The singing started early on.
As the 112-year-old steam locomotive rumbled out of its berth at the Oregon Rail Heritage Center in Southeast Portland, St. Nick launched into a song about himself – “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” – as he moved through the aisles of the vintage train cars, passing out candy canes, his elf assistants in tow. Soon almost all the passengers in the car – especially the children – were joining in, belting out the familiar yuletide diddy.
The Holiday Express is back, with the 1912 train heading out multiple times every Friday, Saturday and Sunday until the end of the year. The trip trundles along the Springwater Corridor
on a roughly 45-minute out-and-back trip that reverses at Sellwood Riverfront Park. On this day, in 50-degree weather, it included an open-air front car, hitched behind the engine’s billowing smokestack.
Megan Black, who was on the train Saturday with her husband Jason, their 3-year-old son and their 9-month-old daughter, loved being in the old passenger car, bedecked in strings of colored lights, and loved the sights outside along the way – including spotting a buck with two-prong antlers in a marsh along the Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge.
But it was Santa and the other volunteers who really made the trip special, she said.
“They’re super-jolly and super-helpful, ” she said. “They just really make the vibe of this whole thing amazing.”
The train’s cars were mostly packed, as young children excitedly looked out at the views of the Willamette River while their parents chatted.
The volunteers, meanwhile, were busy at work, keeping that vibe amazing.
“I’ve put in 16-hour days leading up to this to have it pay off,” said Zack Black, an 18-year-old volunteer at the rail center unrelated to Megan Black and her family. He helped get the train’s antique engine in shape for the holiday rides, and it was worth all the effort, he said. “Seeing everyone so happy and glad to be down here really warms my heart.”
The railroad museum has three vintage steam locomotives, with two of them operational. The oldest one, built by Baldwin Locomotive Works, “arrived in Portland just in time for the 1905 Lewis & Clark Centennial Exposition, just 17 months after the Wright Brothers first flew at 9.8 mph, when Teddy Roosevelt was President and 3 years before Henry Ford rolled out his first Model T,” notes the rail center’s website.
The train used for the Holiday Express is the Polson Logging Co. 2, which the Albany Eastern Railroad has lent to the museum for the last three years.
The Portland museum offers train rides around Easter and at other times, but the Holiday Express, in its 20th year, is by far the most popular, with typically more than 20,000 people showing up each winter to ride the train.
“It truly is the volunteers who keep this place going,” Renee Devereux, the Oregon Rail Heritage Center’s executive director, said. “It’s a big operation, and they come back year after year.”
So do many of the passengers — although several of the people onboard the train on Saturday were experiencing the ride with fresh eyes.
One of them was Jason Black, who was holding his son, Manny, on the deck of the open-air train car as white steam from the engine billowed past them.
“We love that it’s a beautiful day and they have the open-air cars today,” he said. “My son’s in love with trains, so this was a great opportunity.”