2. The Willamette Locomotive
Standing before you is one of only six surviving Willamette locomotives in the world.
Built in Portland, Oregon, in 1926, it belongs to a class of just thirty-three engines ever produced. The one before you is Construction Number 21, originally built for the Anderson & Middleton Lumber Company of Cottage Grove, Oregon, where it operated as Number 2.
Weighing seventy tons, it was built for a job unlike that of most railroads.
While passenger trains connected cities and freight trains moved goods across the country, engines like this spent their working lives deep in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, hauling massive logs from remote mountainsides to mills below.
Its exposed gears and drive shafts distributed power throughout the machine, giving it the traction needed to pull enormous loads through terrain that challenged many conventional locomotives.
Take a moment to notice those details.
The gears running along the side. The drive shafts. The offset boiler. Unlike the streamlined passenger trains that would later capture the public imagination, this engine leaves much of its machinery in plain sight. You can see how it worked.
This particular Willamette is even rarer than most. It was one of only three built with an open-cab design—a variation the company marketed as its "Sport Model."
Like many working engines, it passed through several owners during its lifetime, serving logging operations throughout Oregon as the timber industry expanded across the region.
By the early twentieth century, railroads like this had become an essential part of that expansion. They carried timber out of forests that had once been difficult to reach and helped fuel the growth of towns, industries, and cities throughout the West.
The tracks themselves were often temporary. As forests were logged, rails could be pulled up, relocated, and laid again. In many places, the railroad followed the timber.
Today, the steam is gone. The logging railroads this engine once served have largely disappeared. Many of the tracks that wound through the forests have long since faded back into the landscape.
Yet this Willamette remains.
Nearly a century after it was built, it offers a glimpse into a world of logging camps, mountain railroads, and hard physical work—a world that helped shape much of the Pacific Northwest.
