Five Portland Fire & Rescue units and six Central Police squad cars were dispatched on Friday, January 23, at 11:17 a.m., to a railroad incident near the intersection of S.E. 12th Avenue and Clinton Street, just north of Powell Boulevard.
At first it was not clear just what that railroad incident was. There was a tentative report of someone having been hit by a train, or possibly there had been a derailment. But 911 Center dispatchers soon provided some clarity: No train had been derailed, this incident was not on the TriMet MAX Light Rail Line, but was on the nearby Union Pacific Railroad tracks, on the northeast corner of the crossing.
When THE BEE arrived, it appeared that a forklift operator had been loading or unloading a flatbed truck in the adjacent Mason’s Supply Company lot, when he mistakenly pulled onto the tracks in the path of an oncoming eastbound Amtrak train. As investigators gathered evidence at the scene of the crash, the smashed forklift was visible on its side, several yards east of the impact area…