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.

RAILS TO THE NORTHWEST

Rail lines in the Northwestbegan after the Civil War, though, technically, the first railroad in Oregon dated to 1861.   An earlier mule wagon road around the Cascade Rapids on the Columbia River converted into a broad-gauge railroad by John Brazee’s Oregon Portage Company.  That road used mules for the first year before the first locomotive made its debut – the Oregon Pony – in May 1862.

Before 1862 and for several years after, steamships were the main source of transportation beyond personal wagons and makeshift roads.  The biggest steamship line along the Columbia, the Oregon Steam Navigation Company.  Other small portage lines were bought on the Washington side of the Cascade Rapids or built around the Celilo Falls east of The Dalles – 1863 – allowing the OSN to monopolize transport on the river.

Amidst the Civil War, one of Abraham Lincoln’s goals remained transcontinental rail lines to better weld the country together.  Transcontinental routes dated to 1853-1855 with Secretary of War Jefferson Davis’ reports to Congress on five possible routes across the country.  Southern opposition stymied action upon the routes, obstruction removed with the secession of those states during the war.

The construction of the first such route – one of Lincoln’s 1860 election platform proposals – signed into law first on 1 July 1862.  That act would undergo amendments and additions during the next three years. 

Northern Pacific, an important factor in Kalama’s history, serving as a ferry port across the Columbia River. History remembered at Port exhibits along the river.

LAND GRANTS ANNOINT NEW KINGS

Basically, the act granted companies extensive land grants. Also, the act issued 30-year government bonds in order for railroad construction across the continent.  Rights of way granted included public lands within 100 feet of either side of the track. But additionally, ten square miles also granted for each mile of grade except where railroads crossed rivers or cities.  The additional land grants consisted of alternate sections per mile on each side of the line within ten miles of the road.  That equaled to 6,400 acres (2,600 ha) for each mile constructed.  Government bonds provided capital for the companies.

This act became the basis for the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroads to produce the first transcontinental route from Iowa to California.

Two years later, July 1864, Lincoln signed another act creating the second transcontinental rail line, the Northern Pacific.  This route ran from the west edge of Lake Superior to the Puget Sound.  Work on this route did not go as fast as the central route. It was not until 1870 when work on the route began.  Starting in the east, the line reached Fargo, Dakota Territory in June 1872. The following year, Edwinton (Bismarck) on the Missouri River.

NORTHERN PACIFIC PUSHES OUT FROM KALAMA

From the west, The NP’s Pacific Division work went north from Kalama on the Columbia. Covering for 25 miles by fall and 65 miles to Tenino by November.   Kalama chosen because it was below the ice line on the river. The depth lay about the same seen at the river’s mouth. Finally, Kalama seemed convenient to the Willamette Valley, river steamships could take over upriver from here. 

75% of the stock of OSN purchased by NP in 1871. This served to link the west end of the NP transcontinental line with the hinterlands of Oregon and Washington.

Eventually, NP decided to make Tacoma the western terminus of its transcontinental line.  Scheduled service begins in 1874 between Tacoma and Portland including steamboat runs between Portland and Kalama.  Then the Panic of 1873 emerged with rail construction halting for almost a decade.  NP was forced to reorganize in 1875. To its credit, nearly six hundred miles of rail line and ten million acres of land.  Ownership of the OSN, however, lost.

STUDENT REBELS FROM THE TEACHER

The man behind the OSN was John Ainsworth.  Able to reclaim what he sold, Ainsworth sold out to the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company in 1880. This gave the new company rail lines from Portland to Wallula along the south bank of the Columbia River.  The OR&N eventually became part of the Union Pacific network in 1900, though the line already leased in its entirety since 1896.

ENTER HENRY VILLARD

1879, enter one Henry Villiard.  Villard hailed from Speyer in the Palatinate of Rhineland in Germany.  At the time, Speyer was part of Bavaria.  His father sent him to a semi-military academy in northeastern France and Villard. Raised Ferdinand Heinrich Gustav Hilgard, he emigrated to the US changing his name to avoid repatriation back to Europe.

Villard became a journalist and supporter of the Republican Party. He supported first John Fremont in 1856 and then Lincoln four years later.  During the Civil War, he was a war journalist. Later sent by the Chicago Tribune, he covered the Austro-Prussian War of 1866.  In the late 1860’s he married Helen Frances Garrison. After her husband’s death, she went on to become active in peace groups and the women’s suffrage movement.  With her son, she was a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People – NAACP.

Villard went back to Germany in 1870 for his health.  There became involved with German investors in American railroads.  Returning to the US in 1874, he came to Oregon to oversee German investments in the Oregon & California Railroad. 

He acquired the OSN combining it with the Oregon and San Francisco Steamship Line and the O&C Railroad into the OR&N.  Villard was unable to come to an agreement while the NP continued its extension into Washington. He managed a hostile takeover of the NP becoming president of the NP in September 1881.

SECOND INSOLVENCY

Cost overruns with the NP soon led to a financial insolvency in New York. Villard’s resignation as president of the NP came next in early 1884.  After a short hiatus in Germany, he returned a couple years later with more German capital. He again led the NP, though as a director and not as president, this time around.  The company slipped into insolvency for a second time with the depression of 1893. That was enough for Villard who left the railroad scene for New York.  Enter J.P. Morgan and then James J. Hill in 1896 when he bought controlling interest in the troubled NP railroad.

FERRY TO UNITE NORTHERN PACIFIC TO PORTLAND

Only in 1883, a line between Portland and Goble was built along the west side of the Columbia River.  Enter the railcar ferry Tacoma. The ferry linked the two Northern Pacific lines here at Kalama.

Brought in 57,159 separate pieces from Delaware via Cape Horn. The Tacoma saw life first as an assembled ship in Portland.  338 feet long and 42 feet wide, the ship was the second largest ferry in the world at the time.  Three parallel tracks lay across the length of the ship. enough room for ten passenger cars and trains. For freight trains, there was enough room for twenty cars.  Northern Pacific trains came into either Goble or Kalama with their locomotives disengaging, A shunt engine would then push the cars onto the ferry before both the locomotive and shunt engines boarded on either side. The shunt engine would then push the cars back into the locomotive on the other side and the train would be off. The operation took about twenty minutes.

The Tacoma started in service 17 May 1883 creating an all-rail route between Portland and the Puget Sound.  Ridership soon increased.  Where one passenger car sufficed initially, three more cars soon needed to accommodate the extra passengers.

BRIDGES OVER FERRIES

In 1888, the NP finally completed its transcontinental line.  More importantly for the company, this gave access to vast land grants of timber throughout western Washington.

Eventually, NP purchased in 1902 the remnants of a Union Pacific (now owners of the OR&N) attempt to build a railroad from Portland to Vancouver, Washington and on to the Puget Sound.  The Northern Pacific line from Kalama to Vancouver finished in 1901, became part of the NP line in 1903.  In 1908, the bridges across the Columbia at Vancouver and the Willamette in North Portland completed the all-rail line between Portland and the Puget Sound.

A smaller ferry continued operations for another quarter century, hauling passengers bound to and from Astoria.  Going across the river here meant they did not have to go all the way into Portland before shifting onto another line.

FERRY REINVENTS ITSELF

The bridges meant the end of the line for the noble ferry which plodded across the Columbia for a quarter of a century at Kalama-Goble, but she lived on.  First, in 1909, she ferried rail cars filled with rock quarried near Tenino.  The Tacoma took the rock cars aboard from a point later becoming Longview, transporting them downriver for use on the North Jetty of the Columbia.

A decade on, in 1917, the Milwaukee Railroad bought the Tacoma and towed her to the Puget Sound.  The former ship was knocked down to the hull.  As Barge Number 6, she hauled rail cars across the Sound until near the stroke of midnight as a New Year began – 31 December 1949. She was hit by a freighter trying to avoid a log raft on a snowy, foggy night.  The towboat pulling the barge got her crew of three off safely. The barge, however, with its load of cars sunk in Elliot Bay in Seattle in twenty minutes.  Some of the rail cars were later recovered by salvage workers. Several still lie, with the old ferry-barge at the bottom of the bay.

JAMES J. HILL

Hill entered the rail industry picking up the insolvent St. Paul & Pacific Railroad in 1878. He built that line up from a road worth $728,000 in 1880 to over $25,000,000 five years later. Hill was a hand on manager who was not unknown for surveying rail routes on his own. He was helped by extensive land grants given by the Territory of Minnesota to the predecessor of the St. Paul & Pacific, the Minnesota and St. Cloud Railroad in 1857 – almost 2,460,000 acres – NP’s land grants, by comparison, came to over 70 million acres. Hill used the earlier land grants as collateral to attract capital.

Interestingly, the NP briefly bought the M & St. Cloud in 1870, but like with the OSN, the M & St. Cloud regained independence with the NP bankruptcy of 1873.

In 1889, Hill melded the St. Paul & Pacific – renamed the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railroad – with other lines he owned like the Montana Central, forming the Great Northern Railroad. He also gained title to land grants along the Red River valley, land already taken up by the time the St.P, M&M finished its line to Winnipeg. Instead of upsetting potential customers by uprooting them from their lands in court, Hill relinquished claims in this area. In return, his new GN line gained equal areas of land in any of the States in traversed, from Minnesota to the Puget Sound.

The Great Northern line’s establishment went easier than that of the NP. GN strongly advertised and attracted settlement along its rails. NP had been forced to build rails as fast as it could to gain land needed to solidify shaky finances, rails which necessarily did not support traffic. GN, being mostly landless, waited until lands were settled ensuring traffic on its lines.

onward from the great northern

Hill would later connect the two transcontinental lines he owned or had significant interest in through the Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway in 1909.  That railway acquired the Oregon Electric railway in 1910 from Hill’s Great Northern. Next added, the Oregon Traction Company which owned a route from Portland to Astoria and on to Seaside.  The whole NP, GN and SP&S empire eventually became part of the Burlington Northern network, further morphing into today’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe line – BNSF.

INTERPRETIVE CENTER AT THE PORT OF KALAMA

The Port of Kalama maintains its offices along the Columbia River across from the Port-run marina.  The east end of the building is a small museum devoted to transportation and river matters affecting the port’s history.  One of the main exhibits devotes its attentions to the old rail car ferry.  Photos and a brief explanation of the ferry complement a model of the Tacoma.

The Train

The most dominant exhibit is the O-3 2-8-2 steam train with its tender car sticking out the south side of the building.  This train originally served the Northern Pacific line on dual purpose trains – trains comprised of both freight and passenger cars.  Built in 1917 at the Brooks Works of the American Locomotive Company in Dunkirk, New York, the train, one of nineteen built in September 1917, used coal as fuel.

the sp&s

Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway – originally just Portland & Seattle – began life chartered by James J. Hill in 1905.  The railroad built to connect Portland more directly to the Northern Pacific and Great Northern lines through Spokane. Those lines also owned by Hill.  It was through the SP&S line the Columbia River rail bridge was built at Vancouver in 1908 – as well as bridges over the Columbia Slough and the Willamette River.

The SP&S line went on to include trunk lines. One, the Oregon Electric extended the line to Eugene. Another, the Astoria & Columbia River Railroad connecting Portland to Astoria and Seaside.   Another SP&S trunk line extended south from Wishram over another Columbia River bridge at Celilo.  The line – the Oregon Trunk Railroad – ran south to Bend.  Construction took place at the same time the OR&N was pushing down the same direction from their south Columbia railway at Biggs.  The OR&N purchased in 1898 by the Union Pacific with the Deschutes trunkline operated by the Oregon-Washington Railroad and Navigation Company between 1910 and 1936 as the Deschutes Railroad. 

The two competing national rail lines of Hill and Edward Harriman fought it out on the Deschutes. The Oregon Trunk used the west side of the river and the Deschutes Railroad, the east side.

New construction at the turn of the century commonly utilized subsidiary companies of the big rail parents.  This helped shield the parents from potential financial problems faced in building new railroads.

Number 539

Number 539 joined the SP&S line towards 1944.  She was converted to burn oil rather than coal, more common in Oregon than coal.  The water capacity was reduced by 700 gallons in order to hold 4,357 gallons of oil.  The 2-8-2 trains – known as Mikados or Mikes – were used on the Oregon Trunk and on dual service runs to Wishram.  After 1954, diesel replaced steam on passenger routes and the Mikes were used for only freight services.  In 1957, the company went to all-diesel, and the train was retired after 174,378 miles of service.

Forty years in active service and 55 in retirement.  The train was donated to the City of Vancouver in 1957 where the train stayed on display in the Esther Short Park.  Moving under its own power, the train rolled over movable 33-foot sections of track laid out between the rail tracks of the SP&S to the park on streets.

The train purchase from the city in the 1990’s underwent another move to Battle Ground. Here, the plans for restoring the train for use in Montana came to nothing with many components missing.

TO THE GRAND CANYON AND BACK

2007, enter the Grand Canyon Railroad.  Searching for another 2-8-2 to add to their fleet, the train purchased with the hope of restoration, again.  The same year, the parent company of the GCRR changed and interest dropped with costs.  After a few years, the train on display with a fresh coat of paint outside their platform in Williams, Arizona.

The Port of Kalama wanted a Northern Pacific steam locomotive to display in the new Interpretive Center in 2014.  None of the 20 surviving NP trains available, they purchased No. 539 from the GCRR in late 2019 with the train brought back to Washington early in 2020.  Cosmetics still underway on the old train, but well worth a stop along I-5, especially when visiting the next-door McMenamins Kalama offerings.