30. Interlude, Part II: Rail Historian

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.

One of the historical society’s most prominent members was Al McCready, a former federal judge whose wife had been mayor of Portland. We met with him and agreed that, since we had the contacts with Burlington Northern, namely Bill Francis, we would negotiate with the railroad for the right to run on its property, while the historical society would work on selling tickets. At our next meeting, however, McCready announced that they had asked BN for permission to use its rails and were told no, so the trip was off. I asked why they did that when we had agreed that was our job, and McCready gave some nonsensical answer.

After the meeting, I said to Clint, “Modern surgery is really amazing. I looked carefully at the top of McCready’s [bald] head and couldn’t see any sign of his lobotomy.” Clint looked shocked that I would say such a thing, saying, “You were always the nice guy.”

Soon after that, Clint and Chris announced to the group that we needed to acquire our own fleet of cars and that a rail history group in New Jersey was willing to sell us some former Great Northern coaches that had been used by New Jersey Transit for its commuter trains after Amtrak took over intercity passenger service. Clint asked members to loan PRPA the funds to buy these cars.

After talking it over with Vickie, I agreed to loan the group enough money to buy four cars. Four other people loaned enough to buy one car each. I wrote letters to ConRail, Norfolk Southern, and Burlington Northern asking for them to donate the move of the cars to Oregon, and they all agreed. Chris flew back to New Jersey and accompanied the cars to Oregon.

When the cars arrived, I was dismayed when several PRPA members told me they refused to help restore them. They saw them as private cars, not the PRPA’s cars. I saw them as PRPA’s cars funded by loans from me and other members. Although there was no repayment schedule on the loans, at most I expected to have naming rights for the cars. I was learning, however, that rail history preservation was just as political as wilderness preservation.

Most of the restored 700 worked well but one part that did not was the feedwater heater, which is one of two ways of putting water into a boiler that is under pressure. Clint and Chris found out that a locomotive sitting in a park in Ohio that was probably never going to be restored had a feedwater heater identical to our, and they would be willing to trade their working heater for ours. I used my frequent flyer miles so that Chris and I could both fly to Ohio to inspect their heater. We happened to leave Portland the first day of the 1991 Gulf War, and the airports and planes were practically empty.

My friend John Baden had told me that someone had collected some old railroad cars and put them in a farmer’s field north of Bozeman. At a rail history conference, I met this collector, an old man named Don Redmond who had bought the cars to use for a home. One of the cars was a dome car, and I asked him if he would be willing to sell it to PRPA. He was, provided I paid what he paid Amtrak for it years ago, which was about $4,000.

The tracks he had used to move the cars to the farmer’s field (which was actually a small plot of land he owned) had since been torn up, so we needed to find a way to move the car to the nearest live tracks, a couple of miles away. A group of us drove to Montana and met with a local crane company. They had a low-boy truck and were willing to help us move the car at what they said was a significant discount.

Unfortunately, the car, a former Southern Pacific dome, wasn’t even located close enough to a road for their crane to reach, so we had to build some track to move the car on. We tried to get away with not spiking the rails at every tie, but when we moved the car it split the rails so we had to rebuild.

While we were in Montana, a well-known railroad photographer named Warren McGee heard about what we were doing and offered to pay for our hotel rooms. McGee had been a conductor on the Northern Pacific Railway and his photos of late steam and early Diesel trains have been published in many books.

Bob Stevens, who I knew as a strong supporter of free-market environmentalism, also heard about our work. He owned his own private railroad car, and he treated us to dinner at Bozeman’s best restaurant. While we were there, Dorothy Anderson, a state senator and candidate for governor, stopped by our table to say hello. She had been married to Bob Anderson, the director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, which had hired me to study national forests around Yellowstone Park.

We finally got the car onto the lowboy trailer. Passenger car wheelsets make up close to half the weight of a car, so they were separated and put on their own trailer. As the crane company then slowly moved the equipment to the nearest Montana Rail Link tracks a couple of miles away, I asked, “Do we need any permits to do this?”

“No,” was the answer, “this is Montana. We don’t need any permits.” Unsaid was the fact that no one was likely to see us to check whether we had permits. Even more interesting was the fact that no one had let Montana Rail Link know we were putting a car on their former Northern Pacific tracks. Since they knew the 700 had a Northern Pacific heritage, we had a good relationship with them.

After we returned to Oregon, I began to feel that Chris and Clint were thinking of me as some kind of piggy bank, and they appealed to me for more money for various causes. I told them that, after having spent the money for five passenger cars, I was tapped out.

On my next trip out of town, they called an emergency board meeting. They told the board I wasn’t being cooperative and they wanted to sell the dome car to a rail preservation group in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since that group was restoring a Southern Pacific steam locomotive, it made sense for them to have a Southern Pacific dome car. When I returned home, group members told me they were concerned that Chris and Clint had deliberately timed their emergency board meeting for when I was gone, but they approved the sale anyway. I was disappointed but carried on.

As it turned out, when Union Pacific bought Southern Pacific, it cancelled Portland’s lease on the roundhouse and tracks around it where PRPA stored its cars. PRPA and the 4449 group raised funds for a new engine house, but there was no room for passenger cars, so the group eventually had to sell the coaches too.

The group’s by-laws called for the election of officers once a year at two successive meetings. The first meeting was the only time nominations were allowed; the second meeting would vote for the officers. The group’s treasurer, Jim Vanderbeck, was resigning and I was surprised when someone nominated me to take his place. Moreover, I was the only nominee, so I was a shoe-in.

Since the election was a certainty, I asked Jim if I could look at the books. He gave them to me with deep regret in his eyes. Looking them over, I quickly realized that Chris and Clint had paid themselves tens of thousands of dollars that had supposedly been spent on parts and materials. They even created phony invoices from fake companies to justify some of the payments. Jim admitted to me he was quitting because he didn’t want to be a part of this anymore. I tallied everything up in a one-page memo to the group.

At the next meeting, Chris and Clint made the surprise announcement that they were nominating someone else to be treasurer. They had clearly lobbied other members of the group; I remember Ken Prager refusing to look me in the eye. I handed out my memo but no one read it. When the votes were counted, I thought I heard someone say I had lost by one vote.

Jim and his wife, Linda, who loved the locomotive enough that they had gotten married on it, tearfully bid farewell, obviously never planning to return. I decided I didn’t want to be a part of the group either, and I apologized to Linda for not working harder to win the election.

A few months later, I got a call from someone in the group. They had looked over the books, realized I was right, and they ejected Clint from the group. Chris was kept on (but of course not paid) as a figurehead and honored founder. At the next election, Jim Vanderbeck was elected president, a position he held for many years, and PRPA is doing well today.

I stayed out of the group, however, turning to other rail history opportunities. While reading a biography of James J. Hill, the founder of the Great Northern Railway, I discovered his political leanings were similar to my own. He had a strong concern about soil conservation, but he had no faith that the federal government could do successful conservation work, and he gave several speeches saying so.

I also noticed that I looked a little like Hill, so I had someone who makes clothing for Civil War reenactors make me a suit for about 1910. I memorized some of Hill’s speeches and gave them at both rail history and conservation events.

One of these events was the annual meeting of the SP&S Historical Society in Astoria. Ken Prager was an active member in the society, but I learned at the meeting that he was dying. Vickie and I visited his home where he looked at me from his bed and said, “Hello, Mr. Hill.”

When I got home after visiting with him, I called Clint to let him know. He wasn’t home but I left a message on his answering machine.

The next day, Clint called me and expressed his gratitude, saying he had visited Prager and that “Ken was like a father to me.” But he was also perplexed. “Why did you tell me?” he asked. “I thought you didn’t like me.” I told him I always liked him; I just didn’t like some of his policies.

After Ken died, his wife Laurel (also a former SP&S employee) gave me a collection of stories he had written about his life on the SP&S Railway. I turned them into a book, That Reminds Me of Another Story, which I arranged to have printed for Laurel. She made a nice profit selling them at railroad fairs and (after a good review in Trains magazine) through the mail, but I suspect she enjoyed even more the opportunity to meet other former railroaders and current railfans.

My last work with the PRPA was in 2002, when the group was invited to bring the locomotive to run on Montana Rail Link between Sand Point, Idaho, and Billings, Montana. I made another photo book, this one in full color. Every two-page spread of the book used colors from some famous Northwest passenger train, and the pages made liberal use of Benn Coifman’s fonts and graphics.

I had several thousand copies of the books printed and drove to Montana a little ahead of the train. Whenever I saw railfans waiting to take pictures of the train, I stopped and sold them booklets and hats. PRPA also had a trailer that opened up into a sales booth offering t-shirts, mugs, hats, my booklet, and other souvenirs. In addition to myself, six other people were involved in sales. At the end of the trip, I had made 40 percent of the sales revenues mainly because I went to where the railfans were instead of waiting for them to come to us.

Still, it wasn’t the same. By that time, I lived in Bandon and couldn’t regularly work on the locomotive. The group made it clear that people who didn’t work so many hours per year on the locomotive were second-class members. I still support PRPA, but when I discovered that what I thought would be an escape from politics was just as politicized as everything else, I lost interest in making a career of rail history.

I’m still interested in the topic, of course. In addition to Romance of the Rails, a majority of which is about passenger train and rail transit history, I’ve contributed articles to Minnesota History and the Great Northern and Union Pacific history society quarterly magazines. Because I don’t really want the stress of dealing with the internal politics of various groups, I have become a contributing but inactive member of numerous other rail history groups. Plus, my Streamliner Memories web site, to which I have posted every day for more than seven years, speaks for itself of my continuing interest in rail history.