A lot could be said about the general subject of how logging railroad operations functioned. There are a myriad of variations. Some lumber companies (not necessarily the ones in the Sumpter country) used jippo loggers to fell and skid timber trackside, so their camps were less developed and far more temporary. I see this on a std. ga. operation that I have studied first hand out in the woods. Sometimes in general the railroad crew was based out of a main camp, or even a small company town like Austin, Bates, White Pine or Curry, but the loggers lived at smaller more mobile camps in the woods. Due to the fact that horses were predominantly used for skidding logs in the early days and moving the horses back to a larger camp every night was not practical, small temp. camps next to the cutting area were likey the norm. Probably a lot of the loggers road the last train out of the woods to a main camp leaving a hand of two to look after the horses. Other considerations would be whether the logging show was adjacent to a common carrier mainline like the Sumpter Valley or a logging companies private mainline like those operated by Oregon Lumber, Baker White Pine and Stoddard. That is if the logs were to be loaded on cars waiting on the mainline, the timing had to be coordinated with scheduled trains. Likey this loading was usually accomplished via a temp spur or siding that the empty log cars could be spotted on by the common carrier, to avoid tying up the mainline. However out on the logging companies mainlines this was probably not an issue at all at least for a smaller outfit. Another situation that seems to have been common along the SVRy were relatively short but sometime up to several miles in length, logging spurs built away from the mainline that had a lumber company owned engine moving loads to the mainline. I have suspected that this may have been why SVRy seems to have used telephone exclusively as a telephone could be hung temporarily on a tree at one of these spurs so the logging engine crew could coordinate any movement they had to make on the SVRy mainline. I imagine that in most cases the loaded log cars would be handed off to an SVRy freight at the nearest siding and empties picked up to take back to the logging spur by the lumber co. crew. As stated most of the lumber sawed at the several remote mills was then shipped to Baker for final finishing.
As to location of spurs connecting to logging line trackage along the SVRy, one can pick out many of these locations while grade hiking. Many are in fact documented on maps. SVRy would own the switch and the track to the point of leaving the SVRy ROW, and the logging company would go from there. The AFE material list many of these switches as to when installed and when removed and for which company. Those prior to the 1916 valuation are less well documented, but sometimes appear on the blue print ROW maps.
