Abandoned Railways
Back in 2019 when I mapped the Willamette Valley Southern I noted at the end that it would be a cool idea to build a scalable platform that integrated the modern GTFS transit data model so you could create a map that shows old abandoned trains running realtime as if they existed today.
I shelved the idea primarily due to the amount of time and effort it would take to research and code the model. 7 years later the coding roadblock has essentially been removed with AI tools like Claude. While Claude can also help with tools integrating research, the actual research portion is still best done with a human touch, which became readily apparent once I actually started looking for historic railroad data.
The Oregon ICC Valuation Index
in 1913 the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) required railway engineers generate detailed maps and reports to provide a valuation of every asset the railroads owned. If you want any historic map information on old railroads the ICC valuation maps are the defacto standard (most were completed from 1915-1920), but I quickly found that the amount of data they have and the amount of data that is readily available online are two different things. As of this reading on 10/3/2026 it estimates only 5.38% are available online: 3,579,710 textual scans online out of 66,525,550 estimated total textual pages in this Record Group.
The interurban railroads did not receive an ICC valuation so Oregon Electric Railway and any of the tracks owned by Portland Railway Light and Power Company were excluded (though later acquisitions from Southern Pacific had some valuations for subsets of the original lines, eg portland traction co etc.)
There are a few local resources that have some valuation sheets and railroad plats, either recorded in county records or through the Association of Oregon Counties Railroad Research but these resources have gaps and are largely incomplete. I am not aware of any comprehensive Oregon valuation records outside of the National Archives.
Which leads me to step one of this project to create a basic map based ICC index so people can easily locate where in the NARA archives they need to look to pull the respective valuation maps.
The indexes were compiled from the railroad specific index maps from 1916 that NARA has available online and correlated with a master spreadsheet of the finding aids that included bundle and railroad line information. I was hoping that the final land reports would be available so I could also get a tally of how many pages each valuation section had but they aren’t available online.
Abandoned Railways
Abandoned Railways takes the timetables of defunct railways and replays them against today’s clock. Open it up and you see where the trains would be right now if they were still running. You can also scrub through the day or speed it up to watch a whole day’s service go by.
There are two lines in it so far:
- Willamette Valley Southern Railway (1915–1933), Oregon City to Mt. Angel, using the 1915 timetable from Richard Thompson’s book Willamette Valley Railways and the PEPCO right-of-way plats I traced for the original map.
- Willamette Falls Railway (1925 timetable), Tualatin River to West Linn to Magones. It ran 62 trips a day from 6:00 am until midnight, and the track was traced from the Southern Pacific right-of-way and track maps for the line.
Future
I’m hoping to expand the Abandoned Railways GTFS Viewer with more railroad data as I come across old valuation plats, timetables, and time to do process it. Perhaps one day there will be a readily available public archive of all the old railway valuation plats for Oregon.