Oregon Electric Railroad
The Oregon Electric Railway (OER) was an interurban railroad line in the U.S. state of Oregon that linked Portland to Eugene. Service from Portland to Salem, Oregon, began in 1907. The Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway purchased the system in 1910, and extended service to Eugene in 1912. Regular passenger service in the Willamette Valley ended in May 1933. Freight operations continued and the railway survived into the 1990s, ultimately as a Burlington Northern feeder. Operation as an electric railroad ended July 10, 1945.
The tracks run parallel to the main modern Union Pacific line between Portland and Eugene, used for freight and passenger service. The OER line is to the west, closely following the Willamette River. In the 2000s, the line has been under consideration as an alternative for Amtrak's Cascades and Coast Starlight passenger lines. Removing passenger service from the clogged Union Pacific track would improve the timeliness of the trains, permit higher capacity, and allow higher-speed travel, peaking at 110 MPH.
Burlington Northern operated the last freight train on the Portland-Beaverton segment of this mainline on December 31, 1994, in preparation for the construction of Westside MAX, part of the TriMet light rail system.
Read more about Oregon Electric Railroad: Remnants
Famous quotes containing the words oregon, electric and/or railroad:
“When Paul Bunyans loggers roofed an Oregon bunkhouse with shakes, fog was so thick that they shingled forty feet into space before discovering they had passed the last rafter.”
—State of Oregon, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration of the electric chair
hanging like an oasis in his air
of lost connections. . . .”
—Robert Lowell (19171977)
“... no other railroad station in the world manages so mysteriously to cloak with compassion the anguish of departure and the dubious ecstasies of return and arrival. Any waiting room in the world is filled with all this, and I have sat in many of them and accepted it, and I know from deliberate acquaintance that the whole human experience is more bearable at the Gare de Lyon in Paris than anywhere else.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (19081992)