Putting aside the perennial grumbling about noise and delays, we in Albany should be glad we still have functioning railroads to watch as they work, relieving highways of some of the burden of moving heavy freight.
I was thinking of that the other day when I got the news that trains have stopped running on the historic Siskiyou line across the mountains on the southern Oregon state line.
On Dec. 11, the Central Oregon & Pacific Railroad ran its last train on the line from Weed, Calif., north to Ashland. It was a long train. It started with 38 cars and picked up 14 empties in Hornbrook. Then the whole train, four locomotives and 52 cars, chugged across the mountains to Ashland and Medford…