Railroads
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Steam Locomotives Railroads played a vital role in Washington State's logging industry in the early 1900's. These abandoned steam locomotives are located in Snoqualmie, Washington. The first photograph shows the former Canadian Colliers No. 14 steam locomotive, built by Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1898. Canadian Colliers is a Canadian coal mining company. This locomotive hauled trainloads of coal for sixty-two years until it was retired in 1960. The locomotive with the missing front plate was built in 1928 for the Mud Bay Logging Company and was operated around Olympia. In 1941, it was purchased by Weyerhaeuser Timber Company and used near Klamath Falls, Oregon, until 1960.The third locomotive, Union Pacific 529, operated from 1902 to 1965, by the Union Pacific in Idaho and then by the Edwards Hines Lumber Company in Oregon. It weighs over 198,000 lbs. and pulled with a force of 34,000 lbs. All photographs are by the author. |
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Railroad Cars Near the town of Chehalis is a graveyard of sorts for old railroad cars and equipment. Among the passenger cars there are a few special purpose cars as well as a wooden boxcar. In the early days of railroading, boxcars were built with sides made of wood. These were a fire hazard and had a short useful life. Railroads converted to all steel boxcars in the 1960s. Passenger cars were originally built with wood. Stainless steel “Streamliner” cars were introduced in the late 1930s, built by three manufacturers: the Budd Company, Pullman Company, and American Car & Foundry. The Milwaukee Road at one time had tracks that ran from Milwaukee to Seattle. It was purchased by the Soo Line Railroad in 1986. Much of the Milwaukee Road tracks in Washington have been converted into trails. The last four photographs of railroad cars were taken in Elbe. |
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Cascade Snow Shed and Tunnel Shown here are a snow shed and tunnel built by the Northern Pacific Railway near Snoqualmie Pass in the Cascade Mountains. On March 1, 1910, this was the site of the deadliest avalanche in US history, known as the Wellington Disaster. The trains passed through the 2.6-mile-long Cascade tunnel, but again had to stop in Wellington due to multiple avalanches that had buried the tracks ahead. The two trains were stranded here for seven days while the blizzard continued, dumping snow as deep as 17 feet. Around 1 a.m. on March 1, while most people on the trains were sound asleep, the avalanche of super-saturated snow roared down the mountainside and swept both trains and several buildings 150 feet down into the river valley below and buried them under up to 40 feet of heavy wet snow. It took two weeks to clear the tracks. This snow shed was built after the avalanche occurred. The railroad pulled up the tracks and abandoned the snow shed and railroad tunnel in 1929 when a second, lower elevation railroad tunnel was completed. |
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These two locomotives were built in 1948 by ALCO and acquired new by the Atomic Energy Commission. They spent their entire operating lives at the Hanford nuclear reactor site, which was a part of the Manhattan Project during the end of World War II. Also shown is an irradiated-fuel cask car., used for transporting radioactive plutonium. Running on some of the 158 miles of railroad track built for the Hanford Project, a total of 16 railcars carried irradiated plutonium from the production reactors along the Columbia River and brought it to the 212 buildings for interim storage. There the irradiated plutonium was briefly stored to let some isotopes decay. The fuel was then delivered to the processing plants on Hanford’s Central Plateau and ultimately to the Plutonium Finishing Plant, where it was processed into weapons-grade plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons. The Hanford railroad ceased to run in 1997. |
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Wilburton Trestle and Cabooses The Wilburton railway trestle is located in Bellevue, Washington. It is 102 feet high and 975 feet long, making it the longest wooden trestle in the Pacific Northwest. The trestle was built in 1904 as part of the Northern Pacific Railway's Lake Washington Belt Line from Black River Junction to Woodinville. It was later rebuilt four times, in 1913, 1924, 1934, and 1943, due to deterioration of the timber. It was first used by trains to haul locally logged timber to mills and ports and later served as a transportation corridor for airplane fuselages to Boeing’s Renton facility. The trestle carried a single track of a former Northern Pacific Railway branch line that ran approximately 40 miles from Renton to Snohomish. Before the abandonment of the rail line by BNSF, freight trains ran six days a week. Wilburton Trestle saw its last regularly scheduled daily-except-Sunday passenger trains on July 19, 1922. The train service ended during a national railway strike and never resumed. There are several abandoned cabooses to be found in eastern Washington. |
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