The Mount Hood Railway and Power Company, also known as the Mount Hood Company, initiated hydroelectric development in the Sandy River basin in the U.S. state of Oregon in 1906. Its Bull Run Hydroelectric Project included a powerhouse on the Bull Run River, a tributary of the Sandy River, and a diversion dam on the Little Sandy River, a tributary of the Bull Run River. Water from the dam, which was about 16 feet (4.9 m) high, flowed through a wooden flume about 17,000 feet (5,200 m) long to Roslyn Lake and from there to the powerhouse. The company began using the powerhouse to generate electricity in 1912.
To start the project, the company needed improved access to the powerhouse site. At the time, it took three hours by stagecoach to reach Bull Run from an electric railway depot in Boring. Roads in the area had to be planked to be usable during heavy rains. Access improved in mid-1911, when the company finished construction on a railway line between the Montavilla neighborhood in east Portland and the community of Bull Run.
The Mount Hood Railway and Power Company line, 22 miles (35 km) long, began as a steam locomotive railway. In 1912, the company merged with the Portland Railway, Light and Power Company (PRL&P), which later modified the line for use by electric trolleys, and operated it as its Mount Hood Line. PRL&P was the predecessor of Portland General Electric. Trolley service to Bull Run ended in 1930. In the 21st century, part of the Metropolitan Area Express (MAX) Blue Line, a light-rail corridor between Portland and Gresham, overlaps the former PRL&P right-of-way.
Famous quotes containing the words mount, hood, railway, power and/or company:
“As every pool reflects the image of the sun, so every thought and thing restores us an image and creature of the supreme Good. The universe is perforated by a million channels for his activity. All things mount and mount.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Ben Battle was a soldier bold,
And used to war’s alarms;
But a cannon-ball took off his legs,
So he laid down his arms.”
—Thomas Hood (1799–1845)
“Her personality had an architectonic quality; I think of her when I see some of the great London railway termini, especially St. Pancras, with its soot and turrets, and she overshadowed her own daughters, whom she did not understand—my mother, who liked things to be nice; my dotty aunt. But my mother had not the strength to put even some physical distance between them, let alone keep the old monster at emotional arm’s length.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“In common with other rural regions much of the Iowa farm lore concerns the coming of company. When the rooster crows in the doorway, or the cat licks his fur, company is on the way.”
—For the State of Iowa, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)