Flashback Friday: Last Train to Heppner, Condon, abandoned railways reach deep into Eastern Oregon
By Tom Peterson
Gary Conley said being a train engineer is like a lot of jobs.
“If you know what you’re doing, it's easy,” he said with a laugh.
In Conley’s 44-year career with Union Pacific, he saw a little bit of everything, from steam engines to taking the last trains to both Condon and Heppner.
And he’s got a story or two.
When a loose tanker car of propane got away at the Metolius station south of Madras in the early 1960s - well, it was all downhill, said Conley.
“The section man tried to get on the tanker at Madras in an uphill stretch of rail,” Conley said, noting the section man ran alongside the tanker car but was not fast enough to jump on the rolling tanker to set the hand brake.
The tanker picked up speed.
There was a crane operator on the track near the Paxton stop in Madras. The tanker was headed right for him. Conley said a call to the sheriff sent lights flashing and sirens screaming. The officer raced the tanker to warn the crane operator.
The deputy reached him in time and got him off the crane to safety. No sooner, and the propane tanker came rolling in, hit the crane and careened off the track into a pile of woodchips, left from an earlier derailment. The chips cushioned the impact, leaving the tanker intact.
Other runaways did not turn out as well.
Also in the ‘60s, several cars got away from a crew in Bend. They rolled for several miles and reached 80 mph before hitting a train head on at a stop between Bend and Redmond, Conley said. Several were killed, including a brakeman, who was found thrown into a nearby juniper tree.
It could be dangerous business.
Conley, who resides in The Dalles, started as a fireman in 1953 on an oil-fired steam engine. Twice a week he would stoke the boiler on the trip from The Dalles to Bend, keeping steam pressure at around 200 pounds.
“You had to know the track,” Conley said of the grades. When you’re pulling 2500 tons, it matters. So when that section between South Junction and Madras was coming, it was time to increase the oil to build more steam, he said. Conversely, when returning you had to get your speed down to 15 mph - the more difficult of the two processes.
And you never took your eye off the water glass.
“You don’t dare run out of water,” he said. Water reservoirs to refill the 5,000-gallon tank were spaced along the tracks.
Conley said they could fill at Dike, river mile 22 on the Deschutes River, and also noted an “ungodly amount of water” at Oak Springs, now a fish hatchery near Maupin.
On that run, the UP train would couple cars of lumber at Maupin, cars of potatoes and cattle around Culver and Madras and Perlite from a mine at little known Dant.
The mine, which produced perlite for acoustical tile, is defunct. But Dant is now a private fishing oasis with several cabins some 35 minutes beyond the locked gate on the Bureau of Land Management access road. Current residents have to take an old lifeboat attached to an overhead cable across the river to reach it.
Conley remembered a family living on the river at Nena about seven miles upriver from Maupin
“They rafted every morning to get to their car to drive the kids to school,” he said.
The train to Bend was also known for taking an angler or two and dropping them at their favorite fishing spot along the Deschutes.
In 1963, Conley became an engineer, but it took him another 10 years to get a permanent job. He bid jobs and was often on a 2-hour call out. During the ‘70s and early ‘80s he worked the mainline out of Portland before he received his plum assignment - driving trains to Condon and Heppner.
Rails to these communities, as well as Shaniko, were built in the late 1800s and early 1900s to transport lumber, wheat, wool and people to name a few.
In those days, roads were winding and slow, trucks far less dependable. So, trains were the main transport.
Those tracks are gone now. The Condon line shut down in the early ‘90s, and the Heppner line soon followed. It was abandoned after 1994. Conley took the last trains on both.
Rail grades were steep, requiring patience, caution and a ton of experience. Railroad builders always shot for no more than 2 percent grade, but some steep inclines were too expensive to flatten.
Case in point, the section out of Arlington to Shutler Flat toward Condon presented a 3.2 percent grade and the grade at Biggs Junction was 4 percent, Conley said.
RIDING THE CONDON KINZUA SOUTHERN
The branch leading from Arlington to Condon was called the Condon, Kinzua and Southern. Trains brought lumber out of the Kinzua Pine Mill east of Fossil. The mill was shuttered in the late ‘70s. 125 homes and other buildings were removed from the company town In 1982; 400,000 Ponderosa Pine were planted on the site, burying the former logging town beneath a forest, a rare occurrence indeed, according to the Oregon Encyclopedia.
“You had to pull all you could. Going up was no chore, you ran full throttle,” Conley said of the ascent out of Arlington.
The trick was coming back down with 2,500 tons. “You have to know where you are at,” he said, noting he would start slowing the train about a half mile before taking the grade into Arlington.
“You have to go into dynamic braking and gradually set a little air (on the air brakes),” he said. “You use pretty near all the air you got.”
Dynamic brakes work by engaging generators to the locomotive traction motors and creating drag. The electricity generated dissipates as heat in the brake-grid resistors.
Conley made many friends along the way. At times, he would take a passenger.
He remembers picking up Clarence “Cub” Bear at the Gwendolen station just north of Condon.
“He was a stout guy,” Conley said, referring to the nickname. “We went into Condon, and I had to pick up a new brakeman there.
The brakeman met them at the station, and he looked at Conley and then Bear and asked, “Did you have to stop and ask a farmer for directions?”
“I had to laugh,” Conley said.
RIDING THE COLUMBIA SOUTHERN
The Columbia Southern line ran 70 miles from Biggs Junction to Shaniko in the early 1900s, when Shaniko was the wool capital of the world.
But with the collapse of that market, the railway was shortened to Kent in 1943. It was mainly a means of transporting fertilizer and fuel into Sherman County and taking wheat out. The railway was abandoned after the December flood of 1964, which took out some of the tressels, Conley said.
RIDING THE Heppner Branch
Ten miles east of Arlington was the Heppner line which ran 45 miles into Heppner and was a major transporter of wheat and lumber.
Conley ran that final route on June 30, 1994.
“A bunch of city fathers from Heppner rode the train to Ione, and we went to dinner,” Conley said of the final run. “I liked that job - it was a pretty good job. I was home every night, and it was scenic. I got to the point where I knew all the farmers.”
SOLID GUY
Conley, now 85, retired from Union Pacific on Jan. 1, 1997. He has, what I would say, an almost encyclopedic knowledge of our area. He helped curate the historical Pioneer Picture Board and was named the Wasco County Pioneer Man of the year in 2017. He married Shirley Robertson in 1955, and they had three children. The couple continues to deliver Meals on Wheels as they have for the past two decades.
Retired Union Pacific Railroad Engineer Gary Conley holds a photo of himself on the last train to Heppner in June of 1994. The railway, like several others in Eastern Oregon, was abandoned. Portions of the railroad beds can still be seen from highways leading to towns such as Ione, Condon and Moro.
Union Pacific train on the Condon Kinzua Southern. Photo by Wayne Depperman
The Arlington Train Depot. Courtesy of Gilliam Co. OrGenWeb volunteers
The Heppner Depot. Courtesy of Jeff Asay
Union Pacific running the Heppner Branch in 1993. Courtesy of Sam Davey.
The Roundhouse at The Dalles, where Engines were driven onto a rotating platform to be moved to different tracks, Courtesy of Wasco County Pioneer Association
UP Engineer Gary Conley, left, Conductor. C.L. Clayton and Brakeman W.L. Briles on the last train to Heppner June 30, 1994. It departed at 12:20 p.m. and arrived in Heppner at 3:50 p.m. Contributed photo.
