The Idaho Northern and Pacific Railroad (reporting mark INPR) is a small railroad that runs in Southwest Idaho and Eastern Oregon in the United States. It operates about 210 miles of former Union Pacific branch lines and is currently a subsidiary of the Rio Grande Pacific Company. As of 2006, the INPR operates three separate sections of rail, one running from La Grande, Oregon to Elgin, Oregon, connecting at Elgin with another former UP rail line now owned by Wallowa County which continues to Joseph, Oregon,and the other section is one of the most scenic stretches of Union Pacific route, running from Payette through Emmett and then into the Canyon of the Payette River on a northerly route to Cascade. This line historically continued on to the former logging community McCall.
As of 2006, INPR operates tourist trains and "river and rail" trips in the Payette Canyon that allow riders to ride a train in one direction and return by river raft on the water of the North Fork of the Payette River. Both the Oregon portion and the Payette River line were historically built as logging and lumbering lines with large Boise Cascade mills located in nearby communities, but some of those mills were disbanded and closed in recent times, consistent with a decline in logging and lumber processing in much of the Northwestern United States. As of 2012 The Idaho Northern and Pacific serves the still operating Boise Cascade lumber and plywood mills in Elgin, Oregon, the Boise Cascade particleboard plant in Island City, Oregon, and the Boise Cascade sawmill in La Grande, Oregon.
The Boise line is operated for freight connection with Union Pacific at Nampa and to serve the industrial areas in East Boise with rail service.
Idaho Northern and Pacific's offices are located in Emmett.
Famous quotes containing the words northern, pacific and/or railroad:
“The northern sky rose high and black
Over the proud unfruitful sea,
East and west the ships came back
Happily or unhappily....”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“The doctor of Geneva stamped the sand
That lay impounding the Pacific swell,
Patted his stove-pipe hat and tugged his shawl.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“... no other railroad station in the world manages so mysteriously to cloak with compassion the anguish of departure and the dubious ecstasies of return and arrival. Any waiting room in the world is filled with all this, and I have sat in many of them and accepted it, and I know from deliberate acquaintance that the whole human experience is more bearable at the Gare de Lyon in Paris than anywhere else.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)