It’s safe to say that I’m fascinated with the rich transit history of my adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon, and it’s certainly something that I’ve explored before in a previous project. This new project started out with a very simple goal – to produce a route map of Portland streetcars at their zenith in 1920 that showed each line separately – but it quickly grew into something much more.
As I worked on my initial map, it quickly became apparent to me that information about the streetcars back then was imprecise, fractured and difficult to find. Books like John Labbe’s Fares, Please! Those Portland Trolley Years and Richard Thompson’s series of books about the history of Portland’s streetcars helped to fill in a lot of the gaps, but they were designed more as historical and photographic records than a technical summary of routings. Information found on the internet was often incomplete, like this list of streetcar lines. For someone trying to piece together how the downtown trolley loops worked, it was a very frustrating time, with lots of cross-referencing required.
So while I did complete a designed map of the lines (as shown here), I also started compiling my findings into an interactive Google Map, accurately plotting each line as it existed in 1920, paying attention to where each line used a private right-of-way, and noting that the streetcars would have used the old Morrison Bridge, which actually connected to Morrison Street on the west side. I added notes on where track, evidence of rights-of-way and other infrastructure related to the system could still be found today, as well as historical photos and notes for things long gone.
Once I finished plotting the streetcar network, I expanded the scope of the map to include all electric passenger rail out of Portland in 1920: trolleys to Troutdale, Oregon City, Bull Run and Cazadero; and interurban electric trains running down the Willamette Valley as far as Corvallis, Albany and Eugene. This year was the absolute peak of electrical rail traction; by the end of the decade both the streetcars and the interurbans would already be in serious decline.
Multiple sources were used to compile this part of the map, including historical USGS topographical maps of Oregon, numerous maps and pages from the internet, and even Google Maps itself. I found that if you zoom in close enough, Google shows tax lots, which often still include the otherwise-invisible right-of-way of long-abandoned rail lines.
Some of the old lines still exist much as they did back in 1920, while others have been repurposed as modern passenger rail – TriMet’s MAX Blue Line runs on old electric railway alignments on both the west and east sides, as does the WES commuter rail. The old Springwater and Cazadero Divisions now form a walking trail that can take you from inner Portland almost out to Estacada. However, some lines have long since been abandoned, with only those tax lot boundaries or a road that was laid down directly over the old tracks to tell you of its previous existence.
After all that work, I’m proud to announce that the map can be viewed below, or you can click here to view it full-screen.
It’s still very much a work in progress – I’ll add any corrections to it as I find them, and will continue to add historical information and photographs to the map as well – but I’m already very happy that I’ve created something that consolidates so many different and varied informational sources into one place. I’m certainly going to find it useful going forward, and I hope others will as well. I’d love to hear your thoughts about the map in the comments below!
Nice work! 🙂
Fascinating stuff, thanks! The diagrammatic maps are great, too, but seeing the actual alignment of the lines definitely helps me to square them with present day.
This is awesome!
I used to work at the Whole Foods at SE 28th & Burnside, which was formerly a car barn.
The eastern part of the Ankeny car barn was at that location, but I think the Whole Foods is in a newer building. There is a remaining original car barn from the west Ankeny yard on Burnside between 26th and 28th.
There were three car barns on the ma in “Fares Please”. All three are still there (well, half of one is missing). The Whole Foods is indeed in an old Car Barn. Until recently, the sidewalk on Couch next to the Whole Foods was missing at the spot where the rails entered that building from Couch. The exisitng brick building between Burnside and Couch west of 28th, once had a matching section to it’s east, torn down for a parking lot. And the southern barn, between Ankeny and Burnside, was remodeled into the current Archdiocese Headquarters.
I love Portland, history, design and transportation and your site hits them all.
Thanks for the research and drawing these lines!
The lines you traced helped inform a short video I made on Portland’s rail transit history.
Great job! I’ve been working on placing the long-gone lines for the last year, but I guess I don’t need to now. I started noticing the remnants of them when looking at google maps Satellite and Terrain views. I’m amazed at how much more rail was on the ground 100 years ago than there is now.
This is great. I’m trying to find out more about the alignment in St Johns. This is helpful!
Thank you for all the information. I find it interesting to compare your map to the Washington County property map ( http://gisims.co.washington.or.us/InterMap/theDetails.cfm?x_coord=7625114.45505250&y_coord=663758.67979002&theAddress=7030%20SW%20GARDEN%20HOME%20RD.%20PORTLAND%20OR,%2097223&TLNO=1S124DC00200&Account=R219926&GoNav=2 ) and understand why there are a lot of strange diagonal property lines it the area from Garden Home down towards Metzger.
I came across this shapefile from the City of Portland. The metadata indicates it is from an unknown source, but otherwise it looks like the best detail I’ve seen yet on the streetcar tracks throughout the city. If you zoom in close enough you can see which segments were single or double-tracked, and get a better sense of which segments are connected with wye tracks. Note that it is repurposed from a CAD layer, so there are some extraneous features. I found that filtering to TrolleyType 13 produces the correct features.
https://gis-pdx.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/historic-trolley-routes
What an amazing find! For the most part it correlates with my own research, though with extra levels of detail. Note that you can export the data as a KML file and open it in Google Earth for easier viewing.
Even though I live on NW Pettygrove and walk it several times a week on my Covid walks, I didn’t notice the tracks (“Westover Line”) until today. So of course I had to find out about them. I love your map pin and comment about the end of the street following the old right-of-way: that’s something I wondered about every time I head for the stair.
I noticed there’s some really obvious buried track at the far end of the Woodstock end of the Mount Scott line, by the Lents substation – I ought to take a photograph or two next time I’m in the area and send it in
Hi Cameron. What would the scale of miles be for your 1915 PRL&P map be? I’ve been trying to compute line lengths.
Hi Richard – I’m not sure I’d be trying to get accurate line lengths off that map: it’s somewhat diagrammatic and cheats a little in certain places, especially downtown where I leave out a lot of streets that don’t have streetcars running on them for clarity.
Hi Cameron. Thank you for your extensive research and efforts pulling this together. Great work.
One note I can add: the ca.1925 photo of the three-car Red Electric that you currently have pinned at Little Hells Canyon on Rex Hill was taken further to the west on the downslope into Springbrook. The photo is looking southwest towards Newberg from roughly 45.318007, -122.919498. Historic aerial images show that the trestle depicted at this curve was replaced with a fill between 1960 and 1970. The Pacific Highway (99W) is visible in top left of the photo, near the present-day Providence Hospital. Furthermore, the farmhouse on the photo’s left side still exists (30295 OR-99W) and the barn at the top center is currently used by Wolves & People Brewery.