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This luxury-line strategy was applied to much of the railroad’s buildings and infrastructure as well, and you can see it in the remaining large depots and transfer stations — all built very expensively, with timeless style, and built to last. (Today you can examine the architecture of the grand Oregon Electric depot in Albany over a slice and a pitcher at Ciddici’s Pizza, which now occupies it; or experience the piece de resistance of the line in the Oregon Electric Station restaurant in Eugene.)
WELL, COMPETING ON luxury at the expense of a reduced price advantage was a strategy that worked just fine against the Southern Pacific’s expensive, maintenance-hungry coal-fired locomotive line, which had itself been initially pitched to business executives and merchant princes as a suitable alternative to bouncing around in a stagecoach. The problem was, new competitors were already arriving on the scene — competitors that appealed a lot more to those wealthy travelers than even the plushest railroad car ever could. The revolution hadn’t started out looking like much — just a few slow, flimsy Ford Model Ts rolling off a new assembly line back east. But by 1920 — the year the Oregon Electric cleared its biggest profits, and began its slow decline — the roads of Oregon were full of the new automobiles. They ranged from cheap, tinny Model Ts all the way up to the opulent Rolls-Royce Silver Ghosts purchased by Hollywood stars. Now the big-spending businessmen had a choice: would they rather spend thousands on railroad tickets to ride in luxury, or buy their own Stutz Bearcats and Packard Twin-Sixes? The change didn’t go well for the Oregon Electric. Although fortune had placed them in perfect position to be the fastest, lowest-cost transportation provider of all, they’d saddled themselves with huge capital costs to compete better with the Southern Pacific, totally neutralizing their advantage, and now the low-cost market they’d spurned was spending all its money on model Ts. All they could do now was be as efficient as possible and hope the motorcar thing was a passing fad for college kids in racoon coats. Of course, it wasn’t. By 1945, the Oregon Electric was exclusively a freight-hauling line — and not a very efficient one at that; after all, it had been engineered to haul people, not goods. The last year it actually did haul people was 1932; that entire year, it made just $17,313, down from almost $1 million in 1920. But time has gone by, and things have changed once again. A new generation of travelers is now growing up in cities served by outfits like Zipcar and Lyft, and more and more of them are using those services to entirely skip the expense and bother of automobile ownership. If only there were some way that a person in Portland, wanting to travel to Eugene, could take a taxi or Lyft to the train depot; board a fast, inexpensive electric train; and then pick up a Zipcar at the Eugene depot on arrival ....
TODAY, THE OLD railroad lines for the Oregon Electric are mostly in use for short-haul freight services using regular diesel-electric locomotives, and most of them get very little traffic. There has recently been talk of running the diesel-powered Amtrak Cascades passenger train service on them. But it’s worth pondering whether those old tracks maybe ought to be restored to what they were 100 years ago — an all-electric, dedicated passenger route — without all the expensive amenities that helped financially ruin the Oregon Electric. Running with modern equipment, with electric motors driving aerodynamic trains on steel rails and drawing power from the modern high-tension grid, it’s hard to imagine there could ever be a less expensive way to transport people among the Willamette Valley’s major cities than the old Oregon Electric railroad line. And if that ever happens, perhaps we’ll even see some of our state’s derelict architectural heritage restored to its former glory in places like Pirtle Station.
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