DUNGENESS — The North Olympic Peninsula’s foremost railroad historian, Steve Hauff, has documented between 600 and 700 miles of rails that were laid, torn up and relocated across the Peninsula — none of which exist now.
“There are no existing railroads,” Hauff told about 80 people attending a lecture last week at a history class through Peninsula College hosted by the Museum and Arts Center of the Sequim-Dungeness Valley.
“However, from the mid-1800s to mid-1983, there were more than 30 companies that operated several hundred miles of railroads within Clallam County.”
A rail line also ran from Port Townsend to Quilcene in the late 1800s, Hauff said.
“Railroads were what determined if your town was a town” during the 1870s and 1880s, Hauff said. “They were really important to the movers and shakers of the time.”
Hauff, a former Clallam County Public Works director and road engineer who has lived in Clallam County for 48 years, said most of the rails on the Peninsula were laid by logging companies to move harvested timber. Once the harvest was over, the rail spurs were moved to the next logging site.
Port Townsend line
In 1887, Port Townsend residents formed the Port Townsend & Southern Railroad, acquiring the right of way along Hood Canal to Olympia and calling for bids on six miles of track in 1889 and construction in 1890.
“They got to Quilcene and somebody noticed that Mount Walker was there,” Hauff said. “They found there was really no way to get around this, and that was the end of it.”
The Port Townsend line was the first to offer passenger and freight service.
Passenger rail between Port Townsend and Port Angeles did not come until after logging work was well under way, he said.
Across Peninsula
In 1914-1915, the rail line from logging west of Port Angeles was extended east to Carlsborg, Sequim, Gardiner and Discovery Bay, where it connected to the Port Townsend line.
The first passenger train from Port Angeles to Sequim left on July 21, 1914.
Before 1900, many short rail lines were constructed by timber interests from the Port Crescent-Joyce area west to the Makah Reservation and Lake Ozette.
Passenger service ended in 1931, but freight continued to be shipped via barge from Port Townsend.
Remnants of the Port Townsend rail-barge pier adjacent to the Port of Port Townsend Boat Haven Marina and boatyard were removed two years ago as part of the state’s pilings removal effort around the Peninsula.
Hauff said the earliest freight-carrying railroads to the Sequim-Dungeness Valley includes the Gardiner Timber & Land Co. from 1907 to 1919, the Sequim Bay Logging Co. from 1908 to 1926 and the Snow Creek Logging Co. from 1914 to 1926.
Pacific Logging & Timber operated from 1907 to 1914 in the Dungeness area, Hauff said.
Gardiner had two log dumps accessible by rail, one near the present Jamestown S’Klallam Tribal Center on Sequim Bay in Blyn, the other near the Gardiner boat ramp on Discovery Bay.
Huge firs
For a period, Douglas firs as large as 5 to 10 feet in diameter were harvested in the Blyn-Jimmy Come Lately Creek valley served by those rail companies, Hauff said.
The locomotive brought in to serve the area was pulled off a barge at Sequim Bay in Blyn and was moved down the road on a section of rail that was laid down and dismantled, then laid down in a section repeatedly in front of the train to move it forward.
Once on the rail, the locomotive was powerful but moved at just 6 mph, Hauff said.
Locomotives typically operated six days a week and were maintained on the seventh day.
Brakemen’s job
Brakemen, working the most dangerous job of the day and often dying while doing it, would walk along the tops of high-stacked massive logs in rail transit, he said.
They would jump down and tighten or loosen the brakes as the engineer hollered out orders.
Brakemen also coupled and uncoupled rail cars as necessary, he said, losing fingers if they failed to move their hands out of the way of the giant couplings quickly enough.
The Dungeness Logging Co. rail served the Peterson Logging Co. at the base of Dungeness Spit, where traces of pilings at the former log dump can be seen today.
Hauff said that when a Clallam County Road Department crew removed the surface of Cassidy Road in Carlsborg in the 1980s, it found railroad ties underneath it still in place.
Carlsborg and railroad
“Carlsborg really didn’t exist until 1916 when the railroad came to Carlsborg Mill & Timber,” Hauff said.
The lumber mill operated there in the valley, once heavily treed, until 1942.
Port Angeles was served by Mount Pleasant trolley in the early 1900s, the first urban transportation system.
The Chicago Milwaukee St. Paul and Pacific line was built from Port Angeles to Port Townsend, then to the West End, where several log camps cropped up: Port Crescent, Ramapo, Joyce, Majestic and Twin, near Twin Rivers, which was the terminus for the Milwaukee line and a major logging community in Clallam County.
Olympic Discovery Trail runs mostly along the vacant Milwaukee right of way today.
Train depots
The Seattle Port Angeles and Western Railway train depot was built in 1913 on Railroad Avenue and Front Street, and the Sequim depot was built in 1916 at the foot of the hill on South Sequim Avenue near where U.S. Highway 101 runs today.
Hauff said four passenger trains a day ran between Port Angeles and Port Townsend in the 1920s. The Milwaukee line operated until 1983.
After rails were torn up, rights of way were sold to private owners across the Peninsula.
The MAC history classes meet from 10 a.m. to noon every Friday through Feb. 25 at the Dungeness Schoolhouse, 2781 Towne Road, in Sequim.
This Friday, the class will focus on the Dungeness Lighthouse, with Roberta and Rick DeWitt and Steve Reed describing the finer points of lighthouse operations in the past and today.
For more information about the series, see www.macsequim.org/.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
