Chris Parker and Bob Riskie took off early to take the 8:00 AM Brooklyn Roundhouse Tour, a 2005 National Railway Historical Society convention event, leaving me with a morning free before I met Bob to go to the Crooked River Dinner Train. Since Portland had started the Yellow Line trolley from Rose Center to Expo Center, it was perfect timing for a ride, as well as an opportunity to use my new camera, the Nikon One Touch Zoom 90s I bought last night at Lloyd Center. I walked over to the 82nd Street MAX station.
A Red Line trolley en route to the airport at 82nd Street. I walked down to the platform and about a minute later, a Blue Line trolley to Hillsboro arrived to pick me up and took me to Chinatown, where I detrained to make a rail-to- rail connection to the new Expo Line. You can get off at the Rose Quarter station and walk across two streets to the Interstate/Rose Quarter station.
Now I waited at Chinatown. First a Red Line trolley came and went.
Next a Blue Line trolley for Civic Stadium came off the Steel Bridge.
That trolley left, could the one approaching be going to the Expo Line?
Sure enough, here came a Yellow Line trolley which stopped and I boarded. Opened on May 1, 2004, the 5.8 mile MAX extension was four months ahead of schedule and connected North Portland, Portland City Center and Portland State University. The line serves 17 stations; it runs north–south from Expo Center station to PSU South/Southwest 6th and College station, interlining with the Green and Orange lines within the Portland Transit Mall.
The trolley went up the grade to the Steel Bridge then came to the junction of the new line. We turned left onto the middle of North Interstate Avenue as I entered new trackage as the trolley approached the Interstate/Rose Quarter station. We departed, passing the grain elevators with Union Pacific's line to Albina Yard below. Once clear of the elevator, there was a great view of downtown Portland. We curved into the Albania/Mississippi station, ran under the Interstate 405 bridge then had a great view of the south end of the yard.
The route then climbed to get on top of the hill and at Park station, you could detrain and walk to the cliff's edge for a unique vista of Portland. We made a small "S" curve before reaching North Prescott Street station then passed though the neighbourhoods before making our way to the separated north/south platform station at North Killingsworth and continuing along North Interstate Avenue to another separated station at North Portland Boulevard. Our route now ran downgrade by homes and the Kaiser Permanente Offices to North Lombard Transit Center and turned left to our next station at Kenton/North Denver Avenue. After this stop, we left North Interstate Avenue and made our way out on a bridge over Union Pacific's Kenton Line and then Columbia Slough, which provided a great view of the Portland International Raceway to the west. We came back to the ground to the Delta Park/Vanport station and made an "S" curve to the left to our last stop at Expo Center station, where there was another Yellow Line trolley nearly ready to return to Portland.
The trolley that brought me to Expo Center is on the right and the one to return me to Chinatown was on the left.
My return trolley before boarding it. I enjoyed my ride on the Yellow Line and the highlight was again seeing the Union Pacific United Way locomotive at Albina. All too soon, we were crossing the Steel Bridge to Chinatown, where I detrained, then once on the eastbound platform, a Gresham Trolley picked me up and took me to the Lloyd Center stop where I walked over to the NRHS registration room at the Doubletree to buy some passenger railroad timetables. Returning to the Lloyd Center stop, I returned to 82nd Street and the Days Inn there.
Another westbound trolley at 82nd Street. That is Union Pacific's Graham Line that sees a few trains operate over it daily. I returned to my hotel room to wait for Bob to return so we could drive to Bend so he could see his property and I could ride on the Crooked River Dinner Train. Bob and Chris returned at 10:45 AM but Chris decided to stay in Portland.
The Drive to BendBob and I drove east on Interstate 84 heading for Waterfall Drive before Cascade Locks.
Our first stop was Wahkeena Falls, a 242 foot waterfall, which has a more subtle cascading flow than the more famous Multnomah Falls.
Next was Multnomah Falls. Spanning two tiers on basalt cliffs, it is the tallest waterfall in the state of Oregon at 620 feet. The Multnomah Creek Bridge, built in 1914, crosses below the falls, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The land surrounding the falls was developed by Simon Benson in the early-twentieth century, with a pathway, viewing bridge and adjacent lodge being constructed in 1925. The Multnomah Falls Lodge and the surrounding footpaths at the falls were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1981.
Contemporarily, the state of Oregon maintains a switchback trail that ascends to a talus slope 100 feet above the falls and descends to an observation deck that overlooks the falls' edge. The falls drops in two major steps, split into an upper falls of 542 feet and a lower falls of 69 feet, with a gradual nine foot drop in elevation between the two. The two drops are due to a zone of more easily eroded basalt at the base of the upper falls.
The last one on the drive was Horsetail Falls, located on Horsetail Creek. The falls drop over a cut over the columnar basalt cliff within the Oneonta Gorge and the shape of the falls and the rounded rockface over which it flows cause it to resemble a horse's tail.
Oregon Portage 0-4-0T 1 built by Vulcan Iron Works (San Francisco) in 1862. It replaced flat cars originally running on rails and pulled by mules for four-and-a-half miles over iron-reinforced wooden rails. It was for this reason that it became known as the "Oregon Pony". This was the first steam locomotive built on the Pacific Coast and the first to operate in the Pacific Northwest. It was used on the Oregon Portage Railway to take steamboat passengers and goods four-and-a-half miles past the Cascades Rapids on the Columbia River (now drowned by the Bonneville Dam).
For four years, the little Oregon Pony engine moved nearly 200 tons a day between the Cascades and Bonneville, until it was transferred to the The Dalles, where it was put to work on the portage around Celilo Falls. The railway was bought by the Oregon Steam Navigation Company, which sold the engine in 1866, after which it went to San Francisco, where it worked filling and grading the streets in that city. After the locomotive was damaged in a 1904 fire, the owner partially restored it and donated it to the Oregon Historical Society in Portland.
The engine was displayed at the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland and then went into storage at the Albina Railyard. In the 1930s, it was moved to Union Station and then returned to Cascade Locks in 1970. The Port of Cascade Locks funded a restoration in 1981.
It has been preserved in a glass building which makes photography extremely difficult. From here we took the Bridge of the Gods to Highway 14 to Stevenson.
We stopped at the Columbia River Gorge Interpretive Center where Spokane, Portland and Seattle F9A 802, ex. Burlington Northern rotary snow plough power unit 972569 1981, exx. Burlington Northern 782 1973, exxx. Burlington Northern 9816 1970, exxxx. Northern Pacific 6704A 1965, nee Northern Pacific 7013D, built by Electro-Motive Division in 1956. While in passenger service, it pulled the Vista Dome North Coast Limited passenger train between Chicago and Seattle. It was retired in 1998 and BNSF donated the empty carbody to the Columbia Gorge Interpretive Center Museum for static display and it was painted and lettered Spokane, Portland and Seattled. However, this railroad did not own any F9As.
We then drove east of Highway 14, with no trains, but stopped for petrol in Bingen, then turned right onto US Highway 197 and crossed the Columbia River into the Dalles. I remembered riding The Dalles Dam Railroad as a child and thought Bob might enjoy it. We went to the Visitor Center, but the train was out of service.
Here is a picture of a picture of The Dalles Dam Railroad. Out of luck, we continued south on US Highway 197 to Maupin.
The Deschutes River Canyon at Maupin which has the BNSF running through it. We would have ridden through this canyon had the Trains Unlimited Tour NRHS Pacific Northwest Express taken the original routing. We continued to drive south to the junction with US Highway 97 and turned right to Madras and had lunch at the Original Burger Works.
The Madras high trestle built in 1910 by the Union Pacific through their Oregon-Washington Railroad & Navigation Company. The Oregon Trunk and O-WR&N separated at Metolius; the Oregon Trunk dropped down through what is now Madras and then passed underneath that bridge, it then followed the river up to South Junction, where the two railroads used a joint line up the east bank of the river to North Junction, where the lines again separated for the rest of the way down the river to the Columbia. Oregon Trunk abandoned their line between Metolius and South Junction in 1923 in favor of trackage rights over the O-WR&N between those two points.
We would have also crossed this trestle on the original TUT routing.
Our next stop was the Crooked River bridge north of Redmond, which, not to sound like a broken record, would have been crossed also. The Oregon Trunk Railway bridge, constructed in 1911, was the first structure to cross this spectacular gorge. Prior to construction, the only crossing of the Crooked River in this region was located about a mile upstream, where the canyon's sheer basalt walls begin tapering gradually into the surrounding landscape.
In the early 1900's, railroad tycoons James J. Hill of the Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway and Edward Harriman of the Union Pacific began a fierce battle to open central Oregon rail traffic. This battle, one of the greatest in railroad history, played out in the courts, where the SP&S triumphed. In the field, however, where night raids, dynamite, gunfire and fistfights were common, neither railroad triumphed. The Oregon Trunk Railway, a subsidiary of the SP&S, ran from Celilo Falls on the Columbia to Bend - James Hill was on hand in Bend on October 5, 1911 to drive a "Golden Spike" celebrating the line's official opening.
From here we drove through Redmond in the worst traffic I had ever driven in a state other than California. We drove through Bend out to south of town where we looked for Bob's property and thought he found it, then returned to Redmond and I took side streets to avoid most of the traffic. North of Redmond, we found the Crooked River Dinner Train parking lot and as soon as I parked, the City of Prineville Railway local arrived.
The train arrived at Prineville Junction.
City of Prineville Railway GP20 989, ex. Milwaukee Road 989, exx. Milwaukee Road GP9 238, nee Milwaukee Road 2388 built by Electro-Motive Division in 1954.
While I was photographing the locomotive, the crossing gates went down and I made it around the train for a BNSF local.
City of Prineville Railway 989 worked their yard.
The locomotive on its way to the BNSF interchange.
989 now proceeded to the front of the Crooked River Dinner Train and in a few minutes, I would board, but that is another story.
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