The Starting Point

Beautiful scenery with powerful motive power thundering through. (Image: Screen grab from Pentrex DVD)

The Columbia River Gorge

Firstly, despite having travelled right across America, I have never had a chance to visit Washington state.

This section of the website provides me with my inspiration. It has some of my favourite photographs and videos and more importantly, has direct links to the original sources. Many thanks to the contributors who have allowed me to use their images.

I am desperate to go. My only experience is through books and DVDs. I can thoroughly recommend the Pentrex DVD, Columbia River Gorge Volumes 1 & 2, BNSF's Fallbridge Subdivision & Union Pacific's Portland Subdivision respectively. We got ours from from DC Kits. Pentrex videos are invaluable to UK railfans of American railways. I now have quite a collection.

The UP runs along the southern riverbank towards Portland, Oregon and the BNSF runs parallel along the northern bank towards Vancouver Washington. Marvelous scenery and excellent rail fan action. My 5 year-old son now wants to visit America, not to see Mickey or Donald but to see an SD70MAC. The Cascade mountains provide a wonderful backdrop to the the gorge. Vancouver WA is immediately north of Portland OR, the Columbia River between the two. In the middle of the river is Tomahawk Island where the railroad crosses the river on an impressive swing bridge. Tunnel #1 is located right by the edge of the river at Cape Horn and is cut through solid basalt rock, an igneous rock that is very dark in colour and is actually the most common rock into the Earth's crust, making up the majority of the ocean floor.

	Tunnel #1 at Cape Horn (Image: Screen grab from Pentrex DVD)

The Pacific ports provide an important source of traffic for the railways in the area. Traffic varies from grain to huge intermodal stacks. The northern Pacific ports generally export more goods than are imported so empty intermodals can often be seen being transported southwards to the southern Pacific ports in California. there also seems to be an abundance of refuse trains or 'bin-liners' as we call them in England. There are also examples of roadrailer trains though the Swift road railer has now been discontinued.

Amtrak's Empire Builder, Coast Starlight and Cascades Talgo provide passenger train interest all centring on the Vancouver Y.

There is a huge paper mill at Camas which provides enough traffic for BNSF to have a freight office located there. Numerous manifests also wind their way through the gorge. The Washougal siding provides the opportunity for train meets.

The Swing bridge at Vancouver. (Image: Screen grab from Pentrex DVD)

Searchlight signalling seems to prevail along the subdivision which is proving a bit of a difficulty as I can't seem to source any in N-gauge. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

The route is wonderful with many items of interest along the way such as Bonneville Dam (necessitating the construction of tunnel # "1.5" when a second power house was constructed in the 1970's), Beacon Rock and the Bridge of the Gods. All of this is detailed together with some stunning action on the Pentrex video.