Train Town Rolls Into Future

There are two things to do in this tiny train town in the Columbia River Gorge: Buy a burger and a cold beer at the old brick tavern or mail a letter from the brand-new post office.

That’s it.

There are no gas stations here anymore. No motels. No grocery stores.

It’s the sort of thing that happens when the company--Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad--in a company town pulls up stakes.

“The town pretty much goes away,” says Elaine Elliott, 79, a retired railroader who began her career in the 1950s as a “call girl,” knocking on doors and windows to wake up the men in town without telephones to let them know that it was time to go to work.

BNSF shifted most of its resources to bigger rail yards in Washington and Oregon in the 1980s.

Since then, the depot has been torn down. So has the 24-hour railroad diner, once so popular that “people used to drive down here from Seattle just to eat at the Beanery,” recalls Gene Colver, 75, another railroad retiree.

Bunn’s Store, where little kids could buy candy on credit, went out of business.

The park is gone to weeds, and the hobos who rode the rails are rarely seen in town anymore.

There’s still a community church and a 58-student school, kindergarten through 12th grade.

In many ways, it seems as if the last whistle has blown for Wishram, when just a few miles to the west, people are fighting in court for the opportunity to build in this federally protected area.

“I wouldn’t write the town off at this point,” says Mike McBride, a real property appraiser for Klickitat County in Goldendale.

That’s at least in part because the 460-acre town is one of only 13 areas within the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area where development is encouraged rather than severely limited. The scenic area runs about 85 miles, on both the Oregon and Washington sides, west to the outskirts of Portland, Ore., and Vancouver, Wash.

Sandra Campbell and her husband, Ken, found potential in her childhood home when they moved to Wishram from the Seattle suburb of Burien a year ago. They took over the Pastime Tavern from her father and talked of making an antique mall and flea market out of a couple of other buildings on what’s left of Main Street.

“We thought we’d come down here and set this town on fire,” says Campbell, 57, doing bartender and fry cook duty at the tavern.

“My husband fell in love with Wishram. He had a dream, then he got sick”--with liver disease.

The Pastime is the kind of place where strangers offer to buy visitors a cup of coffee and a communal black Lab named Dog hangs around outside.

Inside, patrons have painted the ceiling tiles with personal messages, pictures and poetry. Schoolchildren stop at the walk-up window for takeout lunches.

Most days, three retired railroaders--Colver, Bob Adams, 76, and Vince Jussila, 75--meet here for a beer.

“For a number of years, this was more or less a welfare town. They’ve replaced a bunch of shacks; now it’s a decent place to live,” Adams says.

“It’s a good retirement place--18 miles to the Dalles and 100 miles to Portland,” Jussila says.

The Campbells haven’t given up their dream of making Wishram a little tourist stop off Washington 14--they’ve just postponed it until Ken Campbell gets back on his feet.

“Business is slow, and I’m trying to make it any way I can,” Sandra Campbell says. “There’s a lot here to offer if you got it going.”

She’s already thinking ahead to 2004, the 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery expedition up the Columbia River.

“They say that’s going to put us on the map,” she says.

Already on the map are Maryhill Museum and the new Maryhill Winery just east of town. Just west of Wishram, windsurfers flock to the almost always breezy gorge.

Wishram itself is a two-tier town, with its Main Street just yards from the Columbia River, and views of the gorge and the Cascade Range from the heights.

“People think of it as kind of a railroad town. There’s not much that draws people to that community,” says Allen Bell, a senior planner for the Columbia River Gorge Commission. “Its past history is still dominating its current status.”

But slowly, property in Wishram is beginning to change hands.

The railroad sold most of its property leases to a private individual, who is now selling the property to people with houses built on that land. Others, including key landholders such as the Bunns, who owned the general store, are also putting property on the market.

“The Bunn family owned the majority of the rest of Wishram, and they never sold anything,” McBride says. “Now they’re starting to sell some of that.”

Property values began climbing about three years ago, and sales have picked up, along with some new construction.

“There are some great home sites out there--probably some of the best home sites in the gorge,” McBride says.

He believes that interest in Wishram will increase once people realize the Gorge Commission is serious about limiting building in protected areas.

“The only thing that turns people off is it’s kind of junky looking,” McBride says.

But as more houses are remodeled or built, some of that seediness will start to disappear.

“I personally think that in the next few years, we’re going to see those areas cleaned up and see more possibly retired people moving in. They’re going to realize that it’s got a good view,” McBride says.

Wishram was once a major hub for the Seattle, Portland and Spokane Railway. It began operating through the Columbia River Gorge in 1908, said Gus Melonas, a spokesman for Burlington Northern and a third-generation railroader whose grandfather came over from Greece to help build the original rail yard there.

As the railroad expanded, Wishram became a crew change point. There was a major switching yard, and mechanical shops to service cars and do some light locomotive work. There were maintenance forces and clerical support. Even places to load cattle.

But technological and efficiency changes eventually made Wishram’s operation obsolete, and most of what was done there has moved to major yards in Spokane, Vancouver, Pasco and Portland, Melonas said.

The work force once topped 500. Today, fewer than 20 people report in Wishram, which is now considered a run-through town.

“But it is still a mainline town, operating more tonnage through the town than ever before. Wishram will remain a significant point although operations have consolidated with technology,” Melonas said.