Nobody noticed when 17 railcars rolled out of a switching yard in southeast Portland and rumbled along two miles of track before coming to a rest on lines sometimes traveled by Amtrak passenger trains.

Carrying 1,900 tons of timber, the cars traveled at about 11 miles per hour past at least 20 public rail crossings, according to a report on the Jan. 23 incident.

The cars came to rest on a curved stretch of tracks, where a surprised Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway crew found them minutes later in the path of their freight train.

"I just went, wow, wow, wow," Richard Wright, Union Pacific's local yard manager, told an investigator later, according to a 340-page transcript of the railroad's internal investigation obtained by The Oregonian and reported in Tuesday editions of the newspaper.

At the heart of the incident lies a relatively new technology being used in railyards nationwide: remotely controlled switch-engines. A remote, as the systems are called, pushes train cars around a site without requiring an engineer in the locomotive, and probably propelled the unmanned railcars out of the Portland railyard in January.

The remotes normally are operated by a crew of two