An electric streetcar line that ran in splendid isolation for its surprisingly long existence, never quite connecting to anything despite its close proximity to both Portland and Oregon City. It started life in 1894 s a means to bring workers to the paper mills at West Linn (then just West Oregon City or Linn City) from the company town of Willamette three miles to the west, but its focus quickly changed into carrying enormous amounts of wood to feed those voracious factories. In 1900, the line was extended west from Willamette over the Tualatin River to tap into the rich timber stands there.
Under the ownership of the Portland Railway, Light & Power Company the line was extended north from West Linn to Bolton and Magones, where a popular riverside amusement park created passenger traffic. The earliest reference I have come across to people riding the streetcar to the park is January 1911. The streetcar company also started extending the line further north to Walling, just south of Oswego, where a log crane was built to transfer logs from the lower Willamette River onto cars for transportation to the industries above the falls.
Ownership then passed to the Portland, Eugene & Eastern Railroad, who were looking for a river-level route for their new Willamette Valley electric interurban lines and thought that the Willamette Falls line could be rehabilitated to fulfill this role. The PE&E completed the work started by the PRL&P before taking their parent company’s Southern Pacific name in 1915. While a lot of preliminary engineering work seems to have been done for an interurban route from Oswego to Hubbard via West Linn that used some of the existing right-of-way and planned for shops to be built at Bolton, the route was never constructed. The little Willamette Falls line remained disconnected.
The southern logging extension seems to have fallen out of use once the area was logged out, and the line then ended at the Tualatin River station just to the west of the town of Willamette. Passenger service ended on February 28, 1930, and the log trains from Walling stopped running just three years after that.
Today, few remnants remain of the line. The concrete foundation of the log crane at Walling is still extant and is clearly visible from the Willamette River, and some right-of-way is still accessible: the short Railroad Trail in Mary S. Young State Park being the most notable example.
| Important Dates: | February 1894 – Line opens from West Linn to Willamette. July 1900 – Line extends south across the Tualatin River to timber land there. November 8, 1912 – Ownership passes to the Portland, Eugene & Eastern. July 1, 1915 – PE&E fully absorbed into the Southern Pacific. February 28, 1930 – Passenger service abandoned. 1933 – Logging operations end; line abandoned. | | --- | --- | | Operating Companies: | ‣ ‣ ‣ ‣ Southern Pacific Company | | Gauge: | Standard (4-feet, 8.5 inches) | | Headboard: | None | | Car Barn: | ‣ |