Interesting speculation on this thread...and I'm glad to see it resurrected, I missed it the first time around.
My brain's telling me I read someplace once the SVRy once planned to more or less follow the current Highway 395 route south to the Burns area, thence west to the planned connection with the N-C-O somewhere in the Bend/Prineville area. I wonder, had this been completed, how it would have changed the railroad map of central Oregon...UP might have still completed their Oregon Eastern branch to Crane, they pushed west from Vale in 1912 and emerged into the Harney Basin at Crane in 1916, but built no farther. The State of Oregon tried using courts to force UP to expand a system through eastern Oregon, resulting in the ICC ordering UP in 1930 to build a line from Crane to a connection with the Southern Pacific near Eugene, only to rescind the order in 1933, at which time Oregon went back to the courts only to have the Supreme Court rule in favor of UP in 1935.
I also wonder about how the eventual logging of the USFS lands around and south of John Day would have been different...Oregon & Northwestern in all reality only existed because the Edward Hines Western Pine Company was the second party to win the bids on the Bear Valley Timber Sale, containing 890 million board feet around Seneca, after the USFS cancelled the award of the sale to the first successful bidder after the crash in the timber markets in the middle 1920s prevented him from satisfying the contract. One of the provisions of the sale required the successful bidder to built 80 miles of common carrier railroad running from Crane through Burns to Seneca, which was one of the reasons behind the size of the sale, to make railroad construction viable- had the railroad already been there, the eventual timber sales in the Bear Valley area might have been handled very differently. As it was, the first bidder built almost all of the required railroad, selling the Crane to Burns section to the UP and nearly finishing the line north to Seneca when they lost the contract. Had Sumpter Valley built down from the north, the Oregon Lumber Company likely would have been in a pretty good position to compete for that timber, and probably would have denied Burns its long-time status as a sawmill town in the process. It's hard for me to see much justification for a line built much south of Seneca unless it would be a through route on its way to a connection with another carrier...quite a bit of livestock out there, but not much else. On the other hand, had the Sumpter Valley made it to Burns, who's to say they would have completed a line connecting to the UP at Crane and hauled lumber from the Austin and Bates area that way instead of back to Baker City...likely would have required building a planing mill someplace in the John Day or possibly Seneca area, maybe even at Burns, and they still would have had to figure out how to get a standard gauge line over Dixie Summit...but that part of the line likely could have been built to standard gauge, or improved to standard gauge a lot easier than the line going the other way from Bates, provided they could have engineered an acceptable route going into the hills south of John Day. Interesting speculation...
Jeff Moore
Elko, NV
