Tired of herding ornery oxen across bumpy skid roads to drag logs to a sawmill, but not enough money in your pocket to build a logging railroad? Such was the challenge faced by early settlers in the Green and White River valleys and on up into the Covington/Maple Valley area. Some of the timber was just too big and had to be left standing or dynamited and burned to clear land for farming. Faced with these and other apparently insurmountable problems, our forebears always seemed to find an answer. Here's a local logging railroad on the cheap.
Image courtesy White River Valley Museum, PO-01196, circa 1900
First step was to improve the skid road, then replace oxen with teams of horses and finally lay down narrow gauge rail so that carts full of logs could be drug along. Certainly a whole lot faster with bigger load capacity than skid roads. They even used small logs in the place of steel rail in some locations when they couldn't afford steel (called pole roads). And somehow, they made it all work - until the next innovation came along.
It also looks like they were made without railroad ties.
Posted by: WILLIAM KOMBOL | 09/10/2019 at 09:28 AM