Light rail gives tower second life

Former Union Station control center will be rehabbed for new use

By Jennifer Anderson

The Portland Tribune, Aug 7, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (2 Reader comments)

Sarah Toor / P0RTLAND TRIBUNE

Rick Sanders spent 22 years working in the former Portland Union Station tower before it closed. He is happy it will be used again to support a rail line.

For the past 10 years, the old control tower at Portland Union Station has sat gutted and neglected, a dinosaur in the age of modern technology.

But now the tower’s about to get a second life as TriMet prepares to take it over, restore it, and use it as a signal and communications booth for the new bus mall light-rail line.

That’s pretty cool to Rick Sanders, who spent 22 years at the controls of the tower before it closed in 1997. Much of the work is still ingrained in his mind.

“To depart the depot from Track 13 toward the bridge with the current of traffic,” he said, “you needed to pull the 22, 8, 34 and 19 switches, and I believe the signal was No. 49. To leave the depot against the current of traffic you did not use the 19/20 crossover switches.”

At first, he said, work at the tower was nonstop action — and full of railroad culture. After all, he worked alongside the hobos, drunks and railroad buffs — “foamers,” he calls them — who frequented the tracks.

“Literally, some of them foam at the mouth,” joked Sanders, now 50. “I used to hate it when the steam trains came in. Some of them bring their kids, have nine cameras hanging on their neck and as they take pictures, their kids are wandering away.”

From 1975 to 1997, it was Sanders’ job to man the tower, a two-story, red-brick building decorated with white crosses on top that stands at the corner of Northwest Fourth Avenue and Hoyt Street.

He and the tower’s four other operators, who worked shifts around the clock, had control of most of the 23 tracks that lay in the rail yard, part of which now is occupied by condos.

Sanders and his cohorts would spend hours in the tower focused on a control board, switching tracks as needed and relaying train orders to other operators along the Interstate 5 corridor.

In the mid-1980s, however, as the number of trains decreased and rail traffic control moved toward centralization, the pace of Sanders’ work slowed way down.

Soon, fax machines came into fashion and track bulletins were issued electronically, rather than by phone. Decades earlier, the phone had taken place of the Morse code telegraph, just as the telegraph had taken the place of “hoop sticks,” curved metal sticks with train orders attached by string, which a telegrapher held and offered to a conductor as he sped by.

Job lost its luster

In 1997, Sanders finally got notice that his job would be automated. The tower ceased its operations Nov. 5.

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