves and rail are not friends, so intentionally planting trees that will drop their leaves directly in the ROW isn’t going to work, and I’m assuming that’s been taken into consideration.

Picture of streetcar tracks from last fall, being cleaned of leaf debris

From an operational perspective, I think a bigger concern than making sure the trees are drought resistant is planning how to mitigate the slippery rail/leaf problem. I admit I haven’t gone to any of the open houses or public meetings so I don’t know if it has come up, or if by design the trees will overhang just sidewalks or bike paths and be clear of the ROW altogether. This just sticks out to me as a safety hazard since leaves can potentially impair a train’s braking ability, lift a train’s wheel out of the track, or form an insulating barrier in the rail that can make the train become undetected in that circuit.

Borrowed photo – Lincoln Street is apparently going to have track like this

On a related note, I’m interested to see how the vegetated track is going to play out. I don’t think these are very common in the US – all of the pictures I can find are European. It looks like girder rail running through there in several of the linked pictures (as opposed to something like the embedded t-rail on Interstate), which I think is interesting – I would have guessed that surrounding girder rail with grass/leaves would make it more likely to fill the groove in the rail with debris, such as when cutting the grass. I’m assuming that Lincoln is going to have girder rail since that’s what’s used in downtown and other low-speed areas (it’s cheaper than t-rail and generally effective for low speeds) so I’m curious to see how this is going to work. And I really, really hope people don’t take the grassy track as an invitation to walk on it…

Anyway, back to Lincoln… I noticed a couple of things that seemed strange – first was this pedestrian path and the trees that were marked for removal back here. I’m assuming this is where the platform is going to be. I can’t figure any other reason why trees situated fairly far back from Lincoln would be cleared out, or why the pavement is marked the way it is.

The other thing was how the pavement here in this pedestrian path off of SW 4th just south of SW College was also marked up. I guess this is where the ROW is going to go from the Jackson turnaround? If that’s the case, I’m not sure of the path it’s going to take because there’s not a lot of space between buildings at the eastern end of this path, and it didn’t look like the trees near where this joins Lincoln were slated for removal.

Anyway, I wasn’t really going anywhere in particular with this post, just documenting some pictures of Lincoln pre-construction. If I have time on my days off I’d like to add some during-construction and completion pictures.

SW Lincoln Street, mid-September 2011

What a cool quarter million will get you

I’ll be honest, I waffled on making a post like this, because I don’t view MAX FAQs as my personal blog. It was never my intent to use this site to write about personal things in my life that have nothing to do with rail, because non-rail topics and personal stories aren’t the scope of what I want to cover in here – I think that sort of thing is irrelevant. I want to keep this blog as more of a factual “This is how this or that thing at rail works” and not post personal things unrelated to rail operation.

So when it comes to something that’s totally subjective like art appreciation, I wasn’t sure that was an appropriate topic to write about here since it’s a matter of personal opinion if art is “good.” However, since this involves proposed art for the Park Ave MAX light rail station in Milwaukie, I suppose it technically falls into this blog’s domain. And personally, I don’t know, I’m having a hard time seeing the artistic merit of Uncanny Bambi over here…

I look at that and I see this:

Now you could argue that I’m just too lowbrow to appreciate art, and you might be right. In my defense, I’m not anti-art on rail platforms – I like the feathers at Gateway, the entirety of Washington Park, the Expo gates, etc (though I’m still not sold on the Rockwood Sunrise). I also like the Swedish subway art. But I personally don’t find this sculpture aesthetically pleasing.

Maybe part of my negative reaction comes from spending $250,000 on a giant deer with a human face at the same time that fares are going up and buses are falling apart, and poor Dorothy is out of luck after the bond measure failed. I understand that there was a mandatory art budget for the Orange Line so money is going to be spent on art anyway, but so far the reaction to this particular piece seems overwhelmingly negative – the other proposed pieces aren’t having nearly the same kind of reaction. I guess I just hope that the art budget is ultimately spent on things that people want to see at their platforms.