Columbia River Express

Caption: “These two former SP&S Alcos are about to become ex BN Alcos, too.  They still look good as they sit at Clyde yard in Cicero, Illinois, awaiting their fate.”

April 20, 1977

Columbia River Gorge

This is the Portland section of Amtrak Empire Builder. It is headed westward along the Columbia River between Lyle and Bingen, Washington. It will make its station stop at the latter.

The line here is the former Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway—later Burlington Northern and now BNSF. The diminutive train, made up of four Superliner cars, is powered by a single, relatively new, Siemens ALC-42 locomotive. The tugboat pushing a barge upriver in the first image is the Sundial, built in 1982.

The Columbia River Gorge is an area super rich in history, including, perhaps most famously, the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The Corps of Discovery would have passed this way in 1805 and returned, after wintering on the coast, in 1806.

Modes of Travel

Here’s an image with two modes of travel evident, along with the river for a barge, though one did not happen by for my photograph.

The westbound train, along the Columbia River, is Amtrak’s Portland section of the Empire Builder. It’s on the former SP&S, now BNSF. In the distance is the Hood River Bridge, between its namesake town in Oregon and Bingen on the Washington side.

The span is quite old: it opened in 1924 but was substantially rebuilt in 1938 to accommodate higher water levels due to the building of the Bonneville Dam downriver (source). Having driven across it, I can say that it’s a narrow two lanes, with the speed limit being 15 MPH.

A Sense of Scale While I sat watching—and shooting—the stack train across the Columbia River on the SP&S (see previous post), a westbound local job showed on the Union Pacific. In the second image then, we see two westbound trains, one in Oregon and one in Washington.

Four Tunnels

While I was hanging out at Memaloose State Park, I was able to see a couple more trains, the first being a westbound stack across the river, on the former SP&S, later Burlington Northern, and now BNSF.

I have to say I really was surprised by the scale of the train: this sequence of shots is not what I imagined it would be as I sat waiting for a train. There’s four tunnels here in a short stretch, though my images only show three of them.