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Wednesday, April 19, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
Oregon railroad considers options
By Aaron West
The Bulletin
BEND (AP) — Moving
thousands of pounds of cargo
isn’t typically an issue for
the trains that use the City
of Prineville Railway in
Oregon, but what about when
the cargo is the train itself?
That’s the question the
city-owned railroad is trying
to answer. Railway Director
Matt Wiederholt said railway
staff members are consider-
ing their options for mov-
ing a 30-ton caboose to the
Bowman Museum in down-
town Prineville. The trip
between the railway and the
museum is less than a mile —
practically nothing compared
to the long trips the 70-year-
old railway car used to make
in its heyday. But since the
city’s orange caboose will
have to be taken off the stor-
age tracks where it currently
sits and transported on the
highway to make it there, the
journey seems a little bit lon-
ger than it actually is.
“We’re just trying to fig-
ure out how to get it down
there,” Wiederholt said.
“Hopefully we’ll have it done
in the next couple months or
so. It’s a little challenging,
but it’s doable.”
The caboose, which
Wiederholt said the Prineville
Railway bought in the 1970s,
has seen a lot of use over the
years, but it’s been out of
work for nearly a decade.
Originally used for haul-
ing and housing railroad
employees, the caboose is
outfitted with a generator, a
stove, a desk and bunk beds
for the crew members, con-
ductors and brakemen who
used to have to travel with
a train. When federal safety
laws that had required the use
of cabooses and large rail-
road crews were relaxed in
the 1980s, Wiederholt said,
Prineville’s caboose was
moved over to the Prineville
Freight Junction — via
tracks, not the highway — to
be used as office space. After
that it was used to give kids
rides, but it was retired in the
mid-2000s.
Rather than let the caboose
sit on storage tracks at the
railway, where Wiederholt
said it would slowly deterio-
rate, the decision was made to
donate it to the city museum.
The 100-year anniversary of
the railway is coming up in
2018, and Wiederholt said
the caboose would make a
great historical exhibit at the
Bowman Museum.
Which brings the railway
staff back to the question at
hand: How should they trans-
port the caboose?
The issue isn’t actually
the freight car’s weight, but
its height. For a train car,
60,000 pounds is “fairly
light,” Wiederholt said, but
at 13 feet 8 inches tall, the
caboose’s height would
exceed 14 feet — the maxi-
mum height allowed on
Oregon roads — when it’s
loaded onto the back of a
truck.
Probably what’s going to
happen, Wiederholt specu-
lated, is that the railway will
use a crane it has to lift the
caboose so its wheels can be
removed and it can be loaded
on the back of a lowboy
trailer. Then the trip to the
museum can be made without
smashing into any bridges or
power lines.
But what happens when
the caboose arrives at the
museum is a different matter.
Bowman
Museum
Director Gordon Gillespie
said that since the museum
is located in the middle of
downtown, it could be a little
tricky to get a mobile crane
close to where the caboose is
slated to be displayed behind
the museum.
No-cause evictions ban
proposal passes house
By Kristena Hansen
Associated Press
SALEM (AP) — A con-
troversial proposal to ban
most no-cause evictions
while giving cities the free-
dom to adopt their own rent-
control policies passed the
Oregon House Tuesday on a
31-27 vote.
House Bill 2004 now
heads to the Senate after
weeks of debate between
lawmakers, many of whom
have been inundated with
personal stories of hard-
ship by Oregon tenants and
landlords.
The proposal includes a
web of exemptions and spe-
cial circumstances, mostly
for the benefit of landlords.
But the overall goal is to put
a stop to what’s become an
ongoing narrative of people
living month-to-month see-
ing their rents suddenly
spiked or leases abruptly ter-
minated — often displacing
them back into a costly rental
market.
Democratic Rep. Karin
Power, a freshman lawmaker
from the Portland suburb of
Milwaukie and chief sponsor
of HB 2004, told her col-
leagues about how a 72-year-
old constituent and her hus-
band were evicted three
times without cause within
the last year and half.
“Rents are sky-rocketing
throughout our community,”
Powers said. “I cannot imag-
ine the stress and anxiety this
has caused her, and others
like her who have also asked
for my help. Each move
cuts ever-deeper into their
savings.”
Under HB 2004, no-
cause evictions would be
allowed during the first six
months, with 30 days’ writ-
ten notice, for tenants living
month-to-month.
See EVICTIONS on page 24
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