Monthly Archives: November 2019

In 1989, when Vickie and I decided to move from Eugene to Portland so I could work on the SP&S 700, home prices in Portland were starting to rise following the recession of the 1980s. We soon realized that we couldn’t afford a home in Portland, but we did find a nice house in a Portland suburb called Oak Grove. Having grown up in Portland, I was aware that Oak Grove was located a few miles south of the city on the east side of the Willamette River, but I didn’t know much about it.

I soon learned that Oak Grove is an unincorporated area that had exclusively been farmland until 1892, when the world’s first electric interurban railroad connected the 20-mile distance between Portland and Oregon City, Oregon’s oldest incorporated city. Wealthy Portlanders soon realized that they could “get away from it all” by building homes along the rail line and commuting.

By 1930, parts of Oak Grove nearest the trolley line had been subdivided into standard 50×100 lots centered around a small retail area. But much of the community was a “railroad suburb,” with large houses on parcels of an acre or more, interspersed with farms and dairies. Over succeeding generations, the large parcels and farms were broken up and sold off. Today, the community has a wide variety of lot sizes and home styles. Continue reading →

Membership in PRPA inspired me to go to a rail restoration conference at the California Railroad Museum and to become active with rail history groups all over the country. One person I met, Benn Coifman, was a student in transportation engineering at UC Berkeley. On the side, he had designed a variety of railroad fonts, including both lettersets such as the unique font used by the Great Northern’s streamlined Empire Builder as well as graphics of such objects as locomotives and railcars. He soon added an SP&S 700 to one of his graphic fonts.

I even inquired about getting a master’s degree in the history of technology at a major university, thinking I could become a museum curator of some type. After visiting the school, however, I decided I was no longer willing to put up with all the red tape involved with being a student that I had accepted as a necessity two decades before.

After the 700’s triumphant return from the Washington Central, the Sacramento Railroad Museum invited PRPA to join them for a railfair they were planning for 1991. One way to help pay for such a trip would be to sell space on passenger cars. The 4449 had a fleet of ex-Southern Pacific cars that it used for such trips. Except for our crew car, we didn’t have any passenger cars, but the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the National Railroad Historical Society did, so we met with them to plan the trip. Continue reading →

The year 1995 represented a significant transition in my career. Before 1995, nearly all of my work was studying forest planning and forest policy for environmental groups. After 1995, nearly all of my work was studying urban growth and transportation planning and policy for free-market groups. Before describing that transition, it is worth taking an interlude to look at what was almost my third career: railroad history.

I’ve loved passenger trains ever since my first ride on one, from Grand Forks, North Dakota to Portland, when I was five years old. I grew up with Diesel-powered streamlined trains, and can’t remember ever seeing a steam locomotive in operation except in places like the Portland Zoo and Disneyland. Compared to a real, full-sized steam locomotive, these were toys, so I ignored them and maintained a fondness for streamliners.

One such streamliner was the Rio Grande Zephyr, a remnant of the Chicago-Oakland California Zephyr. The Rio Grande Railroad had elected to not join Amtrak in 1971 and so continued to run its Zephyr between Denver and Salt Lake City over what is probably the most scenic rail route in America. By 1983, however, Amtrak talked the Rio Grande into letting it run Amtrak trains on its route rather than the far-less scenic route it had been using. Vickie and I were on the last run of the Rio Grande Zephyr, and I wrote about it in Passenger Train Journal. After returning from that trip, I became much more interested in rail history. Continue reading →

The last monthly issue of Forest Watch magazine was August, 1993. The first issue of Different Drummer was winter, 1994. Although less frequent than Forest Watch, each issue was 64 pages long compared with 28 for a typical Forest Watch. Each issue focused on one topic: the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the Endangered Species Act, state land and resource agencies, and so forth.

Different Drummer eventually published 13 issues. I was the sole writer of about six of them, and the main writer for several more. One person who helped write a couple of issues was Karl Hess IV, who had a Ph.D. in range ecology and whose father, Karl Hess III, was a well-known libertarian. While I was an environmentalist who had become libertarian, Karl was a libertarian who had become an environmentalist, so we fit well together.

In line with the Different Drummer idea, I changed the name of Cascade Holistic Economic Consultants, which had always been awkward, to the Thoreau Institute. Henry David Thoreau is sometimes considered the first environmentalist, but he was also deeply suspicious of big government. I felt this represented the focus of my work: finding ways to improve the environment without big government. Continue reading →