Clark County companies played a big role in getting the ZooLights train back on track in Portland.
The zoo trains were out of commission for last year’s display as crews installed a new rail route and two locomotives were refurbished in Ridgefield.
This year’s display runs through Sunday.
But local involvement goes back about 55 years, when train-savvy folks helped build the zoo’s railroad. Lewis Record, a retired Vancouver railroader, has an honorary engineer card to prove it.
After we wrote about the renovation of two zoo railroad engines at Pacific Power Group in Ridgefield, a couple of follow-up messages expanded the story.
Mayor Ron Onslow, proud of the role a Ridgefield company played, told us about another hometown participant. TLC Towing transported the two locomotives to and from Ridgefield on flatbed trailers.
In an email, Onslow wrote: “Cory Wells of TLC Towing came up with the idea to put rails on his tow trailer, saving the zoo significant money from crane use.”
Turns out that moving the zoo’s Centennial steam engine is a chore.
“A steam engine is a special beast: It’s almost impossible to pick it up without damaging it,”explained Jeff Honeyman, a Zoo Train engineer who also is the railroad’s unofficial historian.
You have to build a cradle, roll the locomotive onto the cradle, secure it, and then hoist the cradle and set it down on a trailer.
The steam locomotive and the retro-modern Zooliner were able to roll onto flatbed trailers for their ride to Pacific Power Group in Ridgefield. It was the basic concept of a tow truck with a tilt-down flatbed, but on a semi-trailer scale, Honeyman said.
The rails on the trailer actually were lengths of channel steel that secured the engine wheels, Honeyman said: “It was very slick.”
Lewis Record, who worked for the Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway (now part of BNSF), sent some keepsakes from the project that created what now is the Washington Park and Zoo Railway.
“These cards were given to (people) that worked on the zoo’s railroad,” said Record, who was featured in a Nov. 9 Columbian story about Wishram’s history as a railroad town.
“All the local railroads had a hand in building it,” Honeyman said. “A lot of those people were made honorary engineers. A stock certificate was sold as a fundraiser for $1 a share.”
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
