Region's roads were once rails

As the nation struggles with escalating oil prices and overcrowded highways, a display at the Northwest Railway Museum in Snoqualmie sets the mind wondering: What if now-defunct railroads had managed to stay afloat? Would we be better off today? What was travel like before the era of the freeway? The automobile?

Richard Anderson, executive director at the museum, points out that today's freeways largely follow the routes of railroads laid down over a century ago.

One such line, the Milwaukee Road, ran electric trains over the Cascade Mountains until 1973 on a route generally parallel to Interstate 90.

"It used no fossil fuel," Anderson says. The line depended on hydroelectric power for the mountain route. After 1973, the electric lines were torn out, but the Milwaukee Road stayed in service until 1986.

"How can you compete with a government-subsidized roadway that parallels your rail line?" Anderson asks.

Today, governments are trying, frantically, to re-create the now-gone rail routes.

Sound Transit, for example, is building rail routes in the Seattle area that largely parallel the path of an Interurban line that ran from Tacoma to Everett but stopped operating in 1939, Anderson notes.

"The infrastructure has been ... torn down," he says. If the rail routes had been kept in place, they would have provided valuable alternatives to today's clogged roadways.

Seeing where we've been

Founded in 1957, the Northwest Railway Museum provides not only insight into modern transportation problems but also a window on history.

Standing on a track outside the restored 1890 Snoqualmie Depot — museum headquarters today — is one of the last locomotives built by the renowned Baldwin Locomotive Works, founded in Philadelphia in 1832.

Though it tried, Baldwin couldn't make a successful transition from steam-powered to diesel-powered engines. The company went out of business in 1956. The museum has two Baldwin diesels, built in 1954 and bought for $175 each by the museum seven years ago, though it cost about $15,000 to get both of them trucked to Snoqualmie.

The museum recently put a newly restored 1945 White River Lumber Co. caboose on display. Once used in the Enumclaw area, it was given to the museum in 2002. Some 4,400 hours of volunteer labor and $35,000 went into restoring the caboose.

About 45 percent of the original structure was saved. It features a 1949 paint scheme and even displays artifacts such as a gum wrapper and a 1954 hunting license pulled from its crannies.

The caboose, which visitors are invited to enter and touch, demonstrates how the Pacific Northwest developed, said Anderson. Building railroads allowed logging. Loggers would ride atop the logs they'd harvested to the lumber mills.

Imagine making that trip in the rain during icy-cold winter weather, and you begin to grasp the importance of the cozy caboose, the last car on the train, Anderson says.

Among top rail museums

Restorations like that of the caboose take place about 1 ½ miles east of the depot, at the museum's 8,200-square-foot Conservation and Restoration Center, which opened in January 2007.

Restoration of a coal car once used in King County coal mines is under way there, as is the refurbishing of two of the last wooden railcars operated in the United States, built in 1912 in Dayton, Ohio. One of them served the Burlington Northern Railroad along the Columbia River as recently as 1983.

Known as No. 218, the car is today a shell of rotten wood and peeling paint. It's gradually being brought back to its appearance of nearly a century ago.

Anderson estimates there are about 160 railroad museums in the United States, with Snoqualmie's ranking among the top two dozen. The museum makes it possible to understand how evolving transportation systems affect modern society.

Before the railroad reached Snoqualmie and the now-restored depot, said Rich Wilkens, a 30-year museum volunteer, it used to be a day's ride by horse to Seattle.

"With train, it was four hours," Wilkens said. "Now they're trying to bring it all back. It's funny how history repeats itself."

Peyton Whitely: 206-464-2259 or pwhitely@seattletimes.com.