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:
“But mount to paradise
By the stairway of surprise.””
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“One more Unfortunate,
Weary of breath,
Rashly importunate,
Gone to her death!
Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care;
Fashioned so slenderly,
Young, and so fair!”
—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)
“Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish,—and that makes the offensiveness of the class. They are partial; they are not equal to the work they pretend. They lose their way; in the assault on the kingdom of darkness, they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man—the one he used to be.”
—Cesare Pavese (1908–1950)