Matt Wiederholt remembers the boom days of the sawmills in Prineville.

Trucks hauled logs out of the Ochoco National Forest to seven mills in town. Multiple trains a day rolled through town, blowing a whistle every morning at 5 a.m., on the short 18-mile track to the Redmond switchyard and beyond.

“Growing up in Prineville, the railroad was just always there,” Wiederholt said.

Those logging boom days are long gone. But the city’s railroad never faded away, and the city is set to make a multimillion-dollar investment as it continues to evolve.

“It’s neat to come full circle,” said Wiederholt, Prineville’s railroad manager.

The City of Prineville Railway is the oldest continuously operated municipal short line railroad in the United States. With a recent $1.6 million federal grant and $400,000 of its own funds, the railroad will purchase equipment for maintenance and preservation. City crews will also replace 10,000 railroad ties — about one-sixth of the line — after moving through with the equipment to tamp and level the tracks.

“What’s really exciting is it’s going to allow us to purchase equipment to maintain our line, equipment that we don’t have right now,” Wiederholt said.

That will allow the railroad to be more self-sufficient without having to rely on subcontractors. City and railroad officials are confident the investment will keep the railroad on a rising trajectory 20 years after Prineville considered cutting ties with its beloved asset.

Boom to bust and back

Wiederholt joined the Prineville Railway staff in 2004 during some of the railroad’s darkest days.

That year the railroad sent an all-time low 87 cars from Prineville to Redmond, a fraction of the historic highs of the ’60s and ’70s, when more than 10,000 cars left the depot each year, mostly filled with logs. At the low point, Prineville-based Les Schwab Tires was the sole client of the railroad.

Prineville historian Frances Juris writes in a history of the railroad that city officials wrestled with the dilemma of what to do as financial reserves dwindled, and considered both selling and scrapping it.

At the turn of the 20th century, Prineville, population 600, served as the economic hub of Crook County, which at that time included all of what’s now Deschutes and Jefferson Counties as well. That changed about 10 years later when the Oregon Trunk Line, the main railroad in Central Oregon now operated by BNSF Railway, bypassed Prineville, connecting instead to Redmond and Bend.

City leaders feared Prineville would become a ghost town without access to the trunk line. Voters overwhelmingly approved a bond to fund the construction of a city-owned short line to Redmond, and the railroad was operational in 1918.

Some ups and downs followed, but by the 1950s the railroad was so prosperous from log shipments the city built parks, a swimming pool and a city hall, and started to build reserves.

For five years in the 1960s, Prineville residents paid no property taxes because of revenue from the railroad.

Juris chronicled the railroad’s importance: “Without the city of Prineville Railroad, the timber from the Ochocos would have been hauled to Redmond, and Prineville would surely have met the same fate as Shaniko and Antelope.”

But the timber industry didn’t last. Prineville-based Ochoco Lumber Co. shuttered in 2001, taking with it more than half of the railway’s business.

“We knew we were losing money; there was no question about it,” said Steve Uffelman, who has served on the Prineville City Council and city railroad commission since 1985. “The question was, what do we need to do to get it to essentially reinvent itself and find a means to regenerate a revenue stream.”

Old railroad adapts

In a pivotal move, the city swapped land with an old sawmill along the railroad, acquiring two new warehouses. That gave shippers a place to store product at the freight depot, and the railroad no longer had to run tracks to each separate business.

The model took off, and the railroad piled up $9.4 million in state grants over the next several years to build two more warehouses.

“By building the warehouses and the transload facility, somebody down the street, they can bring the product to us and they can take advantage of that bigger transportation web and be more competitive on the national level by using rail,” said Wiederholt, who was tasked with managing the new facility in 2004 and took over as railway director in 2013.

Today the railroad serves 34 businesses and runs more than 1,000 cars a year, a little more than one-tenth of its historical traffic.

A small portion of cars still carry lumber, but the railroad has survived by diversifying its cargo: raw materials for asphalt and deicer, barley for breweries, materials for truss and pipe manufacturing and others.

“Golf course sand comes by rail. Who would’ve thought we would’ve been bringing in golf course sand?”

Unlike the old days, most of the product is inbound, not outbound, to Prineville, where businesses have set up shop because of the rail access. Products come from as far away as Mexico and Canada, Wiederholt said.

Wiederholt estimates those businesses have brought about 200 jobs to Prineville.

Businesses that rely on efficient logistics and supply chains are particularly interested in shipping with the railroad, said Kelsey Lucas, Prineville director for Economic Development for Central Oregon. Rail is ideal for rural areas, where shipping distances are longer and loads are larger, she said. Rail prevails when snow and ice cover Central Oregon and the mountains or congestion blocks car traffic, she said.

Along with the proper infrastructure, Uffelman said, the railroad’s level of customer service has put Prineville on the map.

Though it’s growing, Prineville was, and still is, a blue collar community — largely due to the railroad, he said.

“Let’s face it, that’s what we are,” he said.

“We provide resources so industry can move in and provide jobs, family-wage benefits and full-time jobs, so that people can afford to live and raise their families. That’s what this town was 40 or 50 years ago when there was a timber industry.”

The railroad is not close to returning to the point where it could subsidize Prineville’s property taxes. But it pays for its own maintenance and operation — including matching funds for the recent grant — and contributes to paying city administrative salaries.

City leaders see a bright future for the city’s old railroad. Uffelman sees it as key support for a planned $120 million biomass facility in Prineville, which he said will rely on rail shipments of woody debris from across the state and region to be burned for energy.

Prineville rail back to breaking even

Prineville Railway restores track for new businesses