Chuck Palahniuk - Fugatives & Refugees

Inside are steam locomotives as big as houses, being restored by volunteers who love them.

This is the home of the American Freedom Train, engine number SP4449, built in May 1941. It crossed the country as part of the Bicentennial in 1975-76, and it's still red, white, and blue. Come by on a Monday or Wednesday afternoon and look for Harvey Rosener, the man who built the first high-speed graphics card for a network PC and who works on the engine with his fellow "Friends of the 4449." Also, check out the engines latest trips across the Pacific Northwest on www.4449.com.

The last day I visited, the steam engine for the Spokane, Portland, and Seattle Railroad was also parked in the roundhouse, a double-expansion engine that uses the steam twice. The wheels of these monsters hit most people at chin height. The stock changes but also look for engines from the old Nickel Plate Road, plus European passenger cars and more.

Western Antique Powerland

Larry Leek points out a pile of huge cast-iron columns from the Oregon state capitol building that burned in 1935. Dark and cracked from the heat of the fire, they're here to become part of the Oregon Fire Service Museum. For most of the twentieth century the columns and their fancy cast-iron capitals and bases had been dumped into a local creek as landfill material. "Whatever people don't know what to do with, it comes here. Sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's not so good." The field behind the trolley barn is an organized mix of decaying trolley cars and railroad parts on pallets. Pointing at a trolley car, all splintered wood and peeling paint, Larry says, "If somebody wants to give you a hundred-year-old car, it's hard to say no."

Take Interstate 5 south from Portland to exit 263, just north of Salem. Turn right at the stop sign and then right again a quarter mile later at the sign for Western Antique Powerland, and you'll be traveling back in time. Here are sixty-two acres of history, a grassroots collection of museums and historical re-creations built and maintained by a half dozen different volunteer groups.

"I started with an old tractor I brought out, and I've been here ever since," Larry says, now the group's president. "I'm basically what you'd call a scrounger—I like it all."

Here's the Willow Creek Railroad, a miniature railway with over a mile and a half of track. And the original 1870 Southern Pacific depot moved here from Brooks, Oregon.

Here's the Oregon Electric Railway Museum, a band of two hundred members busy restoring trains from around the world. Walk through an open-air car from Australia. A double-decker car with cramped, five-foot-ten ceilings from Hong Kong. Cars from Los Angeles and San Francisco. They have the two original 1904 trolley cars that ran to the amusement park on top of Council Crest, still with the original hand-painted signs for Jantzen swimwear. Jack Norton, the superintendent of operations, says how the museum's been around since the 1950s. Their car barn holds nine restored cars, and overhead wires allow them to drive out onto the museum's network of tracks around the grounds. Another barn holds nothing but tractors, including the oldest operating steam tractor in the country, built in 1880. Their newest steam tractor is from 1929, with most built between 1895 and 1915. Ask Larry to show you the creepy 1900 steam engine that a murderer spent his whole life insanely cutting into tiny pieces with a hand hacksaw.

The museum of stationary engines could be a Stephen King nightmare of the Industrial Revolution. Row after row of huge engines loom over you, all of them big thrashing monsters of iron, brass, and steel. Here, Larry can show you a stationary engine that runs on hot air, turning the flywheel to work a Rube Goldberg—looking system of pistons and rods.

Next door is the antique car and truck museum with everything from a very antique hearse to snowplows and the world's biggest monkey wrench collection—more than 1,006 unique monkey wrenches. Be sure to check out the before-and-after photos of the vehicles. They're unbelievable. The first one will be some rusty skeleton in a pile of weeds. The second, showroom quality.

Don't miss the restored 1907 steam-powered sawmill, with the kind of huge spinning blade you'd use to kill a silent movie heroine tied to a log. It's powered by the engine from the abandoned Bumble Bee Tuna Cannery in Astoria. Next to it is the twelve-foot-tall drive wheel of the restored engine from the old B. P. Johns furniture factory that became the John's Landing shopping mall. Next to that is a working blacksmith shop.

And opening soon will be the Oregon Fire Service Museum.

The best time to see everything up and running is the last weekend in July and the first weekend in August, at the annual Great Oregon Steam-Up. For more information, call 503-393-2424.

From trains to tractors to trucks, if you think it's gone—it's here. But keep that under your hat. As Larry says, "OSHA [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration] would have a heart attack if they saw us running all this stuff."

Willamette Shore Trolley

Ride a century-old, double-decker electric trolley car from downtown Portland, south to Lake Oswego, through some of the area's best scenery. This is the old 1887 line that runs between the RiverPlace development on the Portland waterfront and downtown Lake Oswego, passing through the forested private estates of Dunthorpe, a tunnel, and skirting along the cliffs high above the Willamette River and Elk Rock Island.

Beginning in April, the trolley runs every weekend, adding Thursday and Friday in May. Regular service runs through October. The best runs include the Fourth of July trips that let you watch fireworks launched from Oakes Amusement Park. Also, the December runs follow the fleet of lighted Christmas ships that cruise the river. And the Valentine s Day trips are also very popular. Reservations are very recommended; call 503-697-7436 or 503-222-2226. The southern trolley depot is at 311 N State Street in Lake Oswego; this end of the route has free parking.

U.S.S. Blueback

Launched May 16, 1959, the U.S.S. Blueback is a diesel-powered, Barbel-class submarine that was home to a crew of eighty-five men for its thirty-one years in service. In Vietnam it dropped Navy SEALs and mined harbors. It arrived in Portland in 1994, decommissioned, after being used in the film The Hunt for Red October.

Look for RG Walker, the submarine manager, who says, "The effect we're going for is as if the crew's just left and gone on shore for the day." Food still sits on plates. Dirty dishes are piled in the sink. Razors and personal items lie where they've been dropped on bunks. RG will show you the pull-down screen where they showed movies during each two-month tour at sea. A former submariner, RG says, "On some tour of duty, we went out with just one movie— West Side Story. By the time we got back into port, everyone knew every song. They'd all be dancing around, singing, 'I'm a shark! I'm a jet!'"

Really, the best tour is the "Techno Tour," given only on the first Sunday of each month. It's limited to eight people and led by an ex-submariner who has no problems lingering over the most obscure detail. Officially, it's two hours but can last up to four or six if the group is that curious. Buy your $15 tickets early at the front desk. The Techno Tour starts at 10:00 in the morning.

Licensed ham radio operators can broadcast from the on-board radio station.

The Blueback resides at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI), at 1945 SE Water Avenue.

One side of NE Multnomah Boulevard is Lined with Portland police officers in full SWAT gear, Kevlar face shields, and body armor, holding black riot sticks.