The Columbia River Gorge is a terrific place to watch and chase trains.   Both sides of the river host major rail lines,  the former Spokane, Portland & Seattle, now BNSF on the Washington side,  and Uncle Pete, the Union Pacific across the pond in Oregon.

It’s also a haven for other outdoors persons, particularly bicyclists.   Oregon’s Interstate 84 frowns on bicyclists, so they flock to Washington’s two-lane State Highway 14.    SH 14 shares the narrow gorge with the railroad involving an array of tunnels as seen above.

The problem:  look as the guard rail at the tunnel entrance,  and you’ll see the roadway has no  room for bikers, or pedestrians.  They compete for space with cars, 18-wheelers in these tight tunnels,  six times in about 15 miles.  At least they are short, averaging 500′ in length, but some have a gradual curve adding to the rise in blood pressure…

To enhance safety, the state installed push-button flashing lights with a sign:  “Bikers Ahead.”  Having navigated this maze several times, I can tell you that nearly no one slows down, so you look back and wait for a pause in the traffic, then pedal like your life depends on it.   It does….!

 But, I’d do it again,  the trains,  river, steep cliffs,  eagles and ospreys,  Mount Hood in the distance, all make it worth it.  That’s the Portland-to-Spokane connection for Amtrak’s Empire Builder.   It left Portland about an hour earlier,  late afternoon.   Usually a whole fleet of freights is soon to follow.  – Gary Ostlund

Credits:  Pix by John Ryan, as seen in TRAINS Magazine,  September 2011

With a westbound freight receding into the horizon, a Santa Fe section crew at Walapai, Arizona, resumes its work, connecting cold rail.   The men have ignited scraps of wood to expand and lengthen the cold steel rail on a rainy December 1977 afternoon.

They have replaced this rail.   If you look closely, this is jointed rail, 39 foot lengths unlike continuous welded rail you would find in mainline operations today.   Why 39′ rather than a nice round number like forty?    Two reasons:    “That’s the way they always were,  but more importantly, they fit nicely on relatively those short forty-foot flat cars of years gone past.”

You can see the outside fishplate and joint at the feet of the worker standing inside the rails holding a long open end wrench.    When the rail expands and the holes line up, his partner will slide in two bolts through a fishplates sandwiching the rail ends. He’ll then place a washer and square-headed nut, whereupon the open-ended long handled wrench will cinch it down tight. 

Those joints provided the clickety-clack that was music in years past whether in coach or Pullman sleeping cars.   Today the welded rail gives a better ride, is safer, quieter, less maintenance intensive, but I still like the clickety.

photo credit:    Dave Stanley as seen in TRAINS 100 Greatest Railroad Photos

Submitted by Gary Ostlund

A detouring Lincoln Service train uses the 5-mph connecting track between Metra’s Rock Island District and the St. Charles Airline on June 16, 2007. The raised bridge in the background has been out of service for about 50 years, but demolishing it is too expensive. Bob Johnston

Beneath a blinding headlight, four locomotives advance stiffly along a tight connecting track as
the rails squeal in protest. A dark figure emerges from a pickup truck waiting in the gathering
darkness, swinging a grip onto the lead unit’s pilot before mounting the steps. Throttling up, the
long train accelerates into the night, leaving its usual route behind for the unobstructed trackage of
another railroad. The “dark figure” was a pilot engineer.

Detours are nearly an everyday experience. Wrecks, scheduled maintenance work,
washouts, mudslides — all of these obstacles may cause trains to detour. Although railroads have
a long history of competition, they decided long ago that it made sense to cooperate in times of
crisis. To provide a contractual framework for such cooperation, the American Railway
Association in 1905 adopted a “Standard Form for Detour Agreement” which railroads could sign
to govern emergency operations over each-others lines.

Under the Detour Agreement, the railroad desiring to detour its trains (called the Foreign
Company) notifies the railroad it wants to use (the Home Company) why it needs to detour, what
part of the Home Company’s lines it wants to use, how many trains it wants to detour, “and such
other information as may be required by the Home Company.” The Home Company has complete
discretion to accept or refuse offered detours. As a practical matter, though, railroads rarely refuse
detour movements, because no carrier ever knows when it will need the favor returned.
The Foreign Company assumes all risks of liability arising out of the detour operations. Its
responsibility is absolute, even if the Home Company is clearly at fault. Another cost a detouring
railroad must pay is the trackage-rights charge imposed by the Home Company. Since 1978, the basic charge in the Detour Agreement has been $9 per train-mile. To that charge, the Home
Company adds the cost of crews, fuel, train and engine supplies, repairs, and locomotives provided
to detoured trains.

There’s one operator that isn’t bound by the Detour Agreement — Amtrak. The passenger
carrier has the right, under the Rail Passenger Service Act and its contracts with the major railroads,
to detour trains for incremental costs, meaning the specific cost of operating the detoured train
without any profit element.

Amtrak is also insulated to some degree from the costs of using railroad crews by the
unusually long crew districts it has established for passenger operations. However, Amtrak still
must use railroad pilots when its crews are not qualified to operate over unaccustomed territory
and rent locomotives when its own units can’t read the host railroad’s cab signals.
This article, originally entitled “When trains must leave home,” appeared in the November 1993 issue. [ The above are excerpts from a much longer array. / Source for example below is from the Northern Pacific Railway Historical Association Mainstreeter, Volume 19, No. l, Winter 2000. GOO ]

Addendum: A Real Life Example (with a lot of disappointed railfans)

From 1956 to 1968 the Northern Pacific Railway hosted what was called “Casey Jones Excursions, ” initially using steam hauled vintage passenger cars in Washington state. The NP was uniquely qualified to do this, in that western Washington was full of branch-lines. These excursions were always on Sundays when traffic on those lines was light or non-existent.

Steam locomotives were being sidelined by the industry-wide conversion to diesel, and adequate passenger cars were sitting idled in coach yards. To say that great times were had by all would be an understatement. These excursions were always sold-out. Labor Day 1965, a fully loaded Casey Jones Excursion was heading across the Cascade Mountains destined to the Ellensburg Rodeo, a popular end-of-summer festival. Ahead of them a freight derailed inside the 2-mile Stampede Pass tunnel shutting down the line. The excursion was sidelined in the small mountain town of Lester. The hamlet found its population increased by one-thousand, to the delight of the village grocer and barkeep. The excursion manager immediately began negotiations with the NP dispatcher for a detour rerouting over the Milwaukee Road’s Snoqualmie Pass line. The verdict was no. A detour would have involved returning half way back down the mountain, and trekking on a foreign-lines “less than stellar branch line” to the Milwaukee main-line over Snoqualmie. Having read the detour agreement policy above, it is understandable. These excursions for the most part, paid for themselves, but the railroad was not going to gamble on the potential costs of a derailment on foreign rails. The railway gracefully refunded
the charter money.

Gary O. Ostlund

From Gary Ostlund

The caption reads: “A steamship passenger’s introduction to the White Pass & Yukon was the view of the train from the ship as she stood on the wharf at Skagway, Alaska The loco seems eager to climb White Pass, portal of legendary Klondike.” This undated scene could be 40s/50s vintage, and is repeated to this day, albiet with Love Boat style liners, and mostly diesel locomotives. (Automobiles help dating old pictures, but none are close or clear enough to assist)

Nudging closer to the dock, this ship is undoubtedly one of the Canadian Pacific Princess liners out of Vancouver, B.C. The tourists will enjoy a scenic ride over the pass to Bennett, maybe on to Carcross or all the way to Whitehorse, Y.T., about 110 miles north.

The 36′ narrow gauge line was built at the height of the Klondike Gold Rush of 98, offering rail service beginning August 1, 1900. During World War II it supported the defense of Alaska and the continental U. S. hauling construction equipment for building the ALCAN Hiway, communications support, and volumes of petroleum. Eventually a pipeline was installed over the pass. The US Army took over operations at that time.

Post WW2 saw this line pioneer cargo containerization. The SS Clifford Rogers called regularly, with containers to be placed on flatcars. These were smaller than what we see double-stacked on today’s RRs. Ore was shipped out of the Y.T. in special containers for smelters in Canada and the U.S.

The line was closed in 1982. A highway had been built over the pass and into Skagway, mines had closed for a variety of reasons. After 6 years, public support and the cruise line industry made for favorable economics and the line is open to Bennett and Carcross, running several “boat” trains as traffic warrants.
Submitted by Gary Ostlund.

Credits: J. Norman Lowe collection, seen in RAILROAD Magazine, February 1973

Steam, Semaphores and blue Sky. Only the
sky is a common occurrence in this day and
age. But in selected locations steam is still there to be ridden, chased and photographed.

Semaphores are a little harder to find. Think New Mexico and a few other select locations.

Semaphores were widely used by
railroads, the most recent installed nearly a
hundred years ago. They were state of the art
in their day, one feature being that even with
the light bulb burned out, the position of the
semaphore provided protection. They are
woefully out of date in this digital age, and are
falling like flies in a freeze.

As a rail-fan I love to have them astride
the tracks. From any angle, even at speed on an adjacent highway you could tell by the horizontal position that a train was occupying the block. Wait for about a minute or less and either you had a train, or the arm went upward indicating the train is moving away. U-turn, and the race is on.

Former Spokane, Portland and Seattle #700 is splitting the blades near Prosser, Washington on October 19th, 1990. What an impressive cloud of steam against that blue sky. The massive Baldwin built 4-8-4 Northern loco was returning from a steam expo in the Yakima Valley.

The Northern Pacific and Great Northern Railways owned the SP&S jointly, and had a bad habit of giving hand-me-down locos to its step-child. But in 1937 the owners let the SP&S buy new locomotives, including three fast passenger Northerns. The #700 was part of that purchase.

The #700 occupies new digs in Portland, Oregon with the other Pacific Northwest 4-8-4 Northern, Daylight #4449 of Southern Pacific heritage. Both locos shared space in Portland’s Oaks Park for years, and they can both be found pulling rail-fan excursions several times a year.

Photo credit: Alan M. Miller, as seen in Classic Trains “Fantastic 4-8-4 Locomotives”, special 2012