Portland, day 4

Sorry for yet another late post -- that's what happens on vacations, I guess! Anyways, today was a transit day, so be prepared for a very long post that probably has very little of interest to most of you...

I started off the day taking the Green Line in from the Clackamas Town Center (mall) station, a short drive away from my hotel. The first train of the day was a Type 1, the original MAX trains from the 80s, which are an old high-floor style (meaning that they are always coupled with one newer train to provide ADA accessibility, since the original platform wheelchair lifts were removed long ago.

It's always nice zipping by cars stuck in traffic on the freeway! Unfortunately, high-speed facilities are the exception rather than the rule on the MAX, which is very much a cheaply built system, especially compared to Seattle's Link light rail system. That allowed Portland's system to be built out quite quickly, but it's not great for making it competitive with driving (which Link very much is for many trips).

The downtown part of the system looks more like this, with just paint lines delineating the light rail lanes from the rest of the road.

After riding that all the way down to the end, I hopped on the Orange Line down south, and then back north (where it continues through as the yellow line). My first two rides on that line were on the newer Type 4 and 5 trains, built in the late 2000s and 2010s respectively.

One very cool feature of the new cars is that each car only has a cab on one end, with seats in the other end of the car. Unfortunately, TriMet has apparently decided that this design limits operational flexibility too much as they can never operate as one-car trains, and they're going back to a normal design with future orders. But it is quite cool for passengers!

Here's an inside view of one of the Type 5s. The 4s are pretty similar, except the seats in the end face towards the ends instead of towards the center -- much nicer on the window end!

Remember the orange building and the building with the funny roofline we saw from Elk Rock yesterday? I'm pretty sure that's them on the left and right side of the train here.

One nice feature of the Orange Line construction was the new Tilikum Crossing bridge across the Willamette River. It's a cable-stay bridge (the first of its type in the Portland area) and carries light rail, streetcars, buses, bikes, and pedestrians -- pretty much everything except for cars!

The Orange Line also passes under the Marquam (I-5) bridge, allowing this neat view of the tangle of ramps coming off of it.

At the north end of downtown, all four lines (I tend to think of the Yellow/Orange pair as one line) cross the Steel Bridge, a very interesting span that dates back to 1912, and carries mainline rail on the lower deck with light rail and cars/buses on the upper deck.

At the north end of downtown is the Fremont (I-405) Bridge, probably my favorite of the major Portland bridges (and not just because it shares a name with my local bridge back in Seattle!). This is a mix of pictures from northbound and southbound on the Yellow Line.

On my way inbound on the Yellow Line, I was able to get this cool picture, of an Amtrak train heading for the lower deck of the Steel Bridge while a MAX train was heading for the upper deck!

Next up was the red line, which, along with the Blue Line, follow the original MAX path through downtown (the Blue and Yellow/Orange lines take a newer route that opened in 2009). While there aren't technically any mixed-traffic sections, this part feels even more like just running in the street, with just some funky old signs to designate it as a transitway. Also of note, I'm standing at one station here while the train is at another -- there are way more stations on this route than would be built today, which is a large part of why the train is so slow through downtown.

There was some sort of weirdness going on with this train (I had to wait way longer for it than I should have), which meant it was actually full -- the only train I was on that was standing room only! Being uncompetitive with driving means that the MAX never seems to be as busy as Seattle's Link, even with smaller, less frequent trains.

The freeway segments are nice while they last, though!

After a long, frustrating ride (even by MAX standards -- we got held for quite a while due to unspecified "police activity"), we finally made it to the airport. I decided to head in, mostly to use the restroom but also to kill time waiting for the train after the one I was on, since I could tell it was going to be even more full heading back. There isn't much to see outside security, but the landside food court has a nice view (across an inside-security hallway) out towards part of the terminal area.

After taking the Red Line all the way back across downtown, you come to the only true underground section of the MAX network, the Washington Park (Robertson) tunnels, which include the deepest rapid transit station in the US. I could really feel the depth in my ears -- it's kind of painful going in and out of that at 60 miles an hour!

My last transit run for the day was the Westside Express Service (WES), which is Portland's only official commuter rail line, and is basically just a short spur off of the Red/Blue Westside MAX line.

After that, it was time to head back downtown for dinner. Here's an interior shot of one of the Type 3 cars -- the Type 2s are basically the same, just with slightly different seating (still in that awful plum color, though -- one thing that Seattle thankfully didn't copy from Portland!).

Dinner tonight was at Old Town Pizza, a well-known, if a bit touristy, restaurant in, well, Old Town Portland. We always ate there when I came to Portland growing up, so I had to come there sometime on this trip. The food is quite good, but a little overpriced. It's still a nice place, though!

That's it for tonight, but expect more transit to come tomorrow...