McCormack, best known as the engineer aboard Southern Pacific 4-8-4 No. 4449, will remain on the board of directors representing the Friends of SP 4449. He is being replaced by Roy Hemmingway, who previously served as ORHF treasurer. McCormack has been president since the founding of ORHF in 2004.
The ORHF runs the Oregon Rail Heritage Center near downtown Portland, home to three steam locomotives owned by the City of Portland and a number of other historic locomotives and cars.
In an interview with Trains News Wire, McCormack, 75, says he told the board in January that he did not want to run for another one-year term as the head of the ORHF.
“It was time,” he says of his departure as president.
McCormack was instrumental in the creation of the Oregon Rail Heritage Center, an interpretive museum and locomotive shop on a 3-acre site across the street from the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. The ORHF was established to find a permanent home for Portland’s three steam locomotives – SP No. 4449, Spokane, Portland & Seattle 4-8-4 No. 700 and Oregon Railroad & Navigation Company 4-6-2 No. 197 – that were previously kept and maintained at the SP’s Brooklyn Roundhouse. The roundhouse was torn down in 2012 to make way for a new intermodal facility. The new ORHF facility was named the “Doyle L. McCormack Enginehouse” when it opened to the public in 2012.
“Without Doyle, the magnificent Oregon Rail Heritage Center would not exist,” says incoming President Hemmingway. “No one has done more for heritage steam preservation in America than Doyle McCormack.”
McCormack plans on staying involved with ORHF, specifically the installation of the former Brooklyn yard turntable in front of the enginehouse. He’ll also stay busy maintaining No. 4449 and his “big blue-and-white beast,” Nickel Plate Road PA1 No. 190. The Alco locomotive was originally built for the Santa Fe and made famous on the Delaware & Hudson before being sold to Mexico. McCormack helped bring the locomotive back from Mexico in 2000 and he’s been restoring it ever since to resemble an NKP PA-1, just like the one he got a cab ride on as a kid in 1955.
Although the locomotive was successfully started up in 2013, and even appeared at “Streamliners at Spencer” in Spencer, N.C., in 2014, McCormack says there’s still a “three-page long checklist, all single space” worth of tasks before the Alco will run under its own power. He’s hopeful that will happen sooner rather than later.
“I still have a lot to do on it,” he says. “I just want to see her run once so I can die happy.”
