Beverly

Late autumn sun was weakly warm on our backs as Dan and I got out of the car at Beverly, Washington. Driving the hour plus from Yakima had been routine and was there was no clue as to what a wonderful event this day would be for us. Memorable, as were the many railroad archeological treks we took, this one is one of the best in my memory.

We had scouted the sad and dilapidated town of Beverly. It is not much more than a motley collection of abandoned houses, tar-paper shacks, trailers in sad disrepair and mountains of refuse. Once a thriving crew change point on the Milwaukee Road, it now is nothing. This is poignantly manifest in the boarded up post office building covered with graffiti. We had seem the mammoth Beverly Bridge spanning the almost mile of the Columbia River. No more would that black hulk sway and rattle to the roar and screaming steel of diesels, boxcabs and long freights. The Road was dead and had been for 24 years by the time we got there in 2005. A quarter century had been hard on Beverly.

We skirted the town limits, hiking the quarter mile from there to the nearest bridge approach. Almost immediately the sand was littered with rusty objects: nails, spikes, tie plates, shattered and splintered remnants of railroad ties. There was a bent and broken signal that looked as if it could have been one of the four wind speed danger signal lights at each end of the bridge. The canyon of the Columbia there produced winds so strong that they could AND DID topple freight cars right off the bridge and into the river. When the lights flashed, trains stopped and did not cross.

Coming back towards town I mentioned to Dan that I bet the sand covered many, many date nails that had fallen out of railroad ties. Not too much further on, my eye caught sight of a strange tie remnant, no more than four inches long, laying against a sage brush. Turning it over,
My eyes beheld a date nail still imbedded into it with the date ’28. I was ecstatic! We walked the area that had been the rail yards and Dan climbed the only intact structure remaining…the brick base of the water tower. This relic of the steam era was in wonderful shape, though it’s inside cavity was filled with trash. Locating the site of the crew change station…in later years a simple boxcar and de-trucked heavyweight passenger coach, we pawed through rust and wreckage but found no other gems.

With the sun beginning to decline over the Saddle Mountains, steeper and harder to cross than even the Rockies for the railroad, we wended our way home. At Boylston, a huge black spidery steel bridge crosses Highway 90, to this day. It is a ghost though, the top open to the sky, devoid of ties and blocked off at both ends for safety.* That was our last view of the Milwaukee that day, the black shadow, disappearing into the gloaming. Night had come to the Milwaukee but that day, Dan and I were able to imagine and relive a bit of its glory days.


*Boylston Trestle was the scene of a later adventure in 2009, when Dan found yet another tie piece with a ’36 date nail. He also scared the
H___out of his father by climbing part of the trestle.

9-13-2010