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:
“My name shall mount upon Eternitie.”
—Michael Drayton (1563–1631)
“We thought her dying when she slept,
And sleeping when she died.”
—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)
“Compared to other parents, remarried parents seem more desirous of their child’s approval, more alert to the child’s emotional state, and more sensitive in their parent-child relations. Perhaps this is the result of heightened empathy for the child’s suffering, perhaps it is a guilt reaction; in either case, it gives the child a potent weapon—the power to disrupt the new household and come between parent and the new spouse.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)