(The following story by Mike Archbold appeared on the King county Journal website on March 29.)
BELLEVUE, Wash. — Rodger Campbell worked at the Auburn Yard in the heyday of railroading in Auburn and when it finally closed in the early 1980s, he was the last man to leave.
“I turned out the lights,” the 73-year-old retired railroad chief clerk said last week as he played tour guide inside the remnants of the yard. Located south of downtown Auburn, the yard is a rectangular expanse of bare land between A Street and C Street Southeast. It stretches south nearly 40 blocks from Highway 18 to Ellingson Road.
Where once hundreds of people worked in what was the Northern Pacific’s Western freight terminus, today there are hardly a dozen or so on a good day. Empty wheat cars sit idle on rusted tracks, waiting for locomotives and orders to move east.
Last week a section crewman in the cab of an equipment hauler called a pettybone rushed by, dragging a long length of rail from the north end of the yard to the south. A newly arrived engine hauling more wheat cars sounded a single horn blast as it came to a stop.
Campbell pointed north from the yard’s nondescript entrance off A Street Southeast at 13th Street South to a lone low brick building.
“That was the store house,” he said. “It’s the only building left.”
Gone, too, is the yard house where Campbell worked. He was hired into the yard in 1946 and worked in a variety of jobs before ending up as yard clerk. He pointed to the south where the ice house is also gone, torn down when refrigeration replaced the ice cars. He worked there, too, breaking up 300-pound cakes of ice hauled to the yard from Seattle.
Yard, buildings in photos
The Auburn Yard as it once was will be remembered in an exhibit opening Wednesday and running through July 11 at the White River Valley Museum. Historic photographs will show the yard, its buildings and the men and women who worked there.
The trains still run through Auburn, but times, technology and corporate mergers killed the yard.
Few of the trains stop in the yard. In 1912, when it was built, the yard turned the sleepy farming community of Auburn into a bustling railroad town.
In 1910, there were 957 residents; by 1913 Auburn’s population, fueled by railroad men and their families, more than doubled to 1,928.
Auburn was the ideal location for a freight and service yard: half way between Seattle and Tacoma and at the westernmost end of the Northern Pacific’s main line that snaked over the Cascades. It was a switch yard where trains were formed for trips north, east and south.
To service the trains they needed a machine shop, offices, water and oil facilities, a power house, freight transfer shed, a coal dock, fuel oil plant, bunk houses for the section gangs and more than three miles of switching tracks to hold the trains. There was a rip track where the rail cars were repaired with new wheels and brakes. The yard never slept.
$1 million a year payroll
Payroll was estimated to be $1 million a year with a work force of nearly 600. The yard was expected to handle 44 trains a day
They also built the roundhouse, a 25-stall repair shop for steam locomotives, complete with a giant turntable that could hold a locomotive. It could be turned to direct a locomotive to the proper stall or send it out of the roundhouse either to the north or to the south..
“… the roundhouse was the ultimate hot spot, railroading’s inner sanctum,” wrote Kurt E. Armbruster in his 1991 Green River railroading history book, “Whistle Down the Valley.”
“To the men who worked there, the roundhouse was interesting, perhaps, but also noisy, dirty and downright dangerous. A place of massive metal castings and thousands-of-an-inch tolerances, smoke, fire and grease. The roundhouse forces were skilled craftsmen at their best.”
Among those craftsmen was Eddie Eckes, 78, who went to work in the yard during the summer of 1940. He was 16 years old and worked unloading railroad ties and cleaning cars for 50 cents an hour. A month later, a rule came down that workers had to be 18 years old to work on a section gang.
Career in the roundhouse
Eckes was fired, but a month later he heard the roundhouse was hiring. There was no age restriction there and he found not only a job and a 4-cent raise, but a career. He turned 18, joined the Navy during World War II then returned to the roundhouse in 1946 as an apprentice machinist.
Framed sheet music of old, forgotten railroad songs like “In the Baggage Car Ahead” and “The Bum Song” hang on the walls in one corner of Eddie and Ruth Eckes’ West Hill home.
On top of a credenza, a black case holds a telegraph bug, a Vibroplex telegraph key that Ruth used during her 10 years tapping out and receiving dispatch orders at her many railroad station assignments — from Eagle Gorge on the Green River to Easton, Yakima and the Auburn Yard.
Sitting on the floor is a hand-made wood horn with a billows that, when pushed, creates the whistle of a steam locomotive.
On another wall is the original charter documents of the International Association of Machinists in Auburn encased in glass. It is dated 1934.
One of Eckes’ early jobs in the roundhouse was tending the fires in the steam locomotives, keeping them hot overnight so they were ready to go when needed.
By the early 1950s, diesel was replacing steam. The huge diesel house was built next to the roundhouse to repair the new technology.
Eckes moved with the times. As steam disappeared, so did the roundhouse. In 1957, Northern Pacific saluted the end of the steam era with Casey Jones Excursion trips in the Puget Sound region.
The Auburn Yard also had a romantic attachment for the Eckes. He and Ruth met there in 1953 when she worked the telegraph in the yard office.
Couple keeps history alive
Together the Eckes, who live in the Auburn area on the West Hill, have tried to keep railroading history alive. Ruth collected, edited and published six volumes of stories by railroad people called “Rail Tales.” They are on sale at the museum.
“These are our stories. This is history. This is the way it was and it will never happen again,” she said.
The end of the Auburn Yard came with the merger of a number of railroad lines, including Northern Pacific and Great Northern, into Burlington Northern (now Burlington Northern Santa Fe) in 1970.
Campbell said that when the official petition for the merger was made in 1961, the plans called for closure of the Auburn Yard.
“We fought it,” Campbell said. The Auburn Industrial Committee was formed to oppose the merger. Committee members attended hearings, lobbied politicians and petitioned government regulators.
The merger was approved Nov. 30, 1967, and Burlington Northern was set to begin operation May 10, 1968.
Campbell said the late Alva Long, a well-known Auburn attorney, succeeded on behalf of the committee in getting an injunction against the merger so it could be further reviewed. The injunction delayed, but didn’t stop the inevitable. The merger was final in February 1970.
Local switching disappears
Despite promises that Auburn would remain a vital rail center, the former Great Northern route took up more and more of the traffic. Yards in Tacoma and Seattle took over. Local switching and maintenance work at the Auburn yard slowed and then disappeared.
By the late 1970s, Campbell said, the car shops were closed. Buildings were closed and eventually torn down. In 1987, the diesel house was demolished. The Stampede line out of Auburn closed for 15 years starting in 1981, the same year Campbell turned out the lights.
It was a Friday, he said. He was the last man working in the yard.
Looking around the yard last year, however, Campbell said the Auburn Yard never returned to its glory, but it certainly could grow in value to Burlington Northern. There is little room to expand operations in Tacoma and Seattle and the Auburn Yard could live again.
“In time, I think it will,” he said.
Auburn Yard Exhibit
WHERE: White River Valley Museum, 918 H St. S.E. in Les Gove Park in south Auburn.
WHEN: Wednesday through July 11
WHAT: Exhibit features 40 historic photographs put together by guest curator Dave Sprau, a regional rail historian and Burlington Northern retiree.
LECTURE: Dave Sprau will lecture on the yard April 4, 2:30-3:30 p.m. The lecture is included in museum admission. Seating is limited.
HOURS/ ADMISSION: Open noon to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Sundays; by appointment for group tours. Admission is $2 for adults, $1 for children and seniors. Wednesdays are free for everyone.
INFORMATION: Call 253-288-7433 or visit the Web at www.wrvmuseum.org.