Last of their kind

Before the late 1920s, this was the Southern Pacific Railroad's mainline between Oregon and California. Dozens of trains a day - freight and passenger - plied these rails. If you or your goods wanted to travel south this is the route you took. The SP invested heavily in upgrading track and bridges, and installed a state of the art semaphore signaling system to control the busy line.

That all changed in 1927 when the Cascade Line was opened. Fewer curves and lesser grades made it the preferred route, and this line became secondary. Traffic dwindled, and in 1995 it was sold to the Central Oregon and Pacific (CORP), who served the remaining lumber products producers in towns like Roseburg and Medford, hauling to the mainline connection in Eugene or Black Butte. The semaphores remained in service, though signaling the passage of fewer and fewer trains. Time was catching up to them, and by the end of the first decade of the new millennium they were removed from service and taken down.

This set of signals was just south of Creswell. I captured them in September 2009, the last of their kind.