Wishram was quite a spot to spend some time in back in the 70's. It pretty much was a railroad town, with a depot and restaurant open 24 hours. The place seemingly was a throwback to the 60's or before. Add in the fact that almost all of BN's Alco's called the area home and that they normally worked with EMD F's,Geeps, GP30's and GP35's and you had the recipe for some great railfanning. The operators in the depot always seemed to find time to get you a line-up and nobody seemed to care if you wandered all over the place shooting photos. The other thing that really stuck in my mind was the number of hobos still riding the rails in this area. Nearly every train we seen had a number of non revenue riders. If Amtrak could have somehow managed to get them all on a passenger train and paying they probably could have turned a tidy profit. This is train 80 with 2533,4243,2528,4011,4257 pausing for a crew change in front of the depot. The C415 in road service was an odd sight, but BN was extremely power short at the time and anything that ran was welcome.
