The southbound Coast Starlight approaches the Burkhart Street bike and pedestrian crossing on May 18, 2026.
Watching a train go by in close proximity is one of the rewards of riding a bike around Albany. You can stand and watch close to the tracks at pedestrian crossings such as the ones at Burkhart or Pine streets.
Here’s one such experience from Monday, necessarily brief:
As I said in the video, this was Amtrak’s Train 11, the southbound Coast Starlight. This daily train starts in Seattle at 9:55 a.m. and is scheduled to make the trip to Los Angeles in 35 hours and 16 minutes.
In Albany, where it stops for a few minutes, Train 11 is due at 4:14 p.m.
On Monday afternoon, the train passed the Burkhart Street crossing, where I was standing, at 4:21. So it was a few minutes late by the time it stopped at Albany Station. That’s not bad for a long-distance train.
The northbound Coast Starlight is scheduled to leave Los Angeles a little before 10 in each morning. It usually gets to Albany between 1 and 2 p.m. the following day.
With the Amtrak Cascades Service, which runs between Eugene and Vancouver, B.C., Albany Station sees six passenger trains a day, three in each direction. It’s a far cry from 100 years ago, when more than 20 trains a day carried passengers to and from Albany, the aptly named Hub City.
It may be a far cry from days or yore, but it’s something. And who knows how long it will last? Make use of the opportunity, buy a ticket and see the country along the track from the window of a train. (hh)
Before taking a photo like this, make sure no train is in sight in either direction.
My wife & I had the opportunity to take the train from Albany to Arizona a couple months ago. We had a great time riding it. The staff were great and the food on board was actually pretty good. Being able to just watch the beautiful scenery pass by was so nice. If you have the time, it is a great way to travel.
If you look at how the city was positioned, everything—rivers, stagecoaches, highways, and especially the railroads—converged right here like spokes on a wheel.
While the Willamette and Calapooia rivers made Albany an early steamboat center in the 1850s, the real “Hub” status exploded with the arrival of the iron horse.
By 1910, Albany was a massive rail junction. A staggering 28 passenger trains departed daily from the Albany station, branching out in five different directions.
Whether you were heading north to Portland, south to Eugene, west to the coast, or navigating the specialized local lines like the Oregon Electric Railway, you almost always had to pass through Albany to get there.
As transportation shifted from steel rails to pavement, the “Hub” identity stuck because of geography. Albany became the intersection point for major arterial routes:
U.S. Route 99E (the main north-south artery before Interstate 5) cut straight through.
U.S. Route 20 connected the community directly over the Coast Range to Newport or east over the Cascades.
The nickname “The Hub of the Willamette Valley” is still used today by the local commercial clubs and tourism groups because the geographic reality hasn’t changed. From our humble town in the valley, we could not be more perfectly centered:
45 minutes south to Eugene.
25 minutes north to Salem (and just over an hour to Portland).
Squeezed perfectly between the Coast Range and the Cascades.
Essentially, if you were a piece of freight, a bundle of newspapers (like The Peoples Press), or a traveler in 1900, Albany was the turnstile you had to spin through.
It’s a fitting nickname for a town that attracts problem-solvers and fixers—hubs are the things that hold everything else together and keep the wheels turning!
Just now I am back from taking my wife to train eleven, on time. The size of it is impressive, but I doubt it was full. She was smart to find out ahead of time where the likely entrance would be. It was way up front, away from the station house. Why don’t the trains stop where the travelers wait? Thank you for the pictures, Hasso.
H.R. Richner