Here's my two cents on the matter:

1. Wallowa Union is a remote railroad, with zero freight prospect, very expensive track to maintain.

2. WURR is located well removed from tourism centers.

3. WURR will be competiting with (yes, compete) the existing Sumpter Valley Railroad (which has ties to local gold-panning historical sites and Baker City), and in a sense also the Mount Hood Railroad.

4. Sumpter Valley is a short, five mile operation that's well established for many years. The original SVRY was much, much longer than five miles.

5. Mount Hood is much closer (about an hour east of Portland), right off of I-84 (there's even a VERY LARGE sign installed by ODOT for the MHRR) - and yet they couldn't make a steam locomotive work.

6. Western Oregon/Washington already have three established steam operations - OCSR, C&C and MRSR. Why drive 200 miles when I can do the same thing in a much shorter distance? (This is actually the reason that is stopping me from going to the Sumpter Valley...sure it's narrow gauge, but I have two kids to occupy, and nothing else to do in Baker City or anywhere within 75 miles of Baker City. It's a VERY long drive for a short railroad. Like standing in line at Disneyland for two hours to go on a ride that is four minutes long...but I then have to "stand in line" again to drive back home.)

7. A million dollars for a "transit hub"??? The town of Elgin gets just four buses a day. Why does it need a million dollar "transit hub"? The tourist trains aren't providing transit. They even have RDCs that could be used for "commuter rail" (lack of population notwithstanding).

8. In Oregon there seems to be an insane fascination with protecting hopeless railroads. We spent millions to rebuild the Burns Branch - only to scrap it. The Port of Tillamook Bay is a goner. The Astoria Line is a goner in Clatsop County; the ethanol plant doesn't know if it's coming, going, or what way is up or down. WES is still a snoozer, after three years it still it a long ways short of its first-year ridership projection. Sometimes, scrapping a railroad is the option...I bet that the Joseph Branch - with its large amount of recreational potential and existing opportunities - would actually attract more users as a trail (mountain biking/hiking/horseback riding in the spring/summer/fall, snowshoeing and snowmobiling in the winter) in two weeks than a train could running in a full year. There's no freight prospect; why is the patient being kept on life support? Same with the Astoria Line and the Tillamook Line (especially the latter with its proximity to the existing, and extremely popular, Banks-Vernonia trail, a one-time tourist railroad itself.)

There's plenty of railroads in Oregon that truly have potential. Heck, why not fix the problems in downtown Portland - especially since there is now the room to build a proper bypass of Albina Yard, and straighten out the track from Albina to East Portland, and relocate Amtrak to the eastside and out of Union Station - doing that would provide far more benefit to both the public and to freight movement. Even replacing the swing-span over the Columbia and replacing it with a lift span; building overpasses/underpasses, double-tracking the UP Valley Main (and putting the P&W on the UP afterwards), fixing the Albany mess, fixing CORP's track...but instead we're blowing our money on trains to nowhere, steam engines that may or may not show up, "transit hubs" that sit idle like Lebanon's train station...