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Fire in Tunnel 13!
On November 17, 2003, a fire was spotted in Tunnel 13. This section of track began life as Southern Pacific’s Siskiyou Line in 1887, the worst but quickest to build of three possible routes over the torturous Siskiyou Mountains of Southern Oregon and Northern California. Until SP constructed the Natrone Cutoff in 1926 and shifted all through passenger traffic in 1929, it was part of the main route between Portland, Oregon and San Francisco. |
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| Just north of the Oregon-California border, Tunnel 13 sits forlorn while shippers scramble to find ways around it until repairs are finished. | |
| SP leased the line to Railtex in 1994 who formed the Central Oregon & Pacific (CORP) to operate this trackage. The section from Black Butte, California to Ashland, Oregon was leased while the section from Ashland to Eugene and another from Eugene to the Oregon Coast were sold outright. The line had suffered a lot of neglect prior to CORP because SP had made the run from Black Butte to Klamath Falls to Eugene — the so-called Natrone Cutoff — their main line and UP continues that way. The whole thing looks rather like a large letter “D” with Black Butte at the lower end and Eugene on top. The straight leg is the Siskiyou Line and the curved section is the UP mainline. The fire in Tunnel 13 effectively blocked off the southern end of CORP’s trackage, and UP’s Natrone Cutoff is a pretty expensive shoo-fly around the problem. Restoring the tunnel to service won’t be easy. A section sixty feet in from the north end has collapsed. The fractured granite of the mountain requires timbers and joists as well as sheeting, often covered over with gunnite. An expert tunnel repair firm is going to start work as soon as the smoke and fire hazard is cleared out. Fire investigators want to know what started the fire in heavily creasoted timbers, some of them originals from 1887. A train didn’t start the fire; there hadn’t been one through since Saturday evening, almost two days before. The working hypothesis for now is that transients built a fire to keep warm and let it get away from them. Some of the track will require replacement, and officials from the phone company are concerned about fiber optic lines running through the tunnel. Most of us in the Rogue Valley of Southern Oregon more or less take CORP for granted. We generally don’t know or appreciate that this railroad — which is now a part of RailAmerica — handles around 75 to 80 cars loaded with lumber each week from just two mills, all headed south to the California building markets. Another dozen and a half companies rely on CORP for their shipping needs. Loads of veneer to produce plywood are constantly on the move, often coming up from the south for plywood mills in the valley. That plywood then heads south again to join the loads of studs in producing new housing. Hopefully, the tunnel will be back in service in just a month or so. Meanwhile, loads will travel north to Eugene and then back south again, taking the long way around, or they’ll be put on trucks to further clog the freeway. And this is at a time when snow closures of I-5 over the Siskiyou Pass are common. Until this rail line is reopened, a lot of businesses in Oregon and elsewhere are about to be reminded of how important trains are to our economy. Generally, Americans today don’t pay much attention to railroads — until they break. Forty percent of freight ton-miles in America travel by train, a fact which shouldn’t be taken lightly. For the time being, twenty reliant industries along CORP’s tracks are having to scramble to send and receive their freight some other way. The fire in Tunnel 13 serves as another reminder that the industry we model is critical to our local, state, and national economies. |
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John Sipple, Editor |
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| To respond to this month's Editorial, send comments to: Editorial@modelrailroadnews.com | |
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