The completion of the permanent railroad was now placed in the hands of H. M . McCartney, an engineer of Wide experience who died a few years ago in Los Angeles. The writer had some correspondence with Mr. McCartney in 1915 which elicited details of interest regarding the condition of the railroad at the beginning of 1878 when the latter went to work. The project was to produce a practicable portage railroad which could be operated very cheaply. It was now to be of three foot gauge, the earlier plan for a standard gauge line being abandoned. The whole of the original line of 1858-1862 could then be traced, but its bridges were decayed and useless. The new engineer reported as had Brazee, that "for two miles along this side hill the whole country seems to be moving steadily toward the river like a glacier. It is all broken and full of fissures and unstable looking to the last degree * * *"[1] A slide had even carried away the wagon road for four hundred feet.[2] The grading and bridging were completed under McCartney's direction, except for the inclines to the rievr's edge bt the two ends of the line, shortly before Christmas when the work was suspended to await the return of spring. This new and permanent line cut through the rock bluff east of Bonneville, and through another just east of Eagle Creek, which the original track had gone around, but left the passage of the Tooth Rock on a trestle bridge as at first. During the early stages of the work under McCartney, a map which is a treasured relic of the Union Pacific engineering department, was made by his draftsman. It is embellished with a pen sketch of the anticipated steamboat landing, when passengers would be transferred through a covered wharfboat between the Oregon Steam Navigation Company's steamboat Wide West and a waiting train whose two cars were named "Astoria" and "Lewiston." As a
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Frank B. Gill
