Steam & Excursion > ORHF Holiday Express, some more photos

I didn't see that many posts on the ORHF Holiday Express this year, so I'll post a few also. These are were all shot with a tiny Canon Elph, so nothing fancy here this year. The event has turned out to be a huge success from what I understand, with the vast majority of trains being sold out. The OPR agreed to allow ORHF to operate 3 weekends this year, which should help bring in some additional revenue and we also agreed to allow some additional runs on this up coming final weekend with trains also running at 5pm on Saturday and Sunday.

People are buying tickets and riding like crazy, which is what really counts. It's turned out to be a very pleasant event and the OPR wants to thank ORHF and all of the volunteers for their wonderful cooperation and hard work and for making this event such a success!

The PRPA's SP&S 700 ran the first weekend and I apologize for not have any photos from that weekend. I was barely able to get any from the 2nd weekend, which included the SP 4449 and the 4449 will also operate on this third and final up coming weekend.

Brian McCamish
Oregon Pacific Railroad
http://www.oregonpacificrr.com/

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A few more...

Brian McCamish
Oregon Pacific Railroad
http://www.oregonpacificrr.com/

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Last three...

Brian McCamish
Oregon Pacific Railroad
http://www.oregonpacificrr.com/

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Brian

Your caboose looks great in lights!

Craig

Thanks much!

Brian
OPR

Warm steam in cool fog is the BEST!

Thanks for the report, Brian, and thanks to you and Dick and everyone else on the Oregon Pacific for hosting this great event every year. In my opinion it is one of the best holiday events that families can experience in the Portland area (especially after hearing about the Clackamas Mall disaster). Very glad to hear that the trains are almost all sold out.

I can understand the statement someone made about riding a "gimmickey christmas train" as I too probably wouldn't normally travel 5000 mi round trip to take such a short train ride. But at the same time, how many of these short christmas train rides are pulled by mainline 4-8-4's!? Thats something to brag about for sure. Also another way I look at it is, any such organization as the ORHF probably could use some additional volunteers, so if you have to travel a long distance and want to see these two engines hot and moving, why not join them all weekend and lend a hand? Even if its working the ticket booth or selling hot choclate, you'd still be surrounded by steam all weekend and meet some great new people too. As someone who pays annual membership dues to the 700 group, even though I haven't set foot in Oregon in alomst 2 years, I must say the idea has crossed my mind several times.

The fact that the train rides are selling out like crazy pretty much speak for themselves. The target audience is generally locals who want to take their family and kids on a reasonable and unique train ride. 45 minutes is just about perfect for a family with small children with short attention spans. The nice thing about a short train ride like this is that instead of exposing only a few hundred people to a longer multi-hour ride, they’re exposing literally thousands, tens of thousands, of people to the wonders of riding behind a rare historical steam locomotive of this size. And the more people you expose to these engines, the more potential supporters, revenue and possibility of keeping them around and operating.

If I’m doing the calculations right, there’s gonna be around 15,000 individual people who will ride behind this train, this year over three weekends. That’s an impressive number of people exposed to the mission of ORHF and potential future supporters!

And most importantly, that's in impressive number of people who are gonna enjoy themselves and have a good time and who are gonna experience this historical event in honor of all of those who built, operated and maintained locomotives and railroads like these over the years. In the end, that's what it's all really about.

Brian McCamish
Oregon Pacific Railroad

VERY well said Brian!! and thanks for the photos. Arlen