Nostalgia & History > Weyerhaeuser Wednesday, Part 1- more C.G. Heimerdinger slides

Weyerhaeuser and Washington together in the same breath in railfan circles usually means the giant bridge and timber trestle at Rocky Point, Washington, used by the company's logging railroad tributary to their facilities in Longview and subsidiary common carrier Columbia & Cowlitz.  However, the timber giant also had other operations in the state, and in this post we’ll take a look at one of them mostly through the lens of C.G. Heimerdinger Jr.
 
First, some history.  Frederick Weyerhaeuser made a fortune in the white pine timber of the upper Midwest, enough to buy a mansion in St. Paul, Minnesota, next door to the one owned by the “Empire Builder” James J. Hill.  By the end of the 1890s Hill, who then controlled both the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railroads, needed money to further railroad construction, and Weyerhaeuser needed additional timberlands as the timber in the region ran out.  The two worked out a deal in mid-December 1899, $6 an acre for 900,000 acres of NP land grants mostly in western Washington.  Weyerhaeuser assembled a large group of fellow timberman to help finance the deal, and in January 1900 the group incorporated Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, over Frederick’s explicit wishes that his name not be used. 
 
The Weyerhaeuser company could not decide in its first decades whether it wanted to be a timberland manager or lumber manufacturer, and in the end did both.  The “every other section” checkerboard nature of the NP land grants meant the company normally had to log its lands in partnerships with intermingled land owners and did such through a variety of subsidiary companies.  Meanwhile, Weyerhaeuser also bought waterfront property in Everett upon which they built a series of large sawmills and other forest product factories. 
 
In the middle 1920s Weyerhaeuser started laying plans to log its lands south of Tacoma.  Getting the logs to Everett posed a challenge, and the company ended up building a 25-mile long railroad from the South Bay log dump in Henderson Inlet to the logging headquarters camp established at Vail.  Weyerhaeuser built an extensive logging railroad network into the woods to the south and east of Vail, and logs handled up to South Bay would be rafted the ninety miles north up Puget Sound to the Everett mills. 
 
New mills constructed at Everett in the middle 1930s created a demand for more timber volume, and to fill it Weyerhaeuser decided to start logging its lands in southwestern Lewis County.  In 1936 Weyerhaeuser incorporated the Chehalis Western Railroad as an intrastate common carrier, which acquired a half interest in the Vail main line, built a short track connecting it to the Milwaukee Road at Western Junction, negotiated 25 miles of trackage rights over the Milwaukee from there to Chehalis, purchased 10 miles of Milwaukee Road’s abandoned Raymond branch running west from Chehalis, and then built five miles of new track to reach Weyerhaeuser’s Camp McDonald logging headquarters camp.  The first logs from Camp McDonald rolled into the water at South Bay in 1939. 
 
In subsequent years the Chehalis Western negotiated trackage rights over the Northern Pacific’s Raymond branch from Milburn to Dryad Junction, and then another 9.6 or so miles of trackage rights over the still extant parts of Milwaukee’s Raymond branch to reach a sequence of four reloads.  In 1959 the Chehalis Western obtained additional trackage rights over the Northern Pacific from Dryad Junction to Pe Ell, where the company built a new logging headquarters camp that fully replaced Camp McDonald by 1961.
 
The attached map shows the extent of Weyerhaeuser’s operations in the area at the time of CGH’s visit in the early 1970s, though operations west of Dryad had mostly dried up by this point.  Weyerhaeuser had long since abandoned all logging railroad trackage in favor of truck to rail reloads located at Pe Ell and the end of the Vail main line.  The Chehalis Western log trains running out of Pe Ell operated over the lines of four different railroads to reach the South Bay log dump.  In addition to all that traffic the Milwaukee delivered logs from the Morton area to the Vail main line interchange at Skookumchuck just east of Western Junction, and the CWWR also delivered some log traffic bound for the Tacoma export docks to the Burlington Northern.  Four diesels handled all this traffic, Weyerhaeuser’s own Fairbanks-Morse H-10-44 #481; Chehalis Western’s pair of H-10-44s upgrade to 1200 horsepower and numbered 492 and 493; and fairly recently arrived Alco C-415 #684.  Weyerhaeuser used a numbering system on this operation’s diesels of the year they bought the locomotive plus the sequence of purchase- thus the #481 was purchased in 1948 and was the first diesel on the property.
 
We’ll start with a map of the operations, an uncredited shot of the Weyerhaeuser #481 at Vail in May 1963, and an undated Northwest Rail Images slide of the CWWR #493 with one of the water cars converted from a retired steam locomotive tender.  On the map the Vail main line is in light green, Chehalis Western owned trackage is yellow, Chehalis Western trackage rights over the Milwaukee are in orange, and Chehalis Western trackage rights over the Northern Pacific are in dark green, no other rail lines are displayed.  Obvious on the #481 is the bell from Weyerhaeuser’s Shay #2 that the Vail shops mounted on the diesel, complete with the rope bell pull.    
 
To be continued.
 

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Unfortunately I don’t have specific dates or locations for a lot of these images, but I have been able to pin down a few places. 
 
First up we’ll start with two shots of the #492, first passing through Pe Ell.  The train has just come off Chehalis Western’s small amount of trackage just south of the town and is just starting its journey to South Bay.  The Burlington Northern truck in the background clearly dates this photo to sometime in 1970 or later.  The second shot is probably the same train crossing a trestle.  The third shot is the #493 passing under Interstate 5 at Maytown.  The tracks to the right are the start of Milwaukee’s branch to Hoquiam.   The #493 got an almost entirely new nose after colliding with a log truck sometime around 1960, resulting in it having a different profile than the #492. 
 
To be continued. 
 

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Sometime during his visit Charles got a cab ride in the #493 going to South Bay.  In the first view the locomotive is seen doing some switching on the line, and then what appears to be turning on the wye at South Bay.  Charles did not apparently get any views of the South Bay log dump itself, but he did snap a picture of an old log car placed on the end of the wye tail track that was built on trestle pilings over the bay. 
 
To be continued. 
 

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The #493 is seen here in the first image with a train of empty cars somewhere south of South Bay.   Somewhere on the trip the #493 entered a siding to pass the Weyerhaeuser #481, which was holding the main with a train of log loads headed for the dump.
 
To be continued.
 

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We’ll wrap up the look at the Fairbanks-Morse units with three shots, first of the #492 with a loaded log train, then the #492 with loads passing the #493 with empties somewhere on the line, and finally the #492 with a caboose hop.
 
To be continued.
 

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Sometime during his visit Charles got to the Vail headquarters camp, where he found the recently arrived C-415 #684 rolling into camp, coupling onto a caboose, and then shoving it east towards the Vail Reload.

To be continued.

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For this last post we’ll take a quick look at three cabooses used on the line.  First up is the #800, which had been a center cupola car up to the point several large logs fell off a skeleton log car in early 1959.  The Vail shops removed the destroyed half of the carbody and built a new cupola.  The crews then used the half open frame for several purposes, including the water tank and hose reel seen here.  Next up is the caboose #711, which got a half open rebuild similar to the #800, swinging off the Milwaukee Road tracks and entering the Vail main line at Western Junction.  The crew is exchanging greetings with the Milwaukee operator stationed here who gave Chehalis Western trains their clearances for the run to Chehalis.  Visible in the background is the bridge that carried the Vail main line over the Milwaukee Road.   Last up is another Chehalis Western caboose bringing up the rear of a loaded log train.
 
As an addendum, the entire operation was facing major changes shortly after this visit.  The Pe Ell transfer closed by the end of 1975, replaced by a sorting yard at Curtis.  The Chehalis Western suspended operations, replaced by the new Curtis, Milburn & Eastern that took over the CWWR line from Chehalis to Milburn and then rebuilt three miles of the abandoned line to Camp McDonald to reach Curtis.  The CM&E did not get the trackage rights between Chehalis and Western Junction, so Milwaukee assumed handling the Weyerhaeuser traffic between those points.  This arrangement lasted until the Milwaukee Road abandoned its main line to the Pacific in 1980, at which time Weyerhaeuser purchased 140 miles of Milwaukee trackage and resurrected the Chehalis Western name.  The closure of the last of the Everett mills in 1985 led to the abandonment of the Western Junction to South Bay line, after which almost all of the logs the line handled went to the Tacoma export docks.  The rest of the Chehalis Western lasted until 1992 when declining log harvests caused Weyerhaeuser to end operations.  Weyerhaeuser eventually sold much of the railroad to the City of Tacoma.  
 
I’ll give a lot of credit for historical information in this book to two sources, Logging Railroads of Weyerhaeuser’s Vail-McDonald Operation by Frank W. Telewski and Scott Barrett and George S. Long- Timber Statesman by Charles E. Twining.  

This concludes Part 1.  In future parts, timing to be determined, we'll look at some of what Charles shot on other Weyerhaeuser operations.  
 
Thanks for looking!
 
Jeff Moore
Elko, NV      
 

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Magnificent photos and story Jeff.  Thanks for all the work you did in presenting CGH's excellent photography.

That's a tremendous photo collection of those mystery years. Great presentation.

When my family lived in Seattle during the 1960's, we would see the big log floats in Puget Sound ( most likely Weyerhaeuser's South Point to Everett ), or the big smelly plants in Everett and Tacoma, also the car barges and Seaspan wood chip barges. Was able to catch the new Chehalis Western many times in the 80's but never caught a Milwaukee train. At the time the only info was in Pacifc Rail News but eventually figured out the relationship between railroads and log hauling in the area.

Hope you can fill in some of the missing stories about the WAM trains ( Weyerhaeuser and Milwaukee ), there are some collections in RailPicture dot net and other hiding spots across the web.
t4p.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/04/24 09:43 by TCnR.

Love those FMs, thanks for sharing!

Love those FMs!  Thanks for sharing.

Fabulous set of uncommon photos - Great job.
Bob

Thanks Jeff for a very informative post and for sharing more of Charlie's photos.   TomE

Great presentation and look back on daily life on the Chehalis Western & Weyerhaeuser operations.

Rich



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/04/24 09:21 by PasadenaSub.

Superb! I can't wait for the next series!

Also noteworthy that the Bowser product listing of the HO scale version of CM&E 684 uses a C.G. Heimerdinger photo.
t4p.

Many thanks to those who have replied. 

And yeah, I'd heard right around the time Bowser finally officially released the announcement that they had put out a call for C-415 photos.  They were initially using an image of the #684 as it is today on display in Fife in the announcement, I dug out and scanned a couple of CGH's slides and sent those to Bowser along with a note that it never wore the combination of markings on it today while in service and that I hoped they were not designing their model around the contemporary images.  Never did get a response message from Bowser, but they did switch the photo in the announcement over to one of the scans I sent them.  In a lot of ways doing that is what prompted this post as it caused me to take another run through his slides from that operation.  

Thanks again!

Jeff Moore
Elko, NV

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Interesting to hear about the change in photos, hopefully Bowser goes with the actual scheme. I have not been able to visit the new display, or many of the other follow up locations that are on my list so I don't know what the display looks like. The CME scheme is not very dramatic but much preferred over a foobie scheme. If Rapido followed up with a simple WTC yellow for their SP caboose we'd have a number of Weyerhaeuser roads covered.

Regarding the last two of the additional photos, they kind of shook me up as I have a set of photos with a pair of GP38's that is an almost identical location, almost to the tree. The best I can figure this is beyond the Vail shops and along a haul road that shows up on Historic Aerial topo maps back in the day but doesn't show on Google maps. Perhaps the photos will show up next Wednesday. My photos have sat for many years so thanks for shaking them up a little.
t4p.

+ looking at Trainweb photos the 'actual' scheme changed a few times, not a dramatic scheme though.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/04/24 13:22 by TCnR.

It appears from the photos that Charles caught the #684 rolling into Vail from the west, coupling onto a caboose that was sitting in the complex, then shoving it further east to the Vail reload by Reichel Lake.  The Vail-McDonald book has a pretty good map of the reload, and Google Earth has some imagery dated 20 June 1990 showing large log decks and a lot of loaded log cars at the site.  Unfortunately Charles doesn't appear to have ever made it back to the Chehalis Western or CM&E, or if he did he either did not take or preserve any images, so what you've seen here is close to the extent of what I have. 

As for the #684, also attached is what is visible from Google Streetview, there are other images of it on the display stand out there on the internet.  At the time Weyerhaeuser created the CM&E and conveyed the locomotive to it they simply removed the Chehalis Western lettering and replaced it with the CM&E initials, as seen in what is essentially a grab shot John Henderson got of it in Chehalis.  When the Chehalis Western got resurrected they simply painted black stripes over the CM&E lettering, it didn't get the CWWR reporting marks added onto the side of the cab until after the Chehalis Western shut down in 1992.  For whatever reason when repainted prior to being placed on display it got both the Chehalis Western lettering and CWWR reporting marks, also looks like the number might be positioned a bit farther down on the cab than it was while in service.  It'll be interesting to see what Bowser does, hopefully they will get it "right".

Jeff Moore
Elko, NV 

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Thanks for sharing. I'm glad the photographer didn't wait for sunny days. (I suppose there are a lot of cloudy days in the region.) The tail track of a wye on a trestle--that's interesting.

Victor Baird