Once a great catalyst for economic growth and a pillar of the community, the railroad business has slowly receded in the face of expanding superhighways and semitrucks.
One remnant of the boom years of the railroad industry can be seen from the South Sixth Street bridge — a railyard roundhouse and turntable.
Of the roundhouse, which was used to store and repair engines, there is only a degraded slab of concrete that was the foundation. Next to that is the turntable, a 100-foot length of track in the center of a circle, which was used to turn engines around to travel in the opposite direction.
Trains were maneuvered into, out of and around these facilities by yard engines — engines that never left the yard and lacked the power to tug a line of 100 freight cars. In the first half of the 20th century, there were 10 such engines puttering around the yard.
Today’s train man
Today, there is only one. There just are not enough jobs to justify more, said Greg Casassa, who worked for 40 years as a train man and conductor for Southern Pacific.
The roundhouse was victimized by the changing technological landscape of the industry.
In the boom years, which reached a peak in the 1940s, the roundhouse stored up to seven engines ready to be dispatched at a moment’s notice.
It also was used to repair trains. There were trenches between the tracks allowing mechanics to work beneath the old steam engines as needed.
But diesel-engines, which quickly became the engine of choice when they were introduced in the 1950s, do not require as much maintenance, and when they did, they were shipped to Sacramento or another larger city.
All use of roundhouse stopped ended in the late 1980s. It was used as a storage facility for a time afterward, but Southern Pacific had it torn down to avoid paying the taxes on the building.
The turntable was used, albeit seldom, to turn around snow equipment, until five years ago, Casassa said.
The growth of the railroad
Both facilities were constructed in 1926 to accommodate a growing railyard in Klamath Falls. The Natron Line, which went from Kirk to Oakridge, was built in 1923, and it opened an alternative, less demanding route than the Siskiyou Line that ran through major towns west of the Cascades.
With the establishment of the Natron Line, many of the jobs from the west, from towns such as Ashland and Hornbrook, Calif., came to Klamath Falls, and business started picking up.
The growth in the railroad allowed the town to expand as well. The trains were able to ship wood products from the timber mills to places formerly inaccessible on the roads, which, at that time, were hardly viable travel options through the mountains, Cassasa said.
Today, much of the bustle around the railyard is reduced, but some of the vestiges of its heyday remain in the turntable and the crumbling foundation of the roundhouse.
While both can be easily seen from the South Sixth Street bridge, the buildings themselves are on private property and not open to the public.