Rail Ferry Service
After the Willamette Chief was taken off the wheat trade she was put into the towing business, and after some miscellaneous work, the once-celebrated steamer was assigned ferry duty to move rail cars across the Willamette at Portland. In those days before the rail bridges connected the east and west banks of the river, inclined rail docks were built on each side of the river and rail cars were rolled down them onto matching tracks built on the decks of the steamer.
Read more about this topic: Willamette Chief (sternwheeler)
Famous quotes containing the words rail, ferry and/or service:
“We rail at trade, but the historian of the world will see that it was the principle of liberty; that it settled America, and destroyed feudalism, and made peace and keeps peace; that it will abolish slavery.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“This ferry was as busy as a beaver dam, and all the world seemed anxious to get across the Merrimack River at this particular point, waiting to get set over,—children with their two cents done up in paper, jail-birds broke lose and constable with warrant, travelers from distant lands to distant lands, men and women to whom the Merrimack River was a bar.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The more the specific feelings of being under obligation range themselves under a supreme principle of human dependence the clearer and more fertile will be the realization of the concept, indispensable to all true culture, of service; from the service of God down to the simple social relationship as between employer and employee.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)