Nostalgia & History > Chase a train - and go run a train

The date is August 9, 2007.  Looking back in my journal, I was called extra to run a ballast train on Portland & Western's Westside District from Wellsdale to Tonquin on the Oregon Electric District (officially the OE District). When I pulled these out, I didn't really take a look at the date, I just liked the looks of them.  It looks like I took off from home and chased a late-running Westsider north, then doubled back and went to work on the ballast train.  Here are some photos I took that day.

The first two images were taken just north of the town of McCoy, looking across farm fields towards the coast range.  North of Amity, there's a bit of a hill and then the line drops down into Whiteson.  Here's the train coming off that hill, just about to enter Whiteson, jucnction with the branch to Willamina.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/17/24 18:30 by roustabout.

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Last photo of the Westsider is them rolling through Whiteson.  

I then doubled back (I guess, memory is foggy) and went south to where we picked up the ballast train with SD9s 1852 and George Lavacot's 4433.  The first of those with 1852 on the point was taken just outside St Joseph yard limits, almost to the town of Layfayette. The next one is us getting close to Newberg, where a crew has brought the Westsider (may actually be the Mac Switcher crew, but I don't remember) up to Newberg to switch out the paper mill's traffic.  By then, the line over Rex Hill was not in regular use so our trip over that line was rare and may,  in fact, have been one of the last runs over Rex.  But I didn't get any photos of that as I was busy running at a blistering 10 mph or less.

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Great group, Lou,thanks.

Nice scenes, Lou.

Were you around when DLM ran his "Nickel Plate" RSD-5 #324 down the Westside line?  That was definitely an "out-of-this-world" experience.

Greg Stadter
Phoenix, AZ