Oahu Railway and Land Company
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The Oahu Railway and Land Company (OR & L) is a former railway company in Hawaii ( United States ). It operated a network of three-foot (914 mm) gauge railways on the island of Oahu .
history
Benjamin Franklin Dillingham founded the company on February 4, 1889 to build a railway from Honolulu to Ewa . He had received the concession for this from King Kalākaua on September 11, 1888 . The line went into operation on November 16, 1889 to ʻAiea . Pearl City was reached on January 1, 1890 . The extension to ʻEwa was opened in May 1890. On July 4, 1895, the track reached Wai'anae on the west coast of the island and on June 1, 1898 already Hale'iwa on the north coast, where Dillingham built a hotel. From this time on, the line was also operated as a passenger service. The Haleʻiwa Limited needed only two hours for the route from Honolulu to Haleʻiwa. On December 28, 1898, the 115 kilometer main line Honolulu - Kahuku was completed and in operation. In 1906, a 17-kilometer branch line from Waipahu to Wahiawā was added, which also connected to the Schofield Barracks, an important barracks of the US Army . Besides passengers, the main transport goods were sugar and pineapples, but general cargo was also carried.
At the end of June 1910, the railway company owned 16 locomotives, 25 passenger cars, four combined passenger, mail and baggage cars, two saloon cars, three baggage cars, 152 closed, 86 flat freight cars, three material cars, 37 coal cars, 32 tankers and eight work cars. In the 1909/10 financial year, 617,719 passengers and 531,751 tons of goods were transported.
In 1921, the line from Honolulu to Waipahu Junction was expanded to two tracks and equipped with automatic block signals. During the Second World War , the US Army built a 17-kilometer link from Wahiawā to Pu'uiki on the north coast and a branch to Halemano . This had become necessary after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor , as the coastline was vulnerable to attack and the railroad was urgently needed for the transport of soldiers and military goods. An army depot was located in Halemano. In addition, a six kilometer long army connection was built from Nanakuli to connect an ammunition bunker near Lualualei . In order to meet the strong transport demand, the railroad acquired used cars from various railways from the mainland of the United States, including the Boston, Revere Beach and Lynn Railroad in Massachusetts .
On April 1, 1946, a tsunami destroyed large parts of the north coast of the island, including the railway line. Although the line was rebuilt, the generally poor condition of the tracks and wagons meant that traffic was stopped on December 31, 1947 and the lines were largely dismantled. Only the double-track section of the main line from Honolulu to Kahili remained in operation as a freight connecting railway. In addition, the US Navy carried out irregular ammunition transports from the ammunition store near Nanakuli to Pearl City. In 1961 the railway company was reorganized into the Oahu Railway and Terminal Warehouse Company . In the following year, the traffic to Kahili ended and only 16 kilometers of track in the Honolulu area remained in operation as shunting tracks until 1972. In 1970 military transports by rail also ended.
In 1970, railroad fans founded the Hawaiian Railway Society and acquired part of the military line. On 1 December 1975, the route Ewa Mill Nanakuli in was National Register of Historic Places ( dt. National register of historic places) entered. Only the Ewa Mill – Kahe Point section is in operation, but there are plans to expand operations to Nanakuli.
literature
- Mike Walker: Comprehensive Railroad Atlas of North America. Pacific Northwest. SPV-Verlag, Dunkirk (GB), 1998.
- Jim Chiddix, MacKinnon Simpson: Next Stop Honolulu! - The Story of the Oahu Railway and Land Company. Sugar Cane Press, Honolulu HI 2004. ISBN 0-9706213-1-0
- Gale Driver: Hawaiian Railway Album: WWII Photographs, Vol. 2 - Along the Main Lines of the Oahu Railway & Land Co. and the Hawaii Consolidated Railway. The Railroad Press. ISBN 1-931477-14-0
- George H. Drury: Hawaiian Railroads , in: William D. Middleton, George M. Smerk, Roberta L. Diehl (Eds.): Encyclopedia of North American Railroads. Indiana University Press, Bloomington IN / Indianapolis IN 2007. ISBN 978-0-253-34916-3
- George W. Hilton: American Narrow Gauge Railroads. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto CA 1990. ISBN 0-8047-2369-9
- Jeff Livingston: Oahu's Narrow-Gauge Navy Rail. Arcadia Publishing 2014. ISBN 1467131970
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Poor's Manual of Railroads, 44th Annual Number. Poor's Railroad Manual Co., 1911, 1405.