Reviving the railroad
Not so many years ago, the Bailey Branch moved hundreds of railcars filled with wood products and agricultural commodities between south Benton County and the rest of the world.
That rail link was broken in 2007 when the two railroads responsible for operating the line — the Union Pacific, which owns the tracks, and the Portland & Western, which leased them — embargoed the branch. The track was badly in need of repairs, they told the U.S. Surface Transportation Board, and freight volumes were too low to justify the cost.
This spring the railroads took steps toward making the temporary shutdown permanent when they petitioned the Surface Transportation Board for permission to abandon the 17.86-mile line, which runs from Greenberry south of Corvallis to Monroe, with a spur from Alpine Junction to Dawson.
But now, just when it looked as though the Union Pacific might rip up the tracks and sell them for scrap, there’s fresh hope of restoring rail service to the southern end of Benton County.
Bob Larson, a railroad buff from Roseburg, put the brakes on the abandonment proceedings June 6 when he made his own filing with the Surface Transportation Board. The document, formally known as a notice of intent to file an offer of financial assistance, is essentially an offer to buy Bailey Branch for its liquidation value.
Larson says he wants to resume hauling freight on the rickety old line while gradually replacing worn-out rails and sleepers. Eventually, he said, he wants to put a steam engine on the line and run passenger excursions to the Hull-Oakes Lumber mill in Dawson. Like the locomotive of his dreams, the historic mill is another steam-powered relic of an earlier age.
“I think that’ll be a nice little tourist attraction,” he said.
The Oregon Transportation Department’s Rail Division has scheduled a meeting in Corvallis this week with former Bailey Branch shippers and interested members of the public to gauge the level of interest in resumed rail service.
The big question now seems to be: Can Larson really pull this off?
Bringing back the OP&E
Bob Larson’s professional background primarily was in radio and TV broadcasting, but he also has some credentials as a railroad man.
In the 1970s, he did some marketing work for the Oregon Pacific & Eastern Railway, which ran a passenger excursion train known as the Blue Goose from Cottage Grove to the Bohemia mining district. That’s when he was bitten by the railroad bug — or, as he put it in an interview with the paper, “I got nailed with train fever.
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He's hoping to get Hull-Oakes back on board as a customer, a deal that could mean 300 carloads a year of wood chips and rough-cut lumber. He also wants to resume service to the dozen or so farms and other agricultural operations that used to rely on
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