I don’t know if anyone has noticed this, but the Steel Bridge on old postcards is often designated as being owned by any one of three different companies. railway rail Most often you will see the words “O.W.R. & N. Co. Bridge across the Willamette,” or something to that effect. Other times the card might read, “O. R. R. & N. Co. bridge, Portland, Oregon.” Then, on occasion, a card might say, “Union Pacific bridge, Portland, Oregon.” This was confusing to me at one time, until I read a little something on the history of the Union Pacific lines in the west, then I became even more confused. The lines were in and out of receivership, leased, sold, given different, but very similar names, and called different names by different levels of steel railroad hierarchy.
When the first Steel Bridge was built in 1888 the company behind the construction was the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company (O. R. & N. Co.), an old and powerful entity that had evolved from the Oregon Steam Navigation Company hearkening back to the earliest days of transportation on the Columbia and Willamette rivers. This company was huge, with rail stretching to Chicago, 3 large ocean steamers, 16 large riverboats, serving all points from the Snake River in Idaho to Eugene, Oregon, up into the Puget Sound, the company also ran numerous barge services—there is nothing quite like it today.
But, it isn’t that simple, the story of railroads steel rail is a story of monopolies, lawyers, lawsuits, bankers, and continual bankruptcies. Railroads were a shell game played by billionaire monopolists to hide money, lose money on the books, and to make money by the hopper car load. As far as I can make it out, in 1888 the O.R. & N. Co. was leased to the Oregon Short Line, a Union Pacific company. In 1889 the OSL merged with the Utah & Northern, forming the Oregon Short Line & Utah Northern Railway, which continued the lease of O.R. & N. Co. Later that same year the O. S. L.. & U N. Railway purchased a controlling amount of stock in the O.R. & N. Co. The merged group of railroads was called the O.R. & N. Co. and became the Union Pacific’s branch in the west. (To make matters worse for people trying to sort this out in 1897 the Oregon Railway and Navigation Co. was reorganized, having been in receivership for several years. The new name they chose was the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company.)
So where did the O.W.R. & N. Co. come from? In 1910, the year the new Steel Bridge was built, the Oregon Washington Railroad & Navigation Co. (OWR&N) was incorporated as a consolidation of Oregon Railroad & Navigation Co. and 14 other, smaller railroad companies in Oregon and Washington. This franchise continued on for a long time, until December 29, 1987, when it was merged with the Deschutes Railroad into the Oregon Short Line Railroad. The following day the Oregon Short Line Railroad was merged into the Union Pacific Railroad.
