which he is today deriving in token of his past labors * * * "[1]
It may be asked, how were the train movements over the Oregon Portage Railroad regulated? There was no telegraph line, and the telephone had not been invented. No mention is found of any passing tracks on the line, but whether there were or not, the presumption is a fair one that the trains were moved by the superintendent's orders received and transmitted by the crews by word of mouth. If engineer Goffe were living we might ask him, but he died in 1916. Colonel Ruckel died on May 23, 1876, in Washington, D. C.[2] Harrison Olmstead is no doubt long since gone, and there is probably no one now living who worked on the Oregon Portage Railroad while it was a real link in the transportation system of the sixties.
At each end of the Railroad were wharfboats, rather than fixed wharves which must have been useless at high water stages unless double decked or built on an incline. A small house for the locomotive, stables for the animals and a barn for the storage of provender, a tool house, maybe, for the repairmen, with the residence of the superintendent probably comprised the structures of the line. Of water stations and fuel stations in the ordinary sense of those terms, for the locomotive, and depots for passenger and freight business, there seem to have been none.
The transportation of freight up the Columbia, involving transfers from steamboat to railroad and railroad to steamboat at the Cascades besides another portage at,The Dalles was at this time beset with annoying losses in transit, and the opportunities for pilferage during the land transfers were great. In this connection the following letter is of interest:
- ↑ Walla Walla Statesman, November. 29, 1862, reprinted in the Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, Volume IV, No. 3, (September, 1903).
- ↑ Portland Daily Oregonian, May 24, 1876.
