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1931-1945: NP Control and the Growth
of Freight Traffic
Following Northern Pacific
control, local management wasted little time to make the little interurban
railroad competitive to Union Pacific. Built primarily for passenger
traffic, the WWV’s capacity to handle much freight traffic was severely
limited.
“We sometimes interchange as
high as thirty empties for thirty loads in a day and after these cars are
shoved over to us, we have no place to set out our transfer cars,” General
Manager W. D. Pearce wrote March 24, 1923. He requested Northern Pacific
officials spend $15 74.00
to add 970 feet of interchange tracks with the NP in Walla Walla. “This
creates much unnecessary switching, causes a bad delay to the icing crews,
and a bad delay to the cars of fruit. . .this track will save each company
in the neighborhood of $250 a year in switching alone besides facilitating
the work of icing and saving a delay to the fruit of several hours which
may mean many hours earlier delivery at its eastern destination.”
On line, the situation was no
better. On May 3, 1926, Pearce asked for construction of a storage track
to hold 44 refrigerator cars—“almost a day’s demand in shipping season”--
near State Line, Washington. “We have always been handicapped during a
fruit season on account of insufficient storage space. We can store about
50 cars on our line now, but as we are limited to our motive power and
must get our empties out on the line and loads back in when we can, and
with the Northern Pacific also cramped for storage space in Walla Walla,
we have repeatedly been hard pressed to keep our car orders filled. At the
present time, except for a 10 car passing track at State Line, we have no
storage tracks between Maple Street (College Place) and Freewater, loading
being done on all other tracks between these stations.”
Fruit traffic was booming in
the Walla Walla Valley. Packing houses were located at a half-dozen points
along the railroad: Blalocks, Whitman, Stateline, Twilight, Ferndale,
Freewater and Milton. All this traffic was very tenuous to the WWV--none
of the growers were more than a few miles from access to the Union
Pacific, further pressuring the NP to spend the money to keep the WWV up
to the task. In 1923, 5 5 cars of prunes moved off the railroad daily for
10 straight days; during the apple season, a dozen cars a day moved to
market, most of them off the Yellowhawk branch. In 1926, WWV shipped
nearly 600 cars of prunes and 700 cars of apples. To protect the fruit, an
ice manufacturing plant and dock were constructed in 1922 at Milton.
The perishable traffic came in
waves; a succession of harvests keeping the railroad busy from late May
until into late November. Peas were the first crop to come in, a 6-8 week
long harvest beginning in late May. As the peas were tapering off, the
Cherries became ripe, with harvest lasting until mid-July. Wheat was
harvested during July and August, and then the railroad caught a short
breath before the prunes were ready in early August, a run lasting
typically three to five weeks. Then, apples took over in late August,
running until mid-September. To close off the year, sugar beets bound
primarily for the Utah & Idaho sugar factory in Toppenish were shipped in
a campaign beginning in mid-September and lasting up to two and a half
months.
But not all the railroad’s
traffic was fresh fruit and vegetables. Several bulk oil dealers were
located on line, along with farmers co-ops handling coal, fertilizer, farm
implements, and seed. A sand and gravel plant received a half-dozen or
more cars of gravel from Umatilla at a time. Several small lumber mills
were located along the railroad, as was a box factory for fruit field and
shipping boxes. A vinegar factory was located at Blalocks, between Walla
Walla and College place, and a small foundry operation was located not too
far south of Mill Creek in Walla Walla. A small amount of hay moved each
winter by rail as well, most of it from the Stateline area.
In the 1930s, what would
historically become WWV’s best shipper opened its cannery on the south
side of Milton. The Rogers cannery was a big traffic producer, receiving
several hundred carloads of empty cans inbound and shipping up to 1000
cars a year, traffic peaking in July, August and into early September. To
help feed the demand of a growing cannery industry in eastern Washington,
Continental Can Company opened its Walla Walla can factory in XXXX,
jointly served by WWV and Union Pacific. Receiving tin sheet and coil
stock and wood pallets, the factory supplied canneries as far as Seattle
to the west and Red Lodge, Montana, to the east. Quite a bit of the
factory’s production went by rail to local canneries served by Northern
Pacific: to Waitsburg and Dayton, and Pendleton, and of course, Milton-Freewater
on the WWV. Union Pacific enjoyed a similar level of traffic from
Continental Can.
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In the final year of electric
operation, September 1949, motor 600 takes a cut of cars southbound down N. 13th
St., swinging around the tight curve past theWalla Walla carbarn. Trackage
on the right curves east onto Rose Street towards WWV's downtown passenger
station. Robert P. Townley photo.
Most powerful locomotive in WWV's
electric fleet was motor 19, parked outside the three-stall carbarn at N
13th and Rose St. in Spetmber 1949. Note the baggage cart outside the carbarn:
long after passenger service ended, WWV carried LCL (Less Than Carload Lot) express
traffic on board its locomotives. Robert P. Townley photo. |
