On the old railbed of the Des Chutes Railroad with the river below.
Type in a query for ‘railroad wars’ and you will find three events under the Wikipedia entry for “railroad wars”. The last event was the “Deschutes Railroad War”. Of the three, this is the shortest entry. The entry focuses on the actual building difficulties of the two Deschutes railroads erected on either side of the river. But to really understand the real reason for the enmity between the competing rail companies, we need to go further back before the 1912 construction of the two lines.
Oregon & California lands given back to the federal government include much of the BLM lands – orange. These were part of the original land grants given to the O&C Rail Road.
Looking at maps showing Federal lands of the West, you quickly notice a checkerboard arrangement incongruously drawn without seeming reason. Certainly, no topographical purpose. You now see the result of the rail land grants – grabs – of the 19th century.
One of Abraham Lincoln’s main planks to his 1860 presidential campaign became realized by the 1862 Pacific Railway Act. This gave Congress the ability to grant land and low-cost loans to railway companies building lines across the West. Lincoln’s goal was a transcontinental line to unite California and the Pacific Coast to the rest of the country.
Union Station in Seattle – originally the Oregon & Washington Railroad Depot.
As rail travel in the western US continues to be a fade from the past, many people have forgotten several cities used to have more than one passenger terminal to use. Some of the multiple rail stations have survived in other guises. Some, simply gone.
Steel Bridge carries trains and pedestrians on the lower deck; light rail and auto traffic use the upper deck.
There are many articles – blog posts or otherwise – and even books about the bridges of Portland, Oregon. Of the twelve bridges along the Willamette River – four more on the Columbia – little space usually covers the Burlington Northern Railroad Bridge 5.1 or the rail portion of the Steel Bridge. If you exclude the new Tilikum Crossing Bridge, which carries light rail tracks and buses, the other rail bridges lack the grace of the St Johns or Fremont Bridges and the traffic of all of the other bridges – maybe the Steel excluded.
A recent post about the rail ferry at Kalama, Washington, some forty-five minutes north of the city, got me thinking about railroads and history. While at first glance, both are reasonably complicated, in the case of the main rail bridges in Portland, like the ferry at Kalama, it all comes down to James J. Hill.
Model of the rail-car ferry Tacoma of the Northern Pacific Railroad at the Port of Kalama Interpretive Center.
For years, Kalama meant the Northern Pacific. Kalama was the beginning of the Northern Pacific push from the west to create a third transcontinental rail line. Northern Pacific also used Kalama as a port for a rail ferry to cross over the Columbia River from.
A recent celebration with friends took us to the large McMenamins Kalama Harbor Lodge. The hotel-brewpub-restaurant complex is a brand-new development made in the appearance of a large Maui plantation. Maybe a bit incongruous along the banks of the Columbia River, the complex always appears popular driving past along I-5 judging from the number of cars in the parking lot.
And while, like with most McMenamins establishments, the Lodge is full of history and art laid out in the McMenamins way, right next door is another large building housing the Port of Kalama. The Port building features a large Interpretive Center on its east side housing several interesting exhibits dealing with issues the Port of Kalama has and does deal with. One of the Kalama themes deals with railroad history – Northern Pacific – and the port.
