“People Come and Go. I Plan for the Land.”

Our initial efforts to save Oak Grove from densification were pretty naïve. First, we thought we could persuade the Clackamas County planners that densification was a bad idea. We invited the lead planner to walk the neighborhood with some of us, a walk that ended with a visit in Jeanne Johnson’s home.

Johnson, a schoolteacher, lived with her husband in a beautiful, 1908 craftsman-style home. After walking around the area on a sunny spring day, the planner exclaimed to Johnson, “What a lovely neighborhood. The only other time I’ve ever walked around here was last fall. It was raining, the edges of the streets were muddy, and I couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to live here.” She was from the government and she was here to help us Neotraditionalize our neighborhood.

Johnson’s neighbors, some of whom had lived their entire lives in Oak Grove, then tried to explain why they didn’t like the plan. Some feared higher densities would bring back the crime that once infested the area. Others worried about congestion. After listening, the planner–who had spent no more than a few hours in the area–looked at the Johnsons’ 87-year-old river-rock fireplace and replied, “People come and go, but the land remains. I plan for the land.” In other words, our concerns didn’t matter; she knew what was best. Continue reading →

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 →