Snubbed by railroad, Prineville built its own

Oregon, and the rest of the American West, is full of the ghosts of cities and towns killed by a railroad.

Central Oregon’s third largest city, Prineville, almost became one of them.

Prineville was the first town in inland Central Oregon, founded in 1868. It was located in the Crooked River Valley at Ochoco Creek, at pretty much the most convenient place in Central Oregon for a wagon-road hub serving surrounding farmers and ranchers.

It grew fast, like a lot of frontier towns did. By 1900 it was the only really big town (one couldn’t quite call it a city) in Central Oregon, lording over the few smaller hamlets that had sprung up nearby: Bend, Madras, Antelope, Shaniko, etc.

Prineville residents naturally assumed that when the Oregon Trunk and Des Chutes railroads started blasting and building their way into Central Oregon via Deschutes Canyon in 1911, they would of course want to come through Prineville.

They assumed wrong. For whatever reason — maybe some discreet money changed hands, or maybe it was just an engineering decision to avoid the Crooked River canyonlands — the railroads chose to ignore the “mother city of Central Oregon” and go through Bend instead.

After that, of course, Prineville withered away as farmers and ranchers started trading at Bend and other rail-connected towns instead until all that was left was an empty shell of a ghost town.

Just kidding! That’s actually what most likely would have happened if the residents of Prineville hadn’t taken matters into their own hands. Which, after a few years of dithering and false starts, they did, and as a result Prineville today is a thriving community of about 12,000, the 55th largest in Oregon.

So, what did Prineville do to save itself? Something that sounds pretty simple, but wasn’t:

It went into the railroad business.

In the years after the bad news came down, Prineville’s residents took some time to process what had happened. At first, they just kind of assumed the railroad would put in a spur line. Obviously, that wouldn’t be as good as being on the main route to other places, but it would at least give local farmers and timber producers a way to get their goods out and would save enough trade to keep the town from fading away.

And indeed, there was some railroad-company interest in doing that. But talk was cheap, and railroad building was (and is) expensive. By about 1915 it was clear to even the dullest Prineville residents that talk was all they could expect from the big railroad lines.

So the citizens of Prineville decided they were just going to have to build their own.

This wasn’t a totally new idea. Other towns had tried the same thing. But, it was definitely an audacious one, and very much a hail-Mary shot. There weren’t any municipal railroad successes they could look to for inspiration; most other towns that had tried it hadn’t been able to pull it off, and the few that did had gotten rid of their lines as quickly as they could, at a substantial loss.

Undaunted, the citizens of Prineville voted 355 to 1 to authorize $100,000 in bonded indebtedness to get the program started.

The First World War got in the way, and of course, the money ran out and they had to pass the hat again, and again. Prineville residents, game to the last, voted yes on several more transfusions, albeit by smaller majorities. It was still overwhelmingly popular, though; in 1916 the vote was 202 to 14.

Finally, on July 25, 1918, the Crook County Journal ran a banner headline in type an inch and a half high: “RAILROAD IS HERE!”

And so it was — an 18-mile spur line running from Prineville to a junction spot a few miles north of Redmond on the Oregon Trunk line.

But the very first train to use it carried an ominous load. It brought an entire car full of automobiles — something Randall Mills, writing in the middle of the golden age of car travel, compared to “a prisoner building his own gallows.”

Sure enough, within just a few years of the railroad’s construction, motor vehicles had started taking over. Prineville was left with a brand-new railroad that few were using and a half million dollars in bonded indebtedness — a lot of debt for a town whose population was still under 2,000.

So the City Council passed an ordinance: All Prineville businesses had to have licenses and report the means by which freight left town. If it were shipped by any means other than the city railroad or the business’s own truck fleet, it was taxed at 10 cents a pound.

Naturally, this was not popular with trucking outfits, which had gotten used to the business and hated to see it go. But their outrage fell on deaf ears.

Most likely this has a good deal to do with the fact that, until a few years ago, it was very common to see Les Schwab Tire Centers trucks on Oregon roads. Les Schwab, of course, was headquartered in Prineville until the death of its founder, after which the executives moved it to Bend. But while they were in Prineville, the company had to maintain its own fleet of trucks or pay that enormous tax when it sent tires to its stores.

In any case, the plan worked: In 1940, the city proudly proclaimed the railroad debt-free at last.

Over the subsequent decades, the railroad has had good times and bad times. Its traffic peaked in 1971 when more than 10,000 carloads (mostly of lumber from Prineville sawmills) used it.

Today the line is still in operation, and it’s the oldest municipal short line in the U.S. and a source of considerable pride to Prineville residents.

(Sources: “Early History of the Prineville Railway,” an article by Frances Juris published Sept. 8, 2017, by the A.R. Bowman Museum; “City of Prineville Railway,” an article by Austin Jacox published Dec. 21, 2021, in Railfan & Railroad Magazine; Railroads Down the Valley, a book by Randall V. Mills published by Pacific Press in 1950.)

Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Oregon history. His most recent book, Bad Ideas and Horrible People of Old Oregon, was published by Ouragan House early this year. To contact him or suggest a topic: [email protected] or 541-357-2222.