I biked (not hiked) the entire Crown Zellerbach Trail, from the Columbia River at Scappoose to Vernonia, in a couple of stages recently. The day after Thanksgiving, I did the second section from the Nehalem Divide to Vernonia and back.
I got off my bike to do the short scramble down to the west portal of the railroad tunnel (about 3/4 mile from the highway) that is now on the National Register of Historic Places but has been left to rot. There's actually a trail, unmarked, but if you can find it the tread will take you there. The tunnel, carved as it was through soft seafloor sandstone, had to be buttressed and completely framed with timber, but the entire ceiling and most of the wall timbers have collapsed. There are large breakdowns in the middle. I could see the glimmer of the east portal, but did not venture far into the tunnel as I did not have a hard hat or caver-level lighting.
On Sunday, I convinced my wife that we had to find the east portal, so we drove the Scappoose-Vernonia highway to the divide and hiked down about 0.6 miles before I saw a "sign" that indicated a user route that thrashes through big sword ferns and then over an overgrown embankment on North Scappoose Creek.
Logging operations via rail had their beginnings here in 1906 when Fred and Simcoe Chapman constructed the Portland & Southwestern Railroad in stages, logging as they went. As they moved higher into the hills, the Chapmans faced difficulties and sold out to Henry Turrish. One massive endeavor was tunneling through the Nehalem Divide, an unusual undertaking of great expense for a mere logging railroad. The 1,712-foot tunnel was completed in 1920 but not before the Nehalem Timber and Logging company took over operations. Clarke & Wilson succeeded Nehalem Timber and then the former sold to Crown Zellerbach in 1944: Crown Zellerbach took up the tracks and used much of the alignment as a logging road, detouring up and over the divide as the trucks could not use the tunnel, which then fell into disrepair. Later, Hancock Timber became the owners and used the route to a lesser degree. Throughout the 1990s, Columbia County was in negotiations with Hancock over purchase of the road. The route eventually became public property in 2004 and a master plan for public use (hiking, biking, horse riding) was conceived under the moniker 'Crown Zellerbach Trail.'
Again, there's a lot of collapse in the tunnel: it can still be traversed, but at some risk. The area around the tunnel itself is actually BLM land although private property abuts most of the remainder of the Crown Zellerbach Trail.
How cool!!! Awesome post! I wonder if any foreigners died when constructing the tunnel. Thanks Bobcat for your awesome exploration.