Just another Saturday afternoon on the Siskiyou Line

            The east end of the siding at Gazelle, California sees a meet on Southern Pacific's Siskiyou Line. A westbound lumber drag out of Ashland, Oregon is rolling by on the main. Once the loads clear, the eastman will line out of the siding and continue its trip to the Rogue Valley. In all likelihood, virtually every car in the eastbound train is a lumber empty, returning north for another load of forest products.

In 1986, timber sales on the O&C timberlands in Southwest Oregon were still going strong. The raw material they supplied to the sawmills along the Siskiyou Line was sufficient to produce a daily 7,200 ton train of forest products for the Golden State. Drags that were dispatched west from Ashland over Siskiyou Summit's 3% grades were sights to behold, with three or four big EMDs on the point, working with a mid-train five-unit helper.

There's a lesson here: appreciate what you have, when you have it. At the time, no one could have imagined that in a decade, the Friendly Southern Pacific would be a fallen flag. They might have been just as amazed to find out that Siskiyou traffic would suffer a massive decline - a fall so great that a few diminutive locals each week would be sufficient to keep what few carloadings remained moving through Gazelle.

Taken on: September 13, 1986

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Camera: Plustek OpticFilm 8200i (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Plustek OpticFilm 8200i
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Adobe Photoshop Elements 15.0 (Windows)
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