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Portland & Western’s American Turn heads north at Harvest Drive, just south of Albany, Ore., on December 8, 2009. The tracks are former Oregon Electric. PHOTO BY SCOTT LOTHES


Oregon’s Branchline Empire


IT WAS EDEN — or at least that is how 19th century boosters sold the Willamette Valley to potential emigrants in the East. Located one mountain range east of the Pacific Coast, this valley was said to be a place where the soil was so fertile that nearly any crop would grow, unaided by fertilizer or irriga- tion or perhaps even the tending of humans. It was the promised place for hundreds and thousands of families who, in the 1840s, set out for new lives in the West, before Califor- nia took its place as the “golden” state. The Pacific Northwest in general and


the Willamette Valley in particular — it’s will-LAM-it, by the way, not willa-MET or willa-MET-tee — have also long been destina- tions for railroad construction. The second transcontinental railroad commissioned by Abraham Lincoln was the Northern Pacific, meant to generally follow the line of Lewis & Clark’s 1804-06 explorations and link Oregon with the nation. Railroad construction in the region began in the 1860s, and by 1887, three separate transcontinental routes served Portland, more than any other Pacific Coast port. Beyond these, there were several upstart lines founded to link this community or that to some long hoped-for connection from the east. Every small-town booster had the belief that the fertile Willamette Valley was so rich, so desirable, it was only natural that more and more transcontinental railroads would want to make it their end goal. In the 1880s, for example, the businessmen of Corvallis, Ore., sought to project a line west to a port on the Pacific Ocean and east over the Cascade Range to an eventual connection with the Chicago & North Western. The valley was once crisscrossed with routes with similar ambitions. Few of these hopeful pikes got beyond


the stage of meandering aspiration. Blame the Southern Pacific. In a fashion typical of its corporate strategy, the SP (by hook or by crook) gained control of nearly every potential competitor in western Oregon. Once in control, these would-be trunk lines were


4 MARCH 2016 • RAILFAN.COM


repurposed as feeders of the SP mainline to California. The venerable Espee thus had an almost complete lock on traffic originating and terminating in the valley. This near- monopoly was challenged only by the arrival of James J. Hill’s Oregon Electric interurban route in the years before World War I. For nearly a century after, the valley was like this, a majority SP territory that was thickly crossed by a network of branches. What kept these branches operating was


not, however, the agricultural riches that had first attracted easterners to Oregon, but rather what lay in the hills at the periphery of the valley, one of the greatest stands of timber in the country. Sure, after the 1849 Gold Rush, California became the main destina- tion for those moving west, but those new Californians increasingly built their houses out of lumber harvested in the hills above Corvallis, above McMinnville, above Lebanon — all SP Willamette Valley branch cities. Yet the timber, and the money, did not keep flowing forever. As the 1970s broke, harvests cut back. Partly this was due to increased environmental restrictions, but also it was because of the closure of small town mills in favor of fewer, larger, more efficient facilities. Factor in truck competition, and it was little wonder that by the 1980s the SP was either closing or selling off the branches. Many of these routes ended up in the


hands of shortline conglomerate Genesee & Wyoming, in its Willamette & Pacific and (later) Portland & Western Railroads. Smaller, scrappier, and (for better or worse) initially non-union, these new operators worked harder for the business than the SP had. On page 28, Scott Lothes shows us the kind of railroad G&W built out of these old routes, a branchline empire that has slowed, even if it hasn’t stopped, the steady decline which began so many years ago.


Consulting Editor Alexander B. Craghead is a transportation historian, photographer, artist, and author.


ASSOCIATE EDITOR/ART DIRECTOR OTTO M. VONDRAK OTTO@RAILFAN.COM


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