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)
“What have Massachusetts and the North sent a few sane representatives to Congress for, of late years?... All their speeches put together and boiled down ... do not match for manly directness and force, and for simple truth, the few casual remarks of crazy John Brown on the floor of the Harper’s Ferry engine-house,—that man whom you are about to hang, to send to the other world, though not to represent you there.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune, or “broken heart,” is excuse for cutting off one’s life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.”
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935)