Drivers can be stuck anywhere from a few minutes to an hour due to trains crossing at Southeast 11th Avenue and Division Street.

PORTLAND, Ore. — At Southeast 11th Avenue and Division Street, traffic has come to a halt. It happens every day as trains from TriMet and Union Pacific go by.

The Federal Rail Administration says that around 34 trains from both agencies cross this intersection daily.

Drivers and business owners have the biggest complaint against Union Pacific.

"I don't understand why they can't run the trains at night," said David Portash, who was stuck, boxed in and couldn't move as he waited for a train to pass Thursday afternoon. "We're probably going to be here for 30 minutes and it's already been about eight."

Luckily for Portash, this stoppage only lasted eight minutes.

The trains can take as little as eight minutes or as long as an hour. On Wednesday morning, they stopped and didn't move for over an hour.

Vince Patton is the president of the Genealogical Forum of Oregon. Some patrons visiting his library have told him that they've stopped coming down because they don't want to get stuck.

"It's absurd to me that trains are allowed to paralyze part of the city.... It's a one-way street, so people are literally trapped by these trains."

Patton and his board of directors voted to donate $200 to the Albina Rail Relocation Project. The group wants to raise $25,000 to study moving two of Portland's rail yards, Albina and Brooklyn.

Union Pacific acknowledged the complaints that they've received and apologized for the inconvenience. In an email to KGW, a spokesperson said, "The blockage is due to rail traffic going in and out of our Brooklyn Intermodal Yard. We're doing all we can to alleviate the problem, including trying to depart trains from the yard as early in the day as possible to avoid the busiest traffic times."

The email continued, "In addition, for more than a year, UP has worked directly with the City of Portland and TriMet to analyze the flow of trains into and out of our yard there. As a result of that analysis, TriMet has helped invest in new power switches in the yard to improve the flow of trains. We are still in the process of implementing the operating procedures to best utilize the new power switches, and we expect them to reduce, but not eliminate, the amount of time trains are stopped at these crossings."

Patton has a different solution.

"Either make this no longer an at-grade crossing. Either lower the street or raise the street to get over the tracks or move the rail yard to another area," he said.