A Little Locomotive Lore

By Roberta McKern
For The New Era
We looked at Col. T. Egenton Hogg and his train track dreams last time. As we saw, his expectations of a railroad running from the Yaquina Bay to Ontario with eastward connections ended at a short length of track near a volcanic rock on the Santiam Pass named for him, Hogg Rock.
If we look at the history of railroads in Oregon with Wikipedia we can see many short lines started and ended between the 1860’s and 1960’s. So how did this even start? In the beginning was Locomotive I, a steam engine capable of running on rails at tremendous speeds over 5 to 10 miles an hour at a time when 25 miles an hour was considered lethal for humanity. This first train was developed in England by George Stephenson in 1830 and Queen Victoria took a ride. Locomotive contagion struck Europe and America in particular and railroads proliferated.
Just thirty years later in the United States a transcontinental railroad running east and west was under construction despite the Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln supported its development having worked for a railroad in Illinois, and he actually set the gauge by which railroad tracks would be measured, assuring uniformity and the ability for a train to switch from one track to another.
Stephen Ambrose wrote in his book about the transcontinental juncture made by the Central Pacific from San Francisco and the Union Pacific from Council Bluffs, Iowa, Nothing Like It In the World, published in 2000. Work on the Transcontinental started during the middle of the Civil War in 1863. Such an undertaking might have occurred even earlier, but the South had to secede first because northern interests wanted the railroad line to run above the Mason-Dixon line where slavery was prohibited and the South wanted to run a southern course through Texas on to California allowing the formation of more slave states. As long as southern and northern congressmen canceled each other out the transcontinental line did not receive a go-ahead.
Railroads built already in the North and in the South demonstrated how handy moving troops and material could be. Railroads became of great importance during World Wars I and II in keeping supplies of men and equipment going and in bringing them home again exemplified in the World War II classic Chattanooga Choo-Choo.
Before 1860 a map of America’s railroads shows more in the north than south and how they ended east of the Missouri River which brings us to a little locomotive lore. The railroad in Missouri stopped at St. Joseph with the Missouri River separating St. Joe from Kansas. Kansas wanted a railroad, however, and a clever and ingenious plan was made. In the freezing winter cold when ice covered the river a track was laid tied to telegraph poles (under the rails, we suppose). A small steam locomotive revved up was set to travel on those rails and there must have been doubt if the ice would hold. But the train turned loose, crossed successfully. (I’ve seen this story twice, but details are scanty. Was an engineer on board? Did the train halt in a snow bank?)
The transcontinental railroad and the further contagion of “Locomotive Fever” and the building of interconnecting lines also fed the commercial expansion following the Civil War. Major wars disrupt populations, stir people up and set them on the move. For railroads this means settlement along the tracks where trains can obviously haul people and freight in and haul them out again. As we look around the East Linn Museum we are often aware of how similar its artifacts are to ones seen all across America. Why? Because in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s the time most often represented, mail order catalogs abetted by rail transportation homogenized America.
With this in mind, we’ve looked at a copy of an 1897 Sears Roebuck catalog. On page two where we’re told how to order there is the picture of a train. When we look at freight and express rates on pages 5 and 6 we see lists of cities to which goods are sent. The nearest to us are Portland and Salem. But, thanks to the Southern Pacific Railroad running north and south in the Willamette Valley a closer point could be Halsey and with the addition of connecting lines, Lebanon, Brownsville or Albany on what is now the Albany and Eastern line.
The Sears Roebuck catalog was a household cornucopia for many years. The index lists runs from abdominal corsets to zither hammers. But you could buy the zither, too, listed on page 504 for the low price of $3.70 for one in a cardboard case or up to $11.00 for a concert zither. If a buyer could not find what was wanted, there were other choices, one being an untarnishable silverine pocket watch with a gilded picture of a locomotive and its coal tender on the front reminding us that our time zones were developed so trains from east to west could arrive at the announced hour.
And it wasn’t just goods being moved either. Immigrant trains transported entire families and their possessions. Those companies who had received land grants alongside the railroad tracks to help defray the costs of building the line encouraged the sale and settlement of those acres. Other railroaders saw how having growing populations added income from developing markets.
In 1913 three families we know of left northern Kansas to come to Oregon on an immigrant train. They auctioned off their farm implements and animals, bringing only those felt to be necessary. They had to travel to Kansas City where they rented box cars and bought tickets for the women and children who would ride in the passenger cars while the men and older boys rode with the horses and cows and family belongings in the box cars. The mother of the largest family had filled a wash basket with loaves of freshly baked bread. A hungry offspring could be given a chunk of bread for the time being. One family later lived on Fern Ridge, another at Waterloo. How many families of the East Linn area came this way we cannot say since our interest in emigrant trains exceeds what we’ve so far found out.
For our vicinity, the real importance of having railroad connections came in the early 1930’s when Sweet Home got a depot and a spur line was built to Dollar Camp on the Upper Calapooia. This coincided with the increase in logging in the Cascades. Dollar Camp existed as a reloading point for timber being cut on the Calapooia watershed. Sweet Home, too, rapidly grew as a timber town with sawmills and another reloading point.
Suddenly Sweet Home expanded from having a population in the low hundreds to ten times that size. A lack of city utilities brought the nickname of “Privy City”. As a sign of the times, people moved in not by train, but by traveling in cars and trucks. The mobility of cars and trucks which could go wherever a nearly decent road existed worked against the immobility of train tracks and better roads eroded the reliance on trains. In the meantime, trains still operate among us but many of the old lines have been merged into what’s called a duopoly by Wikipedia made up of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe or BNSF and the Union Pacific. Commuter lines reduce pollution around Portland and other cities and Amtrak comes through offering passenger service to designated points not always where you meant to go.
Yet our link to trains remains rich and varied. Trains have been featured in song and in story. On the dark side, we can imagine wrecks and hold ups and a picture in the East Linn Museum features a train wreck near Albany. Some passengers from our area were aboard. It looks like those and others are gesturing and exclaiming, “Will you look at this?”
The 1897 Sears catalog does not show a toy train. Actually, it doesn’t seem to display toys at all although garden seeds are available. This is not a catalog designed for the frivolity of being read by children. The Sears Roebuck company still exists, but like railroads it is not its old self either. Or maybe like locomotive travel it was always a part of transitions.
There are those of us old enough to recall the whistle of a train crossing a trestle over a small river in the middle of a summer’s night. And there was a time when we trepidaciously walked that trestle in the afternoon, fearing all the while a train would surprise us and cause us to leap for safety, hopefully not into the green river water below.
At Christmas trains serve as icons of a Victorian past when little toy steam locomotives sat on tracks under a well decorated tree and we can still, perhaps, find ornaments depicting those little trains to hang on our tree. Because the two hundredth anniversary of Stephenson’s Locomotive I will soon be upon us, maybe we can all say “Chug, chug, toot, toot, off we go.”
Off the rails, many might think. Happy New Year 2025.