Signing Off: Portland Says Goodbye to the MAX Type 1
At Holladay Park on a bright Saturday afternoon, Portlanders lined up with Sharpies to send off their first light-rail trains in the only way that felt right.
The train arrived at the corner of NE Holladay and 11th already half-covered in ink. Over the next three hours, people finished the job. By the end of the afternoon, there wasn't a white panel left to sign on car 124 a/b — Portland's last official goodbye to the MAX Type 1.
TriMet billed it as a retirement party, and it mostly was. Orange and blue balloons. A merch tent. A costume contest where the grand prize was, fittingly, a physical piece of the train itself. Kids kneeling on the pavement, drawing little suns and smiley faces next to their names. TriMet Customer Service staff in green high-vis taking each other's photos in front of the cab.
But the tone was softer than a party. If you walked the length of the train and read what people wrote, it came through: this was a thank-you note.
Forty years of a boxy Belgian cousin
The Type 1s opened the MAX system on September 5, 1986, rolling from Gresham into downtown Portland on what's now the Blue Line. TriMet bought 26 of them between 1984 and 1986. They were built by Bombardier, based on a modified Belgian design from BN Constructions Ferroviaires et Métalliques — which is why, parked next to the sleek Siemens cars that make up the rest of TriMet's fleet, a Type 1 looks a little like it wandered in from another continent. Taller. Squarer. More rivets. A face only a transit nerd could love, and many did.
They were also, charmingly, completely analog. The destination displays were cranked by hand. The floors were high enough that stations needed lifts to get riders in mobility devices aboard — a workaround that predated the ADA and the low-floor cars that followed. Somehow, despite all that, the Type 1s carried Portland through four decades of growth: through the Westside extension, the airport line, the opening of the Yellow, Green, and Orange lines. They were the trains a generation of Portlanders learned the word MAX on.
"You trained us well"
The messages on car 124 run the full catalog of farewell — the operator's formal dedication, the plain thank-you, the wry callback, the inevitable pun, the bumper-sticker sign-off:
"It is a great honor for me to be a part of this train's last moment. Loved to operate 124.a.b. — Sany Paek, Operator #7866, 4-18-2026"
"Thanx for the great rides!!! Miss you."
"I never tripped on your steps as much as I missed your MAX trains." — Nik
"You trained us well."
"End of an era." — Shelby
"Arrivederci, MAX Type 1."
"We love you, MAX!"
Farewells in Sharpie, from passengers to a piece of infrastructure. Portland does this kind of thing well.
What happens now
Most of the Type 1 fleet is headed to Radius Recycling, where 1980s light rail steel will get a second life as rebar in Oregon construction projects — which, honestly, is the most Portland ending imaginable: your old train becomes the bones of your new apartment building. One car, #101, was donated last July to the Oregon Electric Railway Museum in Brooks, about 38 miles south on I-5. That's the one you'll be able to visit.
The Type 1 wasn't the prettiest train in the system. It was the boxy one, the tall one, the analog one — the destination sign cranked by hand. The kind of train a lot of people are quietly starting to miss before it's even gone. Saturday, a few hundred Portlanders showed up at Holladay Park to say so.
Photos from the April 18, 2026 farewell event at Holladay Park.
Tim Trautmann
Photos in the archive.