Trains-to-Trees Project
Above is a close-up of western trillium (Trillium ovatum) in April in a woodland near Eugene.
My house is located some two miles from the downtown Eugene Amtrak Station. Until about 2005, I never really noticed the sound of train horns. But something changed that year and I began hearing them both day and night, and quite loudly. When I inquired, I learned that the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) had recently implemented a new “train horn rule” requiring all trains to blow their horns four times at every intersection with a street or highway, and it had also increased the decibel level required. Aha!
I learned, too, that in recognition of the fact that this rule might cause an unreasonable disruption in communities across the U.S., the FRA also made possible the designation of a Railroad Quiet Zone where, once certain safety requirements were met, train operators would no longer be permitted to blow horns routinely as they passed through.
So I got to work and, along with other community members and City staff, we organized a series of public meetings to publicize and discuss the problem and propose solutions. We learned, for example, that because a community’s “risk profile” for train accidents is based on the average risk of all the intersections in a particular stretch of track, it was possible to completely close a couple of them—thus eliminating accident risk altogether at those intersections—and meet the safety requirements of the FRA for a Quiet Zone. This sounded very doable, so much of the discussion at the public meetings focused on which of the ten intersections in downtown Eugene we citizens would agree to closing completely to auto traffic.
Traffic counts were carried out by City staff, and we discussed which intersections were “redundant” and could possibly be eliminated. Eugene, it turned out, had an unusually high number of railroad/street intersections (ten) in a stretch of only a mile or so. After the public discussions were completed, Eugene’s city council took up the issue. And at a council “work session” on 25 February 2008—which was closed to public comment, but which I attended out of personal interest—I was simply stunned when councilors, despite the support for one or more intersection closures at the public meetings, said that they wouldn’t even consider permanent intersection closures as part of meeting the FRA’s safety requirements.
I didn’t know what to say or do, but I was profoundly disappointed in Eugene’s elected officials who completely dismissed community support for the closures as a way to get a Quiet Zone “for free” from the FRA. Instead, councilors went on record supporting an eventual Quiet Zone, but waiting until funds were available to install what are called “quad gates”—four lowered arms instead of just two—at some of the intersections. In short, the city council chose to seek a Quiet Zone designation that would cost money (which it did not have and still had not acquired five years later) instead of having the Quiet Zone designated at virtually no cost by simply closing two or three of the redundant intersections.
Meanwhile, I took the time to spend two twelve-hour sessions sitting atop Skinner Butte in downtown Eugene, and recording on paper the number of horn blasts that shatter our community every day, and can be heard in some instances (e.g., in the hillier parts of town) for distances of two or more miles from the tracks. Each train blasts its horn four times—two longs, a short, and a long—at each of the ten Eugene intersections, for a minimum of 40 blasts per train. At an average of 25 trains per day, that makes, yes, one thousand outrageously loud blasts daily.
While I was sitting atop the butte recording horn blasts, I began to consider other ways the noise problem—and several other problems caused by trains passing through the heart of our community—might be solved. I knew, of course, that trains pass through many American cities in trenches or completely underground so intersections with streets are completely eliminated. And as recently as 2005, Reno, Nevada had finally placed its train tracks in a trench.
The designer in me played with several options, and I finally settled on the one attached here. Eugeneans have responded favorably to my proposal, but they roll their eyes at what a public works project of this magnitude might cost. But Reno did it, and Eugene, too, could find the combination of federal funds and temporary local taxes that Reno did, to accomplish this sooner rather than later. Because every year we put this off—and most people agree that, eventually, the railroad through our increasingly built-up downtown is going to have to be put somewhere else—the more it is going to cost, both in materials and labor as well as in property acquisition to permit what is called “parallel construction” where, during construction of the trench, the railroad continues to operate on a temporary track built parallel to the trench.
During the dedication of the new Federal Building downtown more than a decade ago, its nationally renowned architect looked out across the relatively barren landscape surrounding the new building—including the adjacent railroad tracks—and imagined what the former light-industrial area might look like as it is redeveloped over the next decade or two. One of the essential changes he said must happen along the way is that the railroad must “disappear” underground. Thankfully, he shares my vision for Eugene’s future downtown. Now let’s make it happen.
January 2014 update: No one else has yet picked up the ball to work on this project. Meanwhile, other Oregon communities have acquired railroad Quiet Zones, including Salem, portions of Portland, Columbia City, The Dalles, Pendleton, and the booming metropolis of, yes, Westfir (a tiny community west of Oakridge). Come on, Eugene, time to get on board with the rest of the world and deal with the public health nuisance caused by these train horn blasts!
October 2014 update: A small group of dedicated Quiet Zone proponents has been working diligently this year to get this issue before Eugene's City Council, and it's going to happen! (City Council held a work session on 8 October that included a presentation by City staff about what is involved with getting a Quiet Zone designated; Council will be meeting at a later date--hopefully yet this year--to discuss the proposal in greater depth. We're headed in the right direction...!)
13 October 2014 update: And now, thanks to Eugenean David Caruso—a member of our little working group—we have an on-line petition that you can sign [since taken down] and where additional comments can be made, and these will be available to our city councilors, as well as to the general public. By making your own voice heard, you'll be helping to quiet the train horns! Things are starting to warm up, but we need to keep the heat on.
19 September 2017 update: A year or so ago, the Eugene City Council appointed a working group--that included a variety of "stakeholders" interested in the proposed Railroad Quiet Zone--to come up with a detailed plan, including a proposal for funding the required improvements (or "supplemental safety measures") for getting our Quiet Zone. The working group concluded, in a letter to City Council, that Eugene's Quiet Zone would be best funded by including it in an upsoming Public Works bond measure to improve Eugene streets. Alas, when the text for that bond measure was released, it included no funds at all for the Quiet Zone. One city councilor emailed me that "a Quiet Zone simply isn't a priority for most Eugeneans." Wow. Then why did council initially express interest in a Quiet Zone and pull together a group of stakeholders to submit a proposal? What makes people here in Eugene--or our council's apparently very recent perception of them--so different from hundreds of other communities across the U.S. that now have Quiet Zones, and have found the money to pay for them? I'm baffled beyond words.
29 January 2018 update: Well, a railroad quiet zone is back on the front burner, once again, for Eugene's city council. (By now, there are nearly 800 quiet zones in communities across the U.S.!) At two January council meetings, concerned citizens spoke to council in support of the quiet zone, and on 29 January 2018 a letter to the editor appeared in The Register-Guard in support of the quiet zone. It was from two recent visitors to Eugene from Pennsylvania, whose visit was marred by the train horn noise they could hear while staying in and visiting downtown Eugene.
26 March 2018 update: WE DID IT! Exactly one month ago, the Eugene City Council voted to spend the money to install "supplemental safety measures" at all ten of Eugene's downtown railroad crossings, in advance of obtaining a federally designated Railroad Quiet Zone. The end is near, for all the horn blasts Eugene has had to put up with since the Train Horn Rule went into effect in 2005. Yay!
Now we need to get to work on getting the entire train underground as proposed above and in the attached flyer. It's not likely to happen in my lifetime, but it's going to happen sometime. It's just ludicrous to have an at-grade railroad going right through the middle of a downtown. Come on, this is the twenty-first century, folks!
07 April 2020 update: This is the year the construction is to take place that will enable our Railroad Quiet Zone to become a reality. Fingers crossed! There's no sign of any activity yet, but the main construction season here in the Willamette Valley (summer—when the weather is mostly dry) has not yet arrived.
16 November 2020 update: Sometime earlier this year, on the City of Eugene's website, the "project completion date" for Eugene's long awaited Quiet Zone was quietly changed from 2020 to 2021. What happened? It isn't clear. So we get to wait yet another year. If indeed the Quiet Zone finally arrives in late 2021, it will have been SIXTEEN YEARS after the passage of the Train Horn Rule that quiet finally returns to our otherwise fair city. In the meantime, more than one thousand other communities will have accomplished the same feat--in many cases more than a decade before Eugene did--with far less money and far less discussion.
14 June 2021 update: Yet another delay. The formal designation of the Quiet Zone has now been pushed into 2022. As usual, change in Eugene is occurring at a glacial pace, as there are so many "stakeholders" to please.
And now, a comment on the cost of putting the tracks underground. When Reno placed the train tracks into an open trench a decade or so ago, I was informed that the project's cost was approximately $250 million. That included a lot of right-of-way acquisition due to downtown Reno being much more built-up along the tracks than Eugene is. With every year that passes, a large public works project like this becomes more expensive—and not just because of the cost of right-of-way acquisition. But look where we're spending "transportation money" in the meantime. Over the past decade, well over $100 million was spent on "upgrading" a single interchange in Eugene, where Interstate 5 and Beltline intersect. More than $100 million, largely to make it a little easier for people in privately owned automobiles to get around. Multiply the cost of that one project by all of the car-oriented projects completed in our community over the past decade, and it's clear that the funds for transportation improvements are definitely there; it's just that most of those funds in the U.S. are spent on airports and cars, not on moving people and freight more efficiently by train, as we see in most other western democracies.
09 August 2023 update: And yet MORE delays! This is absolutely ridiculous. I'm told that the City of Eugene is still negotiating with the State of Oregon Department of Transportation and with Union Pacific, over who will pay for the ongoing maintenance of the "supplemental safety measures" that will be installed (e.g., new "quad-gates" at crossings and new concrete medians). But this hasn't been a major impediment for other Oregon cities which long ago implemented their own quiet zones. So much dithering! Can you tell that I’m more than a little frustrated and disappointed with these interminable delays?
07 December 2023 update: Now we're told that "progress is being made" and that documents could be finalized in 2024 which would push construction until 2025. I'm now 71-1/2 years old, and hoping-hoping-hoping that I'll still be around when the Quiet Zone is finally implemented. Watching "change" in this community occur at such a glacial pace is not easy. (As of October 2022 there were 985 Railroad Quiet Zones across 44 states, including 16 in Oregon, 92 in Wisconsin, 84 in Minnesota, and 181 in Texas!)
(This page updated 13 January 2024.)