Train buff abandons SH depot, museum idea for another site

Sean C. Morgan

Of The New Era

A Redding, Calif, man has abandoned his effort to restore Sweet Home’s Oregon Electric railroad depot and establish a railroad museum in Sweet Home and has turned his attention to a similar project running from Sherwood to the Spirit Mountain Casino area.

Don Kirk approached Dan Desler, managing trustee for Western States Land Reliance Trust, last year for possible collaboration in the restoration of the depot and the museum.

“Dan Desler thinks that museums that get items donated unexpectedly can make a workable five-year business plan,” Kirk said in an e-mail to The New Era, city manager and owners of the depot, Bob Waibel, Jim Gourley and Ben Dahlenburg. “For the cost of the feasibility study, we could purchase raw land and not need his complex. We actually would enhance his complex and the desirability to visit it by tourists.”

Desler said he told Kirk from the very beginning, that “I need a business plan and some numbers, the financial model that will support the business plan.”

“The guy has good ideas and knows trains,” Desler said, but statistically, museums don’t work financially. They must be supported. “I just want a business plan and economic forecast.

“Even if we have to subsidize it, I’m not opposed to it, but I need to understand what kind of subsidy.”

Desler also has worked with the Wilderness Village committee, which wants to establish a logging museum. In their conversations, he suggested taking the large pieces of equipment and spreading them out along a path inside WSLRT’s Santiam Commons, the commercial portion of a 1,575 unit master plan. That idea could be extended to a railroad museum as well.

The Wilderness Village and Desler have also proposed starting a tourist-type train service between Sweet Home and other mid-valley towns.

In any case, Desler said he wants any museum in which he would be involved to be a “win-win” for the museum that’s already here, East Linn Museum, he said. He does not want to compete with the existing museum.

Desler said that Kirk, who was dealing with family issues as he was planning to move from California to Sweet Home, did not make appointments to meet with him, although Desler recalled canceling one appointment.

Kirk had been looking for a location and building to house the museum, including an old mill property west of Sweet Home.

The owner of a mill site two miles west of town is about to demolish the building there “and will not consider letting us save it,” Kirk said in his e-mail. “Then there’s the former OERY Sweet Home Depot. It needs saving; but I’ve talked to at least 100 people about helping get a lot to move it to. And everyone says they would help, but….”

A month ago, Kirk said, he received a call from State Sen. Gary George, who wants to add a wine train, tourist train, dinner train and historic excursion train to a Portland-Sheridan commuter train project.

A mill owner in Sheridan, with 100 feet of tracks on his property, has offered to work with Kirk to get his museum open and work on other rail projects, he said. After a meeting among participants in Dundee, they convinced him to open the museum there, and he accepted the offer. They have offered funding and help.

“I still wish to see your city’s depot saved,” Kirk wrote. “But, without local support and help getting a location for it, I cannot see it getting saved unless you want it saved to the point that you would allow it to be moved to the museum’s site, which is on another line of the former Oregon Electric Railway in Sheridan.

“I realize that this is a hard decision to make; but, unless a group of Sweet Home residents or business people pop up and seriously work to save the depot, I do not see it ever being saved (in Sweet Home).”

Yamhill County has about 150 people, including city councilmen, county supervisors and business people, involved in helping with tourist planning and making it all work, Kirk said. “I’m sure that if you really want the depot saved and are willing to let it go to Sheridan that the funds will rapidly become available. Once there and restored, you will still be able to visit it and feel proud that you helped see to it that it was saved.

“I wish all of you the best and only wish I could have made restoring the depot and opening the museum happen in Sweet Home.”

The three depot owners will meet later to discuss the fate of the depot, Gourley said. Any interested parties should contact one of them. Gourley can be reached at 367-5517.

The depot remains on property owned by Lester Sales north of the McDonald’s restaurant. It was moved there more than a decade ago to make room for the construction of McDonald’s.

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