# What if the Milwaukee Road didn't de-energize the Pacific Extension



## NeueAmtrakCalifornia

One of the biggest reasons the Milwaukee Road went under was the decision to de-energize the Pacific Extension and go to diesels during the 1970s. That decade was when the 1973 Oil Crisis happened, which caused freight railroads like the Southern Pacific, Burlington Northern, Santa Fe and Union Pacific to seriously consider electrifying at least parts of their main lines (of course by the time the studies concluded oil prices went back to normal and thus stuck with diesels). It actually made more sense economically for the Milwaukee Road to keep their electrics during that time, although they would have to replace their decades-old fleet with European-style electric locomotives soon (as American electric locomotive manufacturing pretty much went moribund) and even convert from 3000 V DC to 25 kV 60 Hz AC. Had Milwaukee Road kept their electrics, they could have survived at least past 1986 and into the 1990s, perhaps even into the 2000s, if not today.


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## ehbowen

I'm not an expert on the Milwaukee Road (I'm a much bigger Santa Fe fan), but from everything I've seen their accounting and decision making was a comedy of errors. The decision you mention was key...I don't have documentation on this, but I've heard on another forum that General Electric was hurting for business in all sectors around 1970. Apparently they went to the Milwaukee Road and offered a proposal for "closing the gap"...electrifying their main line between Avery, ID and Othello, WA which would have included all of the necessary modern (well, for 1970) electrical equipment and custom-designed electric locomotives, probably a derivative of their Universal series Diesels. To sweeten the pot, and since they knew the Milwaukee was on the verge of bankruptcy anyhow, they offered to finance the whole deal through GE Credit.

However, at about the same time (very early 1970s), copper prices spiked. Milwaukee's management looked at the prospect of cannibalizing their existing 500+ miles of electrification and got dollar signs in their eyes. The rest is history; the wires came down...but by the time they came down, copper prices had crashed back to normal and the sheikhs reset the gas pumps.

Milwaukee was bleeding cash...but they didn't have a good idea of where. Apparently their accounting department was double-counting expenses (but not revenues) for the Pacific Extension. To anyone reading the financial report summaries (and not digging deeper), it appeared that the Pacific Extension was a financial sinkhole. So management pushed to abandon it, and did...only to find out that, once the decision was made, the accounting was in error and it had been one of the only profitable portions of the railroad....

I have to say that Milwaukee wasn't alone. There was an awful lot of short-sighted thinking going on then. And now.


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## TinCan782

On the subject of the Milwaukee Road, here is a wonderfully produced tribute...
*Remembering Milwaukee Road’s Coast Division: Scenes from a Dying Transcontinental*


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## MikefromCrete

The Milwaukee Pacific Extension was one northern transcontinental too many. It would be gone no matter what kind of locomotives were leading its trains.


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## neroden

Mike has strong views on this, but he's wrong. With electric traction and competent management, quite likely one of the other northern transcons would have been cut instead; either the NP or the GN. 

The NP got downgraded and mothballed eventually anyway. The GN is probably the worst of the three routes, showing the problems with making national policy decisions by the random acts of private CEOs.


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## railiner

GN also had some, albeit much shorter electrification.


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## Devil's Advocate

MikefromCrete said:


> The Milwaukee Pacific Extension was one northern transcontinental too many. It would be gone no matter what kind of locomotives were leading its trains.


Doubtful it would have survived intact past the mid-1990's consolidation blaze that burned off branch lines and decimated competitive bidding, but improved management and better decision making could have kept them in the running to become part of another conglomerate.


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## NeueAmtrakCalifornia

Devil's Advocate said:


> Doubtful it would have survived intact past the mid-1990's consolidation blaze that burned off branch lines and decimated competitive bidding, but improved management and better decision making could have kept them in the running to become part of another conglomerate.



Canadian Pacific would be obvious but it's likely going to be redundant with their own Canadian transcon so maybe it could go to Union Pacific instead (it would give them a Northern transcon to compete with BNSF's counterpart) although it's unknown if either would be willing to maintain the electric tracks, especially with double stacks though I could expect MILW to rebuild tunnels and bridges to 7.5m to accommodate double stacks during the 25 kV conversion


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## omaha

A great description of the poor management of the Milwaukee Road is THE NATION PAYS AGAIN by Thomas Ploss. He was a lawyer who worked for the Milwaukee Road during its final years. He attributes the problems of the Pacific Extension to the GN and NP who refused to let the Milwaukee get the long-haul for freight. One condition of the CB&Q, NP and GN merger was to open additional gateways to exchange traffic and allow the Milwaukee to get longer hauls but Ploss discovered the BN had no intention of honoring this agreement. He wanted the Milwaukee seek damages against the BN and force them to honor the agreement but at that time the leaders of the railroad were convinced the best action would be to seek inclusion into the BN. This was one of the options in the BN merger but the BN had no desire to absorb the Milwaukee into their system.


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## toddinde

omaha said:


> A great description of the poor management of the Milwaukee Road is THE NATION PAYS AGAIN by Thomas Ploss. He was a lawyer who worked for the Milwaukee Road during its final years. He attributes the problems of the Pacific Extension to the GN and NP who refused to let the Milwaukee get the long-haul for freight. One condition of the CB&Q, NP and GN merger was to open additional gateways to exchange traffic and allow the Milwaukee to get longer hauls but Ploss discovered the BN had no intention of honoring this agreement. He wanted the Milwaukee seek damages against the BN and force them to honor the agreement but at that time the leaders of the railroad were convinced the best action would be to seek inclusion into the BN. This was one of the options in the BN merger but the BN had no desire to absorb the Milwaukee into their system.


It’s a great book. Sound management in the ‘60s could have saved the Milwaukee. A Milwaukee, C&NW, Rock Island merger done right, and early enough, might have given the Pacific Extension enough traffic to be successful. GE’s offer to finance the updating of electrifying and closing the gap would have given the Milw a modern, electrified railway. The Milw had contracts for cheap hydroelectric power that would have been a huge game changer during the energy crisis years of the 1970s. The Milw could have kept a piece of the action when Tideflats was converted to a container port. My view is, from studying this issue, that corruption and stupidity killed the Milw. Even the embargo of the Pacific Extension was a huge mistake. We lost some valuable rail infrastructure that might have seemed redundant in a country of 175 million, belching out greenhouse gas like there’s no tomorrow, but a country of 350 million facing a climate catastrophe desperately needs. Same goes for Erie Lackawanna. We need to get our heads unstuck from our ... when it comes to rail policy in this country. So dumb.


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## NeueAmtrakCalifornia

omaha said:


> A great description of the poor management of the Milwaukee Road is THE NATION PAYS AGAIN by Thomas Ploss. He was a lawyer who worked for the Milwaukee Road during its final years. He attributes the problems of the Pacific Extension to the GN and NP who refused to let the Milwaukee get the long-haul for freight. One condition of the CB&Q, NP and GN merger was to open additional gateways to exchange traffic and allow the Milwaukee to get longer hauls but Ploss discovered the BN had no intention of honoring this agreement. He wanted the Milwaukee seek damages against the BN and force them to honor the agreement but at that time the leaders of the railroad were convinced the best action would be to seek inclusion into the BN.  This was one of the options in the BN merger but the BN had no desire to absorb the Milwaukee into their system.



BN already has 2 northern transcons (the GN and NP), and 3 Cascade crossings (GN's Stevens Pass crossing, NP's Stampede Pass crossing, and SP&S's Columbia River crossing into Portland), and MILW's Snoqualmie Pass crossing parallels the NP's route. Though it makes me wonder what if the Union Pacific took over the Milwaukee Road, as it would give them a Northern transcon (complete once UP gets Chicago & Northwestern) to compete with Burlington Northern (and later BNSF).



toddinde said:


> It’s a great book. Sound management in the ‘60s could have saved the Milwaukee. A Milwaukee, C&NW, Rock Island merger done right, and early enough, might have given the Pacific Extension enough traffic to be successful. GE’s offer to finance the updating of electrifying and closing the gap would have given the Milw a modern, electrified railway. The Milw had contracts for cheap hydroelectric power that would have been a huge game changer during the energy crisis years of the 1970s. The Milw could have kept a piece of the action when Tideflats was converted to a container port. My view is, from studying this issue, that corruption and stupidity killed the Milw. Even the embargo of the Pacific Extension was a huge mistake. We lost some valuable rail infrastructure that might have seemed redundant in a country of 175 million, belching out greenhouse gas like there’s no tomorrow, but a country of 350 million facing a climate catastrophe desperately needs.



MILW Pacific & Montana electric might have even served as a role model for other freight railroads to electrify in the future (I know BNSF's Southern Transcon is low-hanging fruit cuz is has a lot of traffic and it might be busy enough to warrant electrification), though now they're going with battery locomotives cuz they feel that overhead wires would mess with double-stacks but this proves otherwise.


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## Mark Meyer

The Milwaukee Road's electrification - and really the entire Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension - was/is considered a novelty. Hence the enduring interest and "what if" speculation even though such scenarios are contrary to reality. How a railroad which could not even install CTC, power switches, lineside detectors, adequate sidings, or even continuous ABS on its main line could spring for new locomotives (and likely a whole new electrical distribution system) boggles the mind - even for the 650 or so miles under wire - which was not even continuous (that is, the "Gap" from Avery to Othello was never electrified). Of course those who fantasize about this will tell you they have crunched the numbers and it was totally doable.

Figures lie, and liars figure, of course, but there are constants in all the pro-electrification proposals: Ignoring the greatest costs, which are train delay, locomotive dwell, and restricting a large number of assets to a limited area of trackage. For electrification to work, the electrified network needs to be expansive and cover just about all the possible routes, or be a fixed single route usually with a single commodity. In the original posting by D.S. Lewith, he/she gives a link to a map of proposed electrification in the 1970s. Using the BN Powder River Basin to Lincoln, NE route as an example: During the height of coal movement it was not unusual to see 60 or more coal trains (loads and empties) on the route from Alliance to Lincoln. Today, most of these trains are 125 cars or more, and operate with distributed power. Just the thought of having to modify the entire locomotive consist of ALL the trains at Lincoln (from electric to diesel electric and vice versa) again boggles the mind. The amount of yard capacity to accommodate all the trains in the terminal would be huge, as would the locomotive fleet (of both types) to be kept on hand to be available to maintain fluidity. Plus, of course, the personnel to make all these power modifications. The cost is simply overwhelming. Same for the UP proposal with the electrification starting and ending at North Platte. 100 trains a day changing power? NOT. The Milwaukee Road would not have this volume of trains, but electrification still stranded a lot of locomotive assets on a very limited amount of track (Harlowton to Avery; Othello to Seattle/Tacoma). That meant power modifications for the "Gap" (or running the electric power through dead), and at the end or beginning of the electrification.
An additional explanation is here: Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension: The myth of superiority
Here's another take on the costs of electrification proponents don't mention: http://energyskeptic.com/2016/electrifi ... ight-rail/

With regard to NeueAmtrakCalifornia's statement, "then they could have sold the northern transcon (including the Pacific Extension) to Union Pacific, thus giving them a competing northern transcon to compete against BNSF": I'm sure UP would argue that they compete quite well with BNSF in this corridor right now, thank you. Not only that, compared to "transcontinental" routes to and from California, BNSF's route from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest has much more competition. Not only UP via Nampa, Green River, and North Platte, but also UP/CP via Eastport/Kingsgate. The port of Vancouver, BC handles more container traffic (and more tonnage overall) than does Seattle and Tacoma combined, and both CN and CP offer intermodal service from Vancouver to the Upper Midwest of the U.S. In addition, CN has service to middle of America from the burgeoning port at Prince Rupert, BC. But none of this matters, really, because even if there were not all those alternatives to BNSF, the Milwaukee wouldn't be around because the primary reason it's not around is that it was the high-cost route. The Milwaukee didn't electrify for no reason; it did so because its operating profile had horrendous grades. It also had a very poor and usually exceptionally circuitous branch line/feeder "network."
Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension: The myth of superiority

While proponents of the Milwaukee Road electrification and the Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension in general go to great lengths to explain why things turned out the way they didn't, it's easier to just focus on the operational deficiencies to easily grasp why things happened as they did.


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## neroden

It's true that the Milwaukee had an exceptionally poor branch line network -- *that was what drove it bankrupt* according to the forensic accounting. 

If not for the complete mismanagement, they would have noticed this, gotten rid of the hopeless branch lines, put in intermodal yards, finished the electrification on the mainline *which was being offered with subsidy and financing as a demonstration*, installed good signalling, and simply run the cheapest line-haul railroad following the massive increase in diesel prices during the 1970s oil crisis. But of course they were completely mismanaged, not least because they were looking at bogus accounting. But also because they didn't see the oil crisis coming. They wouldn't have been a big profit center -- no railroad was, since roads started being federally subsidized -- but they would have done a lot better than they actually did.

That article Mike likes to link to is full of half-truths and misleading statements. As someone who analyzes financials for railroads, I can say it's not right. The assessments shortly after the bankruptcy -- that Milwaukee management were complete nincompoops -- is correct. 

Had the NP line been electrified first, then it would not have made sense to maintain the Milwaukee. But it wasn't. 

The GN line is essentially awful because it goes to the wrong intermediate points, and it's bluntly too far north; it survived due to the caprices of short-term-thinking private management decisions in the past. It has a fatal flaw in the Seattle area too, which is still going to kill the GN route entirely -- the part built on the beach just north of Seattle. It's not viable, and will require an entirely new route. Most people involved, including advocates, are choosing to stay in denial and not to admit this right now.

I don't know if any private management could ever have done the right thing. 

In fact, I'm not sure a national rail authority acting in 1972 would have been able to look forward to the 1973 oil crisis and see what ought to have been done. I doubt they would have forseen the rise of intermodal and the decline of cars full of rock, either, which renders grades much less of an issue.

I do know that the necessary information was out there. The oil crisis happened essentially on schedule based on Hubbert's peak oil prediction from the 1950s. The pollution problems with coal were understood by the 1960s. Containerization started in the 1950s.

If we'd nationalized the railroads in the 1940s as Keynes advised, and had a government capable of recognizing the upcoming oil crisis in the 1960s, we would have seen very different decisions. (The government was already promoting containerization.) We would probably have a composite line made up of pieces of the existing lines, much as you generally get during mergers. And it would have been electrified. And passenger service would have been maintained. The Milwaukee route would have been used on the Puget Sound end at least as far as Spokane, since it is the best route *there*. The NP route is the best route for serving intermediate-point customers through most of Montana and probably to Minneapolis. The Milwaukee route is of course still used from Minneapolis to Chicago. 

The GN route might have been maintained east of Spokane as a sort of express freight bypass, or it might have been abandoned entirely. It has bad intermediate traffic, and multiple sections where the recurring maintenance expenses exceed all bounds of sanity, including the part on the beach / in the ocean, but also Devil's Lake. (Of course they get government subsidies for both!) The preference by successive private managements for the GN route is extreme narrow-minded short-term thinking; sure, it's the shortest, but it isn't the cheapest when you look holistically. I have to attribute it to the management of the successive companies typically having GN heritage.

But, this is the US. We never do things in a rational or connected-up way; it's just a giant bodge-up of individual decisions based on short-term thinking. 

In policy terms from a national perspective, there are much worse ones -- just within the area of rail policy -- than the Milwaukee Road abandonments. Including the sell-off of Conrail, the failure to repair the Poughkeepsie Railroad Bridge, the loss of the southern approaches to Denver Union Station, the dismantling of the Bay Bridge streetcar system, the teardowns of the Els in New York City, and more. 

The Milwaukee Road stands out for sheer management incompetence and accounting dishonesty from a private for-profit perspective, but only among railroads. In the general corporate world, we have Enron, Worldcom, and any number of other examples of management driving a plausible business into the ground with accounting dishonesty or mismanagement. In railcar manufacturing, we have Bombardier's self-destruction just a few years ago.


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## MilwaukeeRoadLover

Did the fact that Milwaukee Road had ability to build it's own cars and locomotives give them an advantage? Or does every railroad have this? Maintenance and product design must differentiate service...no?


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## Seaboard92

MilwaukeeRoadLover said:


> Did the fact that Milwaukee Road had ability to build it's own cars and locomotives give them an advantage? Or does every railroad have this? Maintenance and product design must differentiate service...no?



I don't think that is any factor to the decline of the Pacific Extension in the diesel era they were buying completely off the shelf products. I don't recall them having any homebuilt locomotives. Their homebuilt cars also weren't exactly that great. How many of those do you see still running today? 

Now I will give you the fact that there were far less of those than there were of Budd or Pullman products. But also consider the fact towards the 50s they had shifted more to Pullman products. The Super Domes are, the Olympian Hiawatha's Skytops were Pullman products. Now a few of the coaches here and there may have been Milwaukee products but most were Pullman products. 

I've always been able to tell a Milwaukee branch line car because it has ribbing very similar to the Soviet Bloc. 

A lot of railroads have had a lot of different abilities over the years. The New York Central built their first streamliner the Mercury from used commuter rolling stock. They also had a robust R&D department in Collinwood, OH that was always looking for innovations. 

The Pennsylvania Railroad also built a lot of their own steam engines. But for the "Standard Railroad of the World" they sure had unstandard boilers as that's a major issue with restoring their steam these days. Now the Altoona shops were and still aren't a joke by any means. They are capable of building a lot.


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## west point

Do not forget the WOOPS energy fiasco.


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## Mark Meyer

neroden said:


> It's true that the Milwaukee had an exceptionally poor branch line network -- *that was what drove it bankrupt* according to the forensic accounting.
> ........................
> we have Bombardier's self-destruction just a few years ago.



Re: neroden’s latest “Drive-By” treatise:

.

Blaming Milwaukee Road mismanagement is the ultimate copout. If a railroad has value, someone (even if not associated with that railroad) will see it and save it. The Rock Island is the perfect example. Even the thousands of miles of redundant branch lines couldn’t permanently sink the Rock’s route from Chicago to Council Bluffs, the Twin Cities to the Gulf, and the Golden State route. Strong routes survive, and weak, high-cost routes – like the Milwaukee’s Pacific Extension – don’t. 



The ridiculous statement about how the “rise of intermodal” would “render grades much less an issue” is reminiscent of the question, “What weighs more: A pound of lead or a pound of feathers?” Especially relevant now when stack trains can be in excess of 12,000 tons, and that while coal demand is not going to increase, it’s not going away completely, and that ag products trains – from wheat to potash – will always be there and with them their unit train weight of 16,000 to 20,000 tons. That’s why the Great Northern (and now BNSF) route between the Upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest with no major grades westbound versus four for the Milwaukee Road (five if destined to Columbia River ports – the primary grain export location in the Pacific Northwest) is still the major reason the Milwaukee isn’t around, and would have been exacerbate by the Staggers Act deregulation of 1980 when the lower cost route could have simply outpriced the Milwaukee. But they were so inefficient, they didn’t make it that far.



Of course, the blather about the “fatal flaw” in the GN’s route along “the beach” “north of Seattle” is not explained. Global warming and sea rise? Landslides? Well, every route is subject to challenges, like if Mount Rainier would erupt; and then there’s that Yellowstone Caldera thing that would certainly take out the former NP and Milwaukee (if it was around) routes. Back in reality, the current route has been in service for 130 years. True, mudslides can be a problem, and they’ve been largely made worse by intense development on the hills directly over the track. But slide-mitigation projects have dramatically reduced the number of service interruptions in the area in recent years, and there is no reason to believe that – as is the case everywhere else – technology will allow further amelioration of such threats and address new ones. 



That “The NP route is the best route for serving intermediate-point customers through most of Montana” and “The GN line is essentially awful because it goes to the wrong intermediate points, and it's bluntly too far north” is a stellar display of ignorance about just about everything. The vast superiority of the GN route versus the NP through Montana notwithstanding, the stark reality is that no route now or in the past nor in the future across Montana exists primary to “intermediate-point” customers because there just aren’t that many of them. The goal of these railroads was/is to get the traffic across Montana as quickly and cheaply as possible, and the GN route is far and away the best way to do that. But that reality aside, the ex-GN routes are hardly devoid of origin traffic. In Montana, 21 of the 25 existing “shuttle” grain elevators (100 cars or more) are on ex-GN lines, and only 3 on ex-NP (none on the Milwaukee, and 1 on the former Soo Line). In North Dakota, 26 of the 58 shuttle facilities are ex-GN routes, versus only 12 on the NP. Today, BNSF generates about a merchandise train per day operating west from Shelby with traffic from Great Falls, Havre, and the CP interchange at Sweet Grass. On the ex-NP line, Montana Rail Link regularly operates none of its own trains west of Thompson Falls, nor any merchandise trains west of Missoula; that traffic is simply handled in BNSF run through trains. Between Missoula and Laurel, actual online traffic – including the UP/BNSF interchange at Garrison – is handled by trains that operate no more than once daily each way. This reality is why when MRL was created in 1987, part of the agreement was (and is) that BN (now BNSF) would guarantee a certain level of traffic on the route to ensure its viability – even during significant downturns in the economy. The concern was that since BN retained is own route between Mossmain/Laurel and Shelby – a route cheaper to operate westward unit trains on versus the MRL – that future management might simply elect not to route traffic on the former NP line due to its higher operating cost. East of Billings, on-line origin/destination non-unit train traffic is easily handled by one train each way, often less than daily. So, the reality is that there never was or isn’t a bonanza of traffic in Southern Montana that would be worth routing most of the through traffic over a higher-cost route.



Probably the most reality-free statement in “neroden”’s blather is “The GN route might have been maintained east of Spokane as a sort of express freight bypass, or it might have been abandoned entirely. It has bad intermediate traffic, and multiple sections where the recurring maintenance expenses exceed all bounds of sanity, including the part on the beach / in the ocean, but also Devil's Lake. (Of course they get government subsidies for both!)” Of course, this is reference to investment by the State of Washington (and Federal grants) to mitigate mudslides between Seattle and Everett, and the paltry amount the State of North Dakota pitched in to raise the BNSF main line between Churchs Ferry and Devils Lake. First of all, both involve investment in routes specifically for passenger trains, and BNSF doesn’t operate passenger trains, so obviously these investments by government entities do nothing to show that the routes could not or would not have been maintained without them. The fact that governments subsidize all other forms of transportation much more than freight rail notwithstanding, actually, the contrary is true. Projects or service interruptions involving passenger trains make the news because such trains are available to the public on a day-to-day basis, especially in this world of social media. Those related solely to freight-only routes – not so much. But that doesn’t mean that Mullan tunnel didn’t collapse in 2009 and was out of service for over a month or that a bluff between Miles City and Forsyth doesn’t want to slide into the Yellowstone River every late spring and close the railroad for several days to a week. You’re just less-likely to hear about it. With regard to the Devils Lake comment, there is no recurring maintenance (versus anywhere else along the route as the track has been raised to higher than the lake can ever be), and the government contribution amounts to between 1.5 and 3 percent of the total multi-billion-dollar investment BNSF made during the Bakken Oil Boom. That contribution was only one-third of the total cost of raising the track above Devils Lake, but an incredibly small part of what BNSF spent to basically rebuild the entire railroad between Fargo and Minot via Grand Forks, including new ballast, new rail, a completely new signal system with CTC, and adding and/or lengthening many sidings to create a second main line. This was done in addition to double-tracking most of the route between Minot and Williston, adding yard capacity in Montana, and adding more double track (actually 2 MT CTC) and high-speed crossovers in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Again, with reality as our guide, these investments all show continuing commitment to the Northern Transcontinental route (much of it being the ex-GN line), and acknowledgement of its continued operational superiority. Of course, “neroden” has a made-up response for this, too: “I have to attribute it to the management of the successive companies typically having GN heritage.” Yes. What else could it be? Fifty years after the BN merger, 63 years after the Wyer report outlining the superiority of the GN route, and nearly 120 years after the first attempted merger at the turn of the 20th Century. Translation: “neroden” is right, and everyone else – from James J. Hill to Warren Buffet and everyone in between – got it wrong. And wow, those GN guys running the show at BNSF today have to be REALLY OLD.



Strong routes survive. Weak routes, don’t. This reality has played out for years. In addition, strong routes encourage investment as investment increases efficiency whereas keeping sub-optimum routes alive is relatively costly and never can achieve the efficiency of the optimum route. The Milwaukee Pacific Extension is the poster child of a route not worth retaining with its numerous steep grades, poor feeder network, and lack of online business and service exclusivity. Just like Raton Pass or Tennessee Pass and others. Not an anomaly. Not a mystery. Just a reality.


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## neroden

More fantasylanding from Mark Meyer. It's hardly even worth commenting on.

Strong routes are ripped out. Weak routes survive. Due to the vagaries of prior ownership. Ask anyone in Iowa. I don't think this is hard to prove.

Ask Scranton, if you like. They know about it too.

Mark Meyer believes in the "just world" fantasy. He wants to believe that whatever has happened, must have made sense. This isn't true. All kinds of idiotic nonsense happens. History is a series of accidents.

That route on the beach? It's toast. It was a dumb location to start with, the constant mudslides are not permanently addressable, and sea level rise dooms it.


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## Mark Meyer

Great comeback. So rich in facts and detail, as expected. Scranton? Iowa? No explanation, of course, especially as to why they are supposedly deficient.



Scranton isn’t on a major east-west freight route anymore and shouldn’t be, just like the Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension shouldn’t be and isn’t. The Lackwanna’s crossing of the Poconos was vastly inferior to even that of the Erie, not to mention the “Water Level” New York Central. But maybe you are lamenting the New York, Ontario, and Western which also served Scranton? Passenger train routes are another matter, but in this country, with few exceptions – which do not include Scranton – are mostly located on the better-maintained freight routes.



It’s not hard to figure out why Iowa couldn’t sustain its 10,000 + mile rail network, with powerhouse Granger lines like the Milwaukee Road, Minneapolis & St. Louis, and Chicago Great Western. Iowans used to be proud of the fact that one couldn’t venture more than 12 miles from any point in the state without crossing a railroad track, but with the subsidization of truckers and change in the way agricultural products are transported and marketed, such a network was hardly sustainable, much less necessary.



What’s happened in history is not always what should have, nor is it what shouldn’t have. It’s also important to view decisions in the context and time frame of when they were made. Debate about routes kept or not during the rationalization of Conrail, for instance, can continue ad nauseum. But the Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension is a given. Bad profile, bad feeder network, no alternate routes, little on-line business, missed major area markets that the other routes served, and built in a region where stronger alternatives were abundant.



As for the “coast is toast” blather: Constant mudslides? Not. Amelioration technology working: Yes. Sea rise? It’s going to affect many things, but only the Chicken Littles think “nothing can be done.” 129 years of “not toast.” And counting.


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## Siegmund

Just a few random thoughts, from a non-specialist but someone who does live in the Northwest and pays attention to the railroads and the history books.

I think neroden overstates the case for the Milwaukee a bit.

The GN is not awful. In Eastern MT it is flat and straight, Marias Pass is the lowest crossing of the divide available. It has only minimal waste of elevation (climbing only a few hundred feet to cross from the Flathead River drainage to the Koonetai River, once Haskell Pass was bypassed in 1903.)

For online traffic, it has its fair share of farm traffic. It did miss out on mining traffic at first but quickly rectified that with the line down to Butte (and moved a LOT of ore between Butte/Boulder/Wickes and a smelter in Great Falls that nobody remembers even existed.)

NP and MILW, by contrast, are roller coasters: up the Yellowstone, down the Gallatin, up the Jefferson, down the Clark Fork, and up the Musselshell, down 16 mile creek, up the Missouri/Jefferson, down the Clark Fork, up and over St. Paul Pass, respectively.

It boggles my mind that NObody took the most obvious route across Montana -- up the Missouri, cross Rogers Pass west of Great Falls, down the Blackfoot and Clark Fork. GN at least considered it (and rejected it because Marias was an easier pass.)

neroden cites the Milwaukee route as "best from Puget Sound to Spokane." Snoqualmie Pass has good grades, yes. The crossing of the Cascades should have been kept. Perhaps the bypass south of Spokane, and the St. Paul Pass route, should have been kept as the lowest-mileage route, vs. going up through Sandpoint (NP) and Bonner Ferry (ID), accepting the steeper grade for light time-sensitive traffic.

The unnecessary 2% grades in central Washington, crossing a range of hills that were in neither NP's nor GN's way, were just silly. The steepest grades on the entire Pacific Coast Extension are in the place that _looks like it has no mountains at all_ if you glance casually at the map.

Similarly in Montana one could compare grades and choose intelligently between Homestake and Pipestone, and between Bozeman Pass and 16 Mile Canyon. A half-NP-half-MILW route would be better than either NP or MILW was separately. A smarter (or wealthier in 1980) BN might have taken advantage of that.



> The GN route might have been maintained east of Spokane as a sort of express freight bypass, or it might have been abandoned entirely.



BN made one big mistake here, abandoning the GN Spokane-Priest River-Sandpoint. They are now double-tracking the NP line, including the causeway across Lake Pend Orielle, at great expense, to regain the lost capacity. Both west of Spokane and east of Sandpoint they have a choice of routes.
(You might argue that not keeping both SP&S and NP between Pasco and Spokane was a similar mistake, but a less serious one.)

I think Mark goes a bit too far the opposite direction:



Mark Meyer said:


> Blaming Milwaukee Road mismanagement is the ultimate copout. If a railroad has value, someone (even if not associated with that railroad) will see it and save it.



The Milwaukee was worth saving, at least in part, in the 60s. And _at that time_ there were interested parties. They then proceeded to run it into the ground for 10 years until the entire Pacific Coast Extension was one giant slow order desperately in need of new ties and ballast.

Closing the gap between the two electrified sections would have made the railroad a lot more appealing. Requiring 3 engine changes rather than 1 requires a lot of extra equipment and manpower. Manpower was a lot cheaper in 1915 than in 1973 or today.

But unless the extension sees a lot of maintenance investment in the late 60s... by 1972 I can see why a lot of folks thought it was a lost cause. _Maybe_ there was a window of opportunity right after the BN merger, if every dollar earned in new Puget Sound traffic was plowed into the deferred maintenance backlog.

Thing is, there wasn't any railroad anywhere in the country making huge investments in the future in the 1970s. Even "healthy" roads were lifting every rail they could and cutting every corner they could. It is unbelievable how much track, not just Milwaukee's, was abandoned in the 70s and early 80s. (I grew up in southern Idaho, and a look at UP branch lines is a litany of "not repaired after 1976 flood," "abandoned 1980", "abandoned 1981", "abandoned 1983" - to West Yellowstone, to Victor, to Sun Valley, to Fairfield, to Mackay, to Wells, NV (OK, I admit that line never made a heck of a lot of economic sense, once "sheep from Sun Valley to California" ceased to be a thing.) Something close to half of UP's route-miles in Idaho vanished in the space of ten years, leaving only the main line and the two heaviest-traffic branches.

With 20-20 hindsight, we would have saved a lot of medium traffic branch lines, and a couple key routes across Ohio that the National and Broadway Limited could be using, and the track between Richmond and Raleigh that VA and NC are talking about re-laying now, and...and...and... you could go on all day about that. In that context, running the Milwaukee into the ground was just a symptom of running the entire national system into the ground, and we are paying for that nationwide today.


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## sttom

Siegmund said:


> Thing is, there wasn't any railroad anywhere in the country making huge investments in the future in the 1970s. Even "healthy" roads were lifting every rail they could and cutting every corner they could. It is unbelievable how much track, not just Milwaukee's, was abandoned in the 70s and early 80s.



Railroads were and to some extent still are in a mindset of managed decline. Which is sad since we need a balanced transportation industry and rail is a really efficient part of it. But, the US is also in a mindset of managed decline. So I guess managed decline just comes with the brain worms that have infested a good chunk of our society.


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## Mark Meyer

Siegmund said:


> The Milwaukee was worth saving, at least in part, in the 60s. And _at that time_ there were interested parties. They then proceeded to run it into the ground for 10 years until the entire Pacific Coast Extension was one giant slow order desperately in need of new ties and ballast.



Who were the interested parties? I know the UP inspected the track from Marengo to Seattle, but east of there – especially since the UP didn’t have a presence east of Council Bluffs – there would be little reason anyone would want it. After all, the population base wasn’t that great, and numerous other railroads served the area. And, there’s that the Milwaukee was a high-cost operation. Its profile was no worse than the NP, but far inferior to the GN. But it lacked a water-level route through the Cascades, and any direct access to Vancouver, BC and Portland, as well as a generally poor branch line access to the places they did go to. It should also be noted that by the ‘60s, the GN, NP, and UP had already begun lengthening sidings and installing large sections of CTC. The Milwaukee did just about nothing, including never installing block signal protection on its main line between Plummer Jct. and Marengo. One can speculate on the why of this, but it’s most likely because a.) they weren’t making enough return on investment to pay for these upgrades, or b.) management already saw the writing on the wall as to the futility of competing with the more-entrenched railroads with more online business and superior operating profiles. Of course, there’s the “c” option that always comes up: Conspiracy! Not a great default.

None of the railroads in this lane were operating at capacity after WWII. The Milwaukee on average was one or two trains per day. Still – as was the case many times in their history – the Milwaukee had delusions of adequacy. Right after WWII, they created their Olympian Hiawatha passenger train to compete with the GN Empire Builder, matching the running time on the westward trip (westward is all that counts as eastward trains were timed for arrivals in Spokane and the Twin Cities rather than speed). But it couldn’t be maintained. By the time the Olympian Hiawatha was discontinued in 1961, its westward scheduled had slumped to over 2 hours slower than the Empire Builder. Then, starting in 1963 with no passenger train west of Deer Lodge, and discontinuance of passenger service east of Deer Lodge imminent, the Milwaukee launched its XL Special freight train on the fastest schedule from Chicago to Seattle. But it operated at a ridiculous 3.0 horsepower per ton from origin to destination (necessary for the numerous steep grades west of Harlowton) and was limited to only 3,000 tons. A couple of years later CB&Q/GN matched the running time, but the difference was GN’s tonnage limit was 5,500 tons as far west as Spokane (to accommodate Spokane and Portland traffic) with the same amount of power (or less, usually, east of Havre). GN continued to operate the fastest Empire Builder as well as the Western Star which carried the Fast Mail traffic west of St. Paul (the Milwaukee did have it east of St. Paul). In 1971 and the advent of Amtrak, Burlington Northern took the mail off the Western Star to create the Fast Mail, which even faster than train 97, and rivaled the running time of the Empire Builder. Meanwhile on the Milwaukee Road, the additional business from concessions by BN as a result of the merger cause the Milwaukee to considerably lengthen the time of the XL Special – its infrastructure and operating characteristics just couldn’t handle the extra business (up to 3 or 4 trains per day each way). If a railroad goes into tilt over a frequency like this, operating deficiencies are obvious. And costly.



Siegmund said:


> Closing the gap between the two electrified sections would have made the railroad a lot more appealing. Requiring 3 engine changes rather than 1 requires a lot of extra equipment and manpower. Manpower was a lot cheaper in 1915 than in 1973 or today.



Not really. The electrified part of the railroad would still only be a meager 882 miles (212 more than in reality with the “gap.”). That’s a lot of power to be confined to such a short area. Having managed locomotive power for over 30 years, I can readily attest to the failure of “captive power” because it has been tried many times before. There will always be restrictions on where some locomotives can go, but for the most part, the most efficient operation is from origin to destination. And the Milwaukee really didn’t have that much electric power to begin with. Case in point: Only 12 “Little Joes”, which would haul only 1.5 of a shuttle grain train today over the Milwaukee’s horrible Pacific Extension profile. The first unit grain train launched from the Ceres Global Ag terminal in Northgate, Saskatchewan went to Mexico. The BNSF power on the train continued through to destination on Ferromex. Changing locomotive power at Harlowton would be expensive, cumbersome, and a poor use of assets. And then there’s that those 882 miles of electrification don’t include any branch lines, and the Milwaukee was famous for grades on its branch lines even worse than the main line (3.6 percent leaving Tacoma toward Chehalis, 2 percent leaving Bellingham for Sumas, and 1.7 percent leaving Spokane for Plummer Jct.), meaning that a lot of diesel-electric power would still need to be in position to handle the tonnage that wasn’t just destined for Seattle and Tacoma.

And that’s another point: Most traffic in the Pacific Northwest / Canadian Southwest is NOT to/from just Seattle and Tacoma. Fast-forwarding to today and the way export grain is handled, we know that no wheat in shuttle grain trains (110+ cars) is exported through Tacoma and Seattle (mostly just corn and soybeans). This pretty much would have excluded the Milwaukee from any of this business, though in Montana the Milwaukee’s circuitous branch line feeders would have already taken care of that problem. The Milwaukee was the dominant railroad in South Dakota which grows a lot of corn and soybeans, so they might have gotten some of that business destined to Seattle and Tacoma, except more shuttle elevators would have been located along GN/BN/BNSF lines because with their superior profile, could undercut the rate by 40% or more compared to the Milwaukee. While all wheat is exported through Columbia River ports and not Seattle and Tacoma, Columbia River ports like Longview, Kalama and sometimes even Portland/Rivergate will handle corn and soybeans. With their poor access to these locations – even after the BN merger – the Milwaukee would be forced to hand over any such trains to BN/BNSF at Tacoma or UP at Marengo due to the restrictive 3.6 percent grade of Tacoma Hill. Had these arrived at Marengo and Tacoma with electric power, that would be just another costly power modification, less profit (if any) for the Milwaukee, or rather, just another reason not to use the Milwaukee altogether.


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## Mark Meyer

Siegmund said:


> But unless the extension sees a lot of maintenance investment in the late 60s... by 1972 I can see why a lot of folks thought it was a lost cause. _Maybe_ there was a window of opportunity right after the BN merger, if every dollar earned in new Puget Sound traffic was plowed into the deferred maintenance backlog.



Again, the salient question is: Did the Milwaukee not maintain the track because it didn’t make enough money to do so, or because it was a lost cause due to competition with superior routes and a prescient understanding of a Staggers Act at some point in time? And again, it wasn’t just maintenance. If you can’t afford hot box detectors, some power switches, welded rail, CTC etc., that’s more telling of a railroad that is unsustainable.



Siegmund said:


> Thing is, there wasn't any railroad anywhere in the country making huge investments in the future in the 1970s. Even "healthy" roads were lifting every rail they could and cutting every corner they could. It is unbelievable how much track, not just Milwaukee's, was abandoned in the 70s and early 80s. (I grew up in southern Idaho, and a look at UP branch lines is a litany of "not repaired after 1976 flood," "abandoned 1980", "abandoned 1981", "abandoned 1983" - to West Yellowstone, to Victor, to Sun Valley, to Fairfield, to Mackay, to Wells, NV (OK, I admit that line never made a heck of a lot of economic sense, once "sheep from Sun Valley to California" ceased to be a thing.) Something close to half of UP's route-miles in Idaho vanished in the space of ten years, leaving only the main line and the two heaviest-traffic branches.



Not true. Burlington Northern was making HUGE investments through the Powder River Basin to serve coal mines, as well as upgrading literally thousands of miles of track to accommodate the new traffic. The “Orin Line” through the coalfields was completed in 1979. Lots of speculation on this. With regard to the short uptick of traffic on the Milwaukee Pacific Extension after the BN merger, there are numerous possibilities with this: a.)the BN was preoccupied completing the merger, including adding connecting tracks and consolidating facilities throughout the system; b.)BN knew the Milwaukee routes were not as profitable as theirs but an increase in Milwaukee traffic would give the impression that the merger concessions were working – and they weren’t; not that things would have been much different in the end, but the concessions were not as generous as they could have been, and c.) Some traffic was routed onto the Milwaukee just to spite the BN. For instance, the NP gave the SP a lot of interchange traffic in Portland, but after the merger, a lot of this began moving via the ex-GN/WP/ATSF “Inside Gateway”, which didn’t please the SP, which in turn began interchanging with the Milwaukee in Portland (except when otherwise indicated by the shipper).

Your statements about branch line abandonments are true, but compared to a “transcontinental” line like the Milwaukee Pacific Extension, are apples and oranges. Branch lines everywhere were clipped dramatically. But only the only “transcontinental” route has been mostly abandoned simply because of its high cost operating profile, minimal online business, and abundance of more-efficient competing railroads.



Siegmund said:


> With 20-20 hindsight, we would have saved a lot of medium traffic branch lines, and a couple key routes across Ohio that the National and Broadway Limited could be using, and the track between Richmond and Raleigh that VA and NC are talking about re-laying now, and...and...and... you could go on all day about that. In that context, running the Milwaukee into the ground was just a symptom of running the entire national system into the ground, and we are paying for that nationwide today.



Again, I disagree, and it’s an apples and oranges comparison. I agree that we should have a national transportation policy that would save routes like the ex-SAL from Petersburg to Norlina (and on to Raleigh), but this is (if relaid/upgraded) for passenger trains. There’s just no indication that CSX is having a problem with its trains on the ex-ACL route through Rocky Mount. The routes of the Broadway Limited and National Limited (both ex-PRR) across Ohio would also be useful only for passenger trains. The Amtrak National Limited route from Pittsburgh to Columbus was especially slow, curvy, and hilly, and the Broadway Limited route through Canton and Lima became redundant as a result of Conrail, and the breakup of Conrail, which tended to focus on the ex-NYC and ex-B&O (via Willard) routes across Ohio. Same for the B&O National Limited route across Ohio via Athens and Chillicothe. Relegated to branch line status/abandonment and what remains is indicative of branch line abandonments everywhere, which is also the case with the Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension, except its length admittedly makes it a standout. But that doesn’t make it any more worthwhile. And, going forward, it more cost-effective to make infrastructure upgrades to the most-efficient routes than maintain the more inefficient routes. Having said that, and reiterating a bit, I do favor a national transportation policy that would maintain certain routes for future passenger service or future online business, but it’s not likely that the private sector would be willing to pay for doing so.


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## Willbridge

Seaboard92 said:


> I don't think that is any factor to the decline of the Pacific Extension in the diesel era they were buying completely off the shelf products. I don't recall them having any homebuilt locomotives. Their homebuilt cars also weren't exactly that great. How many of those do you see still running today?
> 
> ..........................
> I've always been able to tell a Milwaukee branch line car because it has ribbing very similar to the Soviet Bloc.



That's likely because the Russians were in love with the Milwaukee Road from the late 1920's on. One reason I rode Moscow <> Tomsk in 2010 was to see their 3000V DC electrification copied from the Milwaukee before they finished replacing it. Some COMECON member states also ended up with 3000V DC networks.


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## Seaboard92

Willbridge said:


> That's likely because the Russians were in love with the Milwaukee Road from the late 1920's on. One reason I rode Moscow <> Tomsk in 2010 was to see their 3000V DC electrification copied from the Milwaukee before they finished replacing it. Some COMECON member states also ended up with 3000V DC networks.



That is interesting. I know you mentioned on another thread a long time ago how American railroad culture ended up in Russia to a degree. I wonder which railroads those "consultants" came from. It could be possible they came from the Milwaukee Road.


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## Willbridge

Seaboard92 said:


> That is interesting. I know you mentioned on another thread a long time ago how American railroad culture ended up in Russia to a degree. I wonder which railroads those "consultants" came from. It could be possible they came from the Milwaukee Road.


My limited understanding of the Milwaukee Road link is that the first 5-year plan (1928) really highlighted weaknesses of the Soviet rail system and at the same time they were going big into hydroelectric projects. They sent a delegation to visit the U.S. and the Milwaukee Road and GE made an impression.

Recently I learned that in the early 30's war with Japan the capacity of the Trans-Siberian line was 12 trains a day, same as during the 1905 Russo-Japanese War. In 1937 a study showed that they could only get about 436 carloads a day to a hypothetical western front. In 1917 they were delivering 560 carloads a day. Lazar Kaganovich was assigned to take over the transport ministry in 1935. His reputation from his role in the Ukrainian famine preceded him and there were reforms (and removals and/or disappearances of managers). Prior to his posting the job was considered a political dead-end. So through that era they were desperate for new ideas.

GE delivered the first electric locomotives for Russia in 1932. Oddly enough subsequent Soviet-built models of those 40 mph heavy-haul engines were very similar. Italian engines were also tried but they were not as reliable as the GE's.


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## MilwaukeeRoadLover

Willbridge said:


> That's likely because the Russians were in love with the Milwaukee Road from the late 1920's on. One reason I rode Moscow <> Tomsk in 2010 was to see their 3000V DC electrification copied from the Milwaukee before they finished replacing it. Some COMECON member states also ended up with 3000V DC networks.


Didn't Milwaukee produce the Little Joe's for Russia? Why did they never take possession?


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## dlagrua

An enjoyable post. As a railfan that has followed and seen some of the Milwauke roads Western routes, they run though areas that are not served by any current railroads. Their former route through South Dakota's South end is slowly being rebuilt by Dakota Southern but the plans are to end the route at Kadoka and not continue all the way across the railbanked section in the badlands to Rapid City. As for the Pacific extention, unbeknownst to many that route was the shortest, most scenic and most direct route from CHI to SEA. Most of the ROW remains now as a rail trail. If Amtrak ever desired to have their own route West, there would be no obstacles with the freight railroads but that is a long shot.


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## Devil's Advocate

Has any rail trail ever been turned back into a rail route again? Obviously it sounds great PR-wise to donate a route for trail use but turning them into trails also removes the rails and ballast and clogs whatever is left with sand, crushed rock, or pavement. This vastly increases the cost of rebuilding them back into rail routes and probably gives the previous host plenty of confidence they'll never be used to introduce another competitor.


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## Willbridge

MilwaukeeRoadLover said:


> Didn't Milwaukee produce the Little Joe's for Russia? Why did they never take possession?


GE produced them for the Soviet railways but got caught up in the early Cold War. The bargain that resulted for the Milwaukee, the South Shore and the Paulista (Brazil) may have contributed to the extended lifetime of electrification.









Little Joe (electric locomotive) - Wikipedia







en.wikipedia.org


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## Seaboard92

Willbridge said:


> My limited understanding of the Milwaukee Road link is that the first 5-year plan (1928) really highlighted weaknesses of the Soviet rail system and at the same time they were going big into hydroelectric projects. They sent a delegation to visit the U.S. and the Milwaukee Road and GE made an impression.
> 
> Recently I learned that in the early 30's war with Japan the capacity of the Trans-Siberian line was 12 trains a day, same as during the 1905 Russo-Japanese War. In 1937 a study showed that they could only get about 436 carloads a day to a hypothetical western front. In 1917 they were delivering 560 carloads a day. Lazar Kaganovich was assigned to take over the transport ministry in 1935. His reputation from his role in the Ukrainian famine preceded him and there were reforms (and removals and/or disappearances of managers). Prior to his posting the job was considered a political dead-end. So through that era they were desperate for new ideas.
> 
> GE delivered the first electric locomotives for Russia in 1932. Oddly enough subsequent Soviet-built models of those 40 mph heavy-haul engines were very similar. Italian engines were also tried but they were not as reliable as the GE's.



That makes a lot of sense actually. The Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension and the Trans Sib do share a lot of similarities. The electrics were powered by hydroelectric power, a long line over an area with limited population, and harsh winters. There is a reason I call the upper midwest (Both Dakotas, Minnesota, Saskatchewan, Manitoba) North America's Siberia. I would even add that the Milwaukee Road looks a lot like a smaller version of Soviet Railways. If you indulge this side note. But most of the Russian Rail network is east of the Ural's, just like most of the Milwaukee Road is east of the Rockies. With one maybe two lines that are extending further beyond that. 

So I could see where the Milwaukee Road would be the railroad the Russians would have studied them. A very similar network scope, similar climates, similar environment as far as population distribution. 



MilwaukeeRoadLover said:


> Didn't Milwaukee produce the Little Joe's for Russia? Why did they never take possession?



The United States Department of State banned the sale of any item to the Soviet Union that was deemed "Strategic Goods" which the locomotives were. They were designed to operate in Ural Mountains. This was about the same time frame as the Red Scare, McCarthyism, and a general decline of relations between both super powers. 

When the Soviet Union couldn't get the Little Joes they were forced to design their own locomotives similar which turned out to be the VL10 and the VL80. Of those 2,881 VL10s were built up until 2005 and are still in daily operation, and VL80 were built until 1995 and still in daily operation. Of those 4,921 examples were built. It could be argued that if the Little Joe's had gotten to Russia that they very well could still have been in service today. 

Don't forget the Milwaukee didn't produce or design the Little Joe. They are General Electric engines that were designed by GE and the Soviet Ministry of Railways. The Milwaukee wasn't even the first operator in the USA that was the South Shore Line. The Milwaukee offered to buy them first but the board of directors refused to pay for all 20 locomotives, and by the time of an oil and coal crisis in the 50s 8 of those engines and parts either went to South Shore or to Brazil. 

The Milwaukee was not a healthy railroad in the 1950s, or really any other point of it's existence.


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## DCAKen

Devil's Advocate said:


> Has any rail trail ever been turned back into a rail route again? Obviously it sounds great PR-wise to donate a route for trail use but turning them into trails also removes the rails and ballast and clogs whatever is left with sand, crushed rock, or pavement. This vastly increases the cost of rebuilding them back into rail routes and probably gives the previous host plenty of confidence they'll never be used to introduce another competitor.



Wikipedia has one example of a railbanked line getting re-railed.



> Though rare, there are several cases in which trails convert back to active railroads. One example occurred in 2012 in Clarence, Pennsylvania, where the R.J. Corman Railroad Company received permission to rebuild 20 miles (32 km) of railbanked line to serve new industries.[38] Conrail had ceased operating over the line in 1990, and 10 miles (16 km) was converted to the Snow Shoe Rails to Trails.[39]


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_trail#cite_note-39

More recently, a section of the Capital Crescent Trail between Silver Spring and Bethesda in suburban Washington DC is being turned into part of the Purple Line light rail, with the bike trail will be restored once the ROW is built. Unfortunately, project mismanagement and long delays from NIMBY lawsuits have turned this project into a quagmire.


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## PereMarquette810

Seaboard92 said:


> That makes a lot of sense actually. The Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension and the Trans Sib do share a lot of similarities. The electrics were powered by hydroelectric power, a long line over an area with limited population, and harsh winters. There is a reason I call the upper midwest (Both Dakotas, Minnesota, Saskatchewan, Manitoba) North America's Siberia. I would even add that the Milwaukee Road looks a lot like a smaller version of Soviet Railways. If you indulge this side note. But most of the Russian Rail network is east of the Ural's, just like most of the Milwaukee Road is east of the Rockies. With one maybe two lines that are extending further beyond that.
> 
> So I could see where the Milwaukee Road would be the railroad the Russians would have studied them. A very similar network scope, similar climates, similar environment as far as population distribution.
> 
> 
> 
> The United States Department of State banned the sale of any item to the Soviet Union that was deemed "Strategic Goods" which the locomotives were. They were designed to operate in Ural Mountains. This was about the same time frame as the Red Scare, McCarthyism, and a general decline of relations between both super powers.
> 
> When the Soviet Union couldn't get the Little Joes they were forced to design their own locomotives similar which turned out to be the VL10 and the VL80. Of those 2,881 VL10s were built up until 2005 and are still in daily operation, and VL80 were built until 1995 and still in daily operation. Of those 4,921 examples were built. It could be argued that if the Little Joe's had gotten to Russia that they very well could still have been in service today.
> 
> Don't forget the Milwaukee didn't produce or design the Little Joe. They are General Electric engines that were designed by GE and the Soviet Ministry of Railways. The Milwaukee wasn't even the first operator in the USA that was the South Shore Line. The Milwaukee offered to buy them first but the board of directors refused to pay for all 20 locomotives, and by the time of an oil and coal crisis in the 50s 8 of those engines and parts either went to South Shore or to Brazil.
> 
> The Milwaukee was not a healthy railroad in the 1950s, or really any other point of it's existence.



Seaboard, couldn’t it be argued that one of the other reasons that the Russians were as enamored with the Milwaukee Road as they were be that Milwaukee was one of the few railroads still manufacturing a majority of their passenger cars in-house, instead of contracting out to other manufacturers like Pullman, AC&F, and SLCC (among others), in a period where many other railroads were either winding down the manufacture of their passenger cars in house, or had abandoned the prospect entirely? Russia, with a centralized economy, had a relatively similar setup, with most everything being in house.

Bearing that in mind, wouldn’t the Russians appreciate being able to observe a railroad with some similarities to the setup they had, instead of hopping from company to company trying to figure out what would work best for them? I’d argue that Milwaukee provided a “one-stop shop” for the Russians to base many of their observations off of, in addition to the various factors you mentioned.


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## Seaboard92

PereMarquette810 said:


> Seaboard, couldn’t it be argued that one of the other reasons that the Russians were as enamored with the Milwaukee Road as they were be that Milwaukee was one of the few railroads still manufacturing a majority of their passenger cars in-house, instead of contracting out to other manufacturers like Pullman, AC&F, and SLCC (among others), in a period where many other railroads were either winding down the manufacture of their passenger cars in house, or had abandoned the prospect entirely? Russia, with a centralized economy, had a relatively similar setup, with most everything being in house.
> 
> Bearing that in mind, wouldn’t the Russians appreciate being able to observe a railroad with some similarities to the setup they had, instead of hopping from company to company trying to figure out what would work best for them? I’d argue that Milwaukee provided a “one-stop shop” for the Russians to base many of their observations off of, in addition to the various factors you mentioned.




I agree with you on that. However as we have talked about on the phone. If you consult the guide of surviving Pullman-Standard cars (does anyone have any interest in that?) you'll note that once you got into the period of the 1940s they started going from home built cars to a significant number of Pullman-Standard cars. However the Milwaukee is the only one who really built a large amount of cars in general over history. 

I do think you are right that the Milwaukee Road was a one stop shop for the Russians. The Milwaukee also had one really fast competitive market between Chicago, and St. Paul which is similar but not the same as Moscow-St. Petersburg.


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## toddinde

Mark Meyer said:


> The Milwaukee Road's electrification - and really the entire Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension - was/is considered a novelty. Hence the enduring interest and "what if" speculation even though such scenarios are contrary to reality. How a railroad which could not even install CTC, power switches, lineside detectors, adequate sidings, or even continuous ABS on its main line could spring for new locomotives (and likely a whole new electrical distribution system) boggles the mind - even for the 650 or so miles under wire - which was not even continuous (that is, the "Gap" from Avery to Othello was never electrified). Of course those who fantasize about this will tell you they have crunched the numbers and it was totally doable.
> 
> Figures lie, and liars figure, of course, but there are constants in all the pro-electrification proposals: Ignoring the greatest costs, which are train delay, locomotive dwell, and restricting a large number of assets to a limited area of trackage. For electrification to work, the electrified network needs to be expansive and cover just about all the possible routes, or be a fixed single route usually with a single commodity. In the original posting by D.S. Lewith, he/she gives a link to a map of proposed electrification in the 1970s. Using the BN Powder River Basin to Lincoln, NE route as an example: During the height of coal movement it was not unusual to see 60 or more coal trains (loads and empties) on the route from Alliance to Lincoln. Today, most of these trains are 125 cars or more, and operate with distributed power. Just the thought of having to modify the entire locomotive consist of ALL the trains at Lincoln (from electric to diesel electric and vice versa) again boggles the mind. The amount of yard capacity to accommodate all the trains in the terminal would be huge, as would the locomotive fleet (of both types) to be kept on hand to be available to maintain fluidity. Plus, of course, the personnel to make all these power modifications. The cost is simply overwhelming. Same for the UP proposal with the electrification starting and ending at North Platte. 100 trains a day changing power? NOT. The Milwaukee Road would not have this volume of trains, but electrification still stranded a lot of locomotive assets on a very limited amount of track (Harlowton to Avery; Othello to Seattle/Tacoma). That meant power modifications for the "Gap" (or running the electric power through dead), and at the end or beginning of the electrification.
> An additional explanation is here: Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension: The myth of superiority
> Here's another take on the costs of electrification proponents don't mention: http://energyskeptic.com/2016/electrifi ... ight-rail/
> 
> With regard to NeueAmtrakCalifornia's statement, "then they could have sold the northern transcon (including the Pacific Extension) to Union Pacific, thus giving them a competing northern transcon to compete against BNSF": I'm sure UP would argue that they compete quite well with BNSF in this corridor right now, thank you. Not only that, compared to "transcontinental" routes to and from California, BNSF's route from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest has much more competition. Not only UP via Nampa, Green River, and North Platte, but also UP/CP via Eastport/Kingsgate. The port of Vancouver, BC handles more container traffic (and more tonnage overall) than does Seattle and Tacoma combined, and both CN and CP offer intermodal service from Vancouver to the Upper Midwest of the U.S. In addition, CN has service to middle of America from the burgeoning port at Prince Rupert, BC. But none of this matters, really, because even if there were not all those alternatives to BNSF, the Milwaukee wouldn't be around because the primary reason it's not around is that it was the high-cost route. The Milwaukee didn't electrify for no reason; it did so because its operating profile had horrendous grades. It also had a very poor and usually exceptionally circuitous branch line/feeder "network."
> Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension: The myth of superiority
> 
> While proponents of the Milwaukee Road electrification and the Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension in general go to great lengths to explain why things turned out the way they didn't, it's easier to just focus on the operational deficiencies to easily grasp why things happened as they did.


You are far too pessimistic about the actual competitive position of the Milwaukee Road. Again, GE offered to finance the re-electrification of the Milwaukee and bridging the gap. Not an issue. In the late ‘60s, the Pacific Extension was not in bad shape. You ignore the fact that the Pacific Extension was very profitable once the BN gateways were opened. The reason the Milwaukee failed was because the management deferred maintenance to present a rosier balance sheet to get BN to absorb them. It was a dumb strategy and a poor management decision. While you make some reasonable points, your analysis is seriously flawed in that you misevaluate the actual competitive position of the Milwaukee in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. An early merger with C&NW and the Rock Island would have been a game changer.


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## sttom

toddinde said:


> An early merger with C&NW and the Rock Island would have been a game changer.



Going into the 60s, the Rock Island knew its days were numbered, so it merging with the Milwaukee Road would have been a bit of a stretch. Two companies in a similar situation wouldn't make for a good marriage. If Burlington Northern can be called the Western Conrail, a Milwaukee Road/Rock Island merger could be seen as the Western Penn Central. The Rock Island pinned its entire existence on it merging with the Union Pacific, which the Chicago and Northwestern and Milwaukee Road fought until the Rock Island went belly up. If any railway was going to be the Rock Island's saving grace beyond the UP, it would have been the Southern Pacific who bought some of their spare parts at a bankruptcy sale. The only thing that surprises me is the the SP didn't try to buy more of the Rock Island, specifically its route into Chicago, but I know the SP was starting to experience its own issues at the time.


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## Mark Meyer

Toddinde: I think you are missing my point about electrification. Yes, I have heard the story about the GE’s electrification and “closing the gap” in doing so. It’s not about whether or not to electrify the gap or upgrading the system. It’s all about dedicating a large amount of resources (locomotives) to a very limited amount of trackage – only 867 miles if one includes “the gap.” Captive power is very inefficient, and more so considering that none of the Milwaukee’s branch lines were electrified (not to mention the whole railroad east of Harlowton). And, considering that just about all the Milwaukee branch lines had even more horrible operating profiles than the main line (to Spokane, Portland, and Sumas as examples), this would be a lot of diesel-electric power which would still need to be kept in the area, and include costly power modifications as a result.

I don’t accept that the Milwaukee Pacific Extension “was very profitable” following the opening of the BN “gateways.” Sure, I’ve heard this claim, but it is placed against the fact that between just about any two point you care to name, it cost the Milwaukee more to move a car than was the case with Burlington Northern. It’s all about sustainability, and the Milwaukee had none due to its insufficient infrastructure, and the likelihood that it cost them more resources to move a car for the same amount of money dictated by the tariff. Clearly by the time the Staggers Act had been fully realized in the 1980s – had the Pacific Extension held on – its inferior profile and route structure would certainly have doomed it then.

And nothing happens in a bubble. Post-merger at BN was a tumultuous time – not only dealing with merging operating philosophies, but also the expense of building new connections and routes (Spokane and the coalfield, as examples) and yard facilities that temporarily diminished dependability on the BN. 

One of the main new sources of “profitable traffic” on the Pacific Extension as a result of the BN merger was Milwaukee Road trackage rights into Portland and interchange with the SP. One of the more notable shipments were cars of copper concentrate destined for interchange to the BA&P at Silver Bow, Montana for the smelter at Anaconda. Normally, these cars were interchanged to SP&S/NP at Portland and handled on a route (via Pasco, Spokane, and St. Regis) that never exceeded a 1 percent grade. NP and SP interchanged a lot in Portland, but following the merger, much California traffic off the “new” Burlington Northern started using the ex-GN/WP/ATSF “Inside Gateway,” much to the displeasure of the SP. As a result, when the Milwaukee finally got access to Portland in 1971, SP started interchanging traffic to the MILW instead of the BN where possible. The copper concentrate was one such commodity that switched to the Milwaukee. Though touted as “new traffic” the heavy cars were not kind to the former logging railroad which was the Milwaukee from Chehalis to Tacoma; also, the Milwaukee route to Silver Bow was 47 miles further than BN with THREE 1.7 percent grades to deal with – and all for the same cut the BN and/or NP/SP&S received. Again, over the course of time – especially into deregulation where BN could have simply undercut the Milwaukee in price had it lasted this long – the Milwaukee’s situation was untenable. I will reiterate, you don’t get to claim being “very profitable” if you’re not able to compete in the long term.

Your claim that “the (Milwaukee Road) management deferred maintenance to present a rosier balance sheet to get BN to absorb them” is again something I have heard before. I doubt that this can be proven one way or the other, but it is relatively logical. Since the end of WWII, the Milwaukee considered its Pacific Extension as a marginal operation at best with management preferring to be consolidated (somehow) into a larger system. But whether the Milwaukee realized it or not, there was zero chance of being included in Burlington Northern. Had that happened, there is little reason to believe the portions remaining of the Milwaukee Road would much different than they turned out to be after 1980 (probably less trackage, actually). But BN knew all the Milwaukee routes (at least east of Miles City) were inferior and had little reason to want to be bothered with them. For the Milwaukee, it could also be true that they recognized the Pacific Extension’s inferiorities that would eventually doom it and decided it was in their best interest into not investing in an operation which could not compete. And, of course, there is also the very possible likelihood that they simply didn’t have the money to upgrade. Take your pick, but even if you believe in the “very profitable” and “deferred maintenance on purpose” scenarios, then the next question is why another railroad (BN or UP, most likely, of course) did not rush to obtain the Milwaukee. Around BN merger time (even before the decay of the Milwaukee in earnest), UP officials inspected the Milwaukee line, and did BN later on. Bottom line: If there was really “high profitability” (or anything otherwise worthwhile), someone would have saved it, as was the case with many of the Rock Island’s main routes, which were as bad or worse than the Milwaukee’s at the end.

The Milwaukee had little “competitive position.” Not every shipment in the Pacific Northwest originated or terminated in the Seattle or Tacoma areas, and the Milwaukee was fantastically uncompetitive cost-wise everywhere else. It’s easy to look at Milwaukee so-called accomplishments, such as the schedule of the Olympian Hiawatha matching that of the Empire Builder, the XL Special having the fastest freight train schedule from Chicago to Seattle, and the increase in traffic after the BN merger. But they all have one thing in common: Unsustainability. But looking ahead to today we know that a Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension (if amazingly still in place) would be virtually shut out of unit wheat trains to the Pacific Northwest and limited on other ag trains, have no coal business, and would need about 25% more assets for stack train compared to BNSF. Just to name a few.

So, instead of basing the worthiness of the Pacific Extension on anecdotal successes despite the overwhelming failures, I prefer to give people who were some of the primary decision makers at the time the benefit of any doubt that they just might have understood the Milwaukee’s myriad shortcomings and had the prescience to know how they would play out in the future.


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## Seaboard92

I think that the Milwaukee right of way has some utility but not a whole lot. I think in Washington state it would have provided some general aid to the railroad system in general. Currently Stevens Pass is limited to 2 trains an hour, Stampede Pass is only eastbound trains, and the Gorge is incredibly busy. I could see a scenario in which having that fourth route over the Cascades could have been a net positive a few years ago. 

There are only so many trains you can run a day over these lines, and at some point you will reach that max. Now will we ever meet that max that I don't know. A service disruption on the Gorge line would be a severe disruption to the entire PNW. 

So the Milwaukee routing could have potentially been used for that rainy day eventuality. But that may or may not happen. 

You could fix Stevens Pass if you electrified it Seattle-Spokane then you can run significantly more than two trains over the mountain an hour. I say Seattle-Spokane because you ideally want the electric district to be long enough to make it worth while. Unlike the original GN which was Skykomish to Wenatchee.


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## neroden

I'm not indulging Mark Meyer's Just World fantasies. 

It's clear that the Milwaukee route from Seattle to Spokane was, and still is, superior on all counts. I don't think this is particularly controversial; the lack of system unification is what lead to the demonstrably inferior Stevens Pass being used.

With a network broken up among private companies, you can have one good route (like the Lackawanna Cutoff) and it can die because the rest of the lines owned by the same company are terrible. Same thing happened with the Milwaukee, but with the added bonus that the management didn't even know which routes were good and which weren't.


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## Mark Meyer

Seaboard92: The Milwaukee line over Snoqualmie Pass was indeed worth keeping, but BN (which actually acquired it after the Milwaukee shut down) was in the getting-rid-of-as-much-as-possible mode in the 1980s (hence, the gift that keeps on giving in the form of Montana Rail Link…). The 20/20 hindsight issue is that after the Milwaukee got trackage rights from Black River to Bellingham on BN following the BN merger, they abandoned their Everett branch from Cedar Falls to Monroe. This would have been ideal for today’s unit coal trains for Roberts Bank and crude trains for Fidalgo (Anacortes), Arco, and Cherry Point in that they would bypass downtown Seattle.

Again, electrification would not “fix” the Stevens Pass line because – like a Milwaukee Road electrification scenario – there would be a large number of assets necessary for use only on about 330 miles of main line track. And since your stated goal is to increase the number of trains operating on the route, this would create an epic bottleneck at Spokane modifying power – especially for those trains requiring distributed power (locomotives on each end of the train). It would also be awkward and expensive for trains not destined for Seattle, such as Tacoma or Vancouver, BC. 

The limitation on the Stevens Pass route is not Cascade Tunnel, it is the grade, especially eastbound where it is 31 miles from Skykomish to Berne with generally a maximum speed of 25 MPH with one intermediate siding and a continuous grade of 1.6 to 2.2 percent. The heaviest trains are often not even powered to achieve track speed, so a two-hour trek from Sky to Berne is commonplace. Things are more fluid westbound, as the 2.2 percent is much less and it’s downhill through the tunnel. Cascade tunnel is limited to about 28 trains per day – not even the “two per hour” you state. But it is about the same number Montana Rail Link can handle west of Helena to Elliston on its single-track climb over the Continental Divide.

Tunnel flushes can be an issue for eastward trains close together, but BNSF is working on ways to mitigate the flush time with things like diesel exhaust monitors that provide air quality readings throughout the tunnel allowing input on when a following train can enter rather than just waiting for a fixed amount of time. More costly mitigation would include drilling additional tunnels for ventilation. It remains to be seen what could be done to reduce flush time, but the salient point is that the a single track railroad with steep grades on each side of the summit is a significant limitation. Plus – if need be – drilling a second Cascade Tunnel would be cheaper than electrifying the railroad from Spokane to Seattle, acquiring the locomotives to operate it, and absorbing the huge costs of locomotive consist modifications in perpetuity.

The beauty of the Stevens Pass route is that it’s pretty much a one-off for major grades on single track on BNSF’s Chicago-Seattle route. Westward trains can operate with minimal power from Chicago or the Twin Cities to Wenatchee, and then add power for the climb to Cascade Tunnel. This add-on power comes from eastward trains which cut it at Wenatchee and continue east with minimal power. Therefore, the part of the route that requires this very high horsepower-per-ton (HPT) ratio is limited to the 200 or so miles between Wenatchee, Seattle, and Tacoma. This is in contrast to the Milwaukee Road route, which is about an 850-mile district requiring nearly a similar HPT ratio due to the numerous steep grades at Snoqualmie (eastward), Boylston, St. Paul Pass, Pipestone Pass, and Loweth, which makes it the high-cost route.


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## sttom

neroden said:


> I'm not indulging Mark Meyer's Just World fantasies.
> 
> It's clear that the Milwaukee route from Seattle to Spokane was, and still is, superior on all counts. I don't think this is particularly controversial; the lack of system unification is what lead to the demonstrably inferior Stevens Pass being used.
> 
> With a network broken up among private companies, you can have one good route (like the Lackawanna Cutoff) and it can die because the rest of the lines owned by the same company are terrible. Same thing happened with the Milwaukee, but with the added bonus that the management didn't even know which routes were good and which weren't.



What you call a fantasy, others would call business. The Milwaukee Road's route may have been a good option for BN between Puget Sound and Spokane, but that doesn't mean that it would have been seen as a wise thing to buy in the late 1970s. Most railways back then were lucky to be living a few steps above hand to mouth. Humans aren't perfect and we don't live in a perfect world, but we have the ability to look back and say it would have been a smart move for BN to buy part of the Pacific Extension, they wouldn't have had that knowledge. 

As the Milwaukee Road was coming apart, most other railroads were just pulling out of fairly bad times and putting money towards undoing years of poor maintenance, which would have been seen as a better use of money than future proofing their network for 40 years down the line. The world we live in would have been seen as fantastical to them given that the railroads as an industry were seen as through as some people say malls are today. 

If I were running a business that had just survived a rough few years, my first impulse in a good year wouldn't be to buy my competition a couple blocks down the road, I would choose to use the money to shore up my own position. Then snipe business from said competitor after they go under. You or anyone else may not like that decision, but its the decision people in business will choose most of the time. And at the time, BN's options were to shed itself of less profitable routes and focus on the core that made the most money with the business they knew they would have or risk over extending themselves by absorbing bits of a dying competitor in a world where the conventional wisdom was that they had one foot in the grave.


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## neroden

Well, I have to agree with you, sttom, because that's actually my *point*. The short-term decisions of private companies, while individually rational at the time, did not and do not lead to the societally desirable outcome. (Well, mostly rational; the Milwaukee Road's bad accounting is documented.)


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## Willbridge

sttom said:


> What you call a fantasy, others would call business. The Milwaukee Road's route may have been a good option for BN between Puget Sound and Spokane, but that doesn't mean that it would have been seen as a wise thing to buy in the late 1970s. Most railways back then were lucky to be living a few steps above hand to mouth. Humans aren't perfect and we don't live in a perfect world, but we have the ability to look back and say it would have been a smart move for BN to buy part of the Pacific Extension, they wouldn't have had that knowledge.
> 
> As the Milwaukee Road was coming apart, most other railroads were just pulling out of fairly bad times and putting money towards undoing years of poor maintenance, which would have been seen as a better use of money than future proofing their network for 40 years down the line. The world we live in would have been seen as fantastical to them given that the railroads as an industry were seen as through as some people say malls are today.
> 
> If I were running a business that had just survived a rough few years, my first impulse in a good year wouldn't be to buy my competition a couple blocks down the road, I would choose to use the money to shore up my own position. Then snipe business from said competitor after they go under. You or anyone else may not like that decision, but its the decision people in business will choose most of the time. And at the time, BN's options were to shed itself of less profitable routes and focus on the core that made the most money with the business they knew they would have or risk over extending themselves by absorbing bits of a dying competitor in a world where the conventional wisdom was that they had one foot in the grave.


At the risk of thread drift, I'll add a footnote to this: the way that Denver Union Station ended up a stub and almost ended trackless is that the railway real estate people were on a roll into the early days of the Staggers Act. When the Act started to take hold it dawned on railways that they might make money by running trains. City planners did not read _Railway Age_ and so it took some time for everyone to realize that railway operating issues now had to be addressed.


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## toddinde

Willbridge said:


> At the risk of thread drift, I'll add a footnote to this: the way that Denver Union Station ended up a stub and almost ended trackless is that the railway real estate people were on a roll into the early days of the Staggers Act. When the Act started to take hold it dawned on railways that they might make money by running trains. City planners did not read _Railway Age_ and so it took some time for everyone to realize that railway operating issues now had to be addressed.


The Staggers Act was not a success. Currently, the railways’ share of the freight business in the US is roughly the same as the share of freight transported by water. In percentages, about 17%. Post deregulation, the railroads decided they wanted to focus on hauling commodities, and little that required specialized service. While perhaps a logical, short term decision, it hasn’t set the railroads up for just in time delivery, the focus on rapid delivery of consumer goods, and the inevitable clean energy future. The railroads absolutely must carry more passengers to support a growing country and relieve a strained and inefficient transportation system that is over reliant on highways and aviation. The country needs to demand more from rail. Whether rail management is able to adapt is questionable.


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## Willbridge

toddinde said:


> The Staggers Act was not a success. Currently, the railways’ share of the freight business in the US is roughly the same as the share of freight transported by water. In percentages, about 17%. Post deregulation, the railroads decided they wanted to focus on hauling commodities, and little that required specialized service. While perhaps a logical, short term decision, it hasn’t set the railroads up for just in time delivery, the focus on rapid delivery of consumer goods, and the inevitable clean energy future. The railroads absolutely must carry more passengers to support a growing country and relieve a strained and inefficient transportation system that is over reliant on highways and aviation. The country needs to demand more from rail. Whether rail management is able to adapt is questionable.


Neither was the Staggers Act a failure. One of the state rail planners in the attached 1975 late night photo was from Rhode Island. He had just stopped a Penn Central crew from lifting rail from a branch line in his state that still had customers on it. They needed rail for another branch! The grim consequences of the 1920's Progressive Era rail regulations -- intended to punish railways for how they had behaved in the previous generation -- were still doing that into the 1980's.

When waiting for the _Southwest Chief_ in Kingman and watching the BNSF intermodal trains rolling through on double track I think about value, not just tonnage. I also think about what things were headed to prior to the Staggers Act, imperfect though it may be.

If these state guys looked stressed out it's because a doomsday scenario for U.S. railroads seemed a real possibility.


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## lostcat

I’ve sometime wondered what if the ICC had said “not ever” rather than “not yet” to the BN merger in 1968. Would the NP and MILW have merged? Assuming they could have resolved the issues that stymied a MILW-CNW merger, An NP-MILW merger would certainly have hastened the demise of the electrics rather than extend it. 
As has been stated by others, railroads in 1970 were in consolidation and survival mode, not looking to expand and grow for the future. 
How would they have consolidated the MILW and NP west of N. Dakota?
Miles City to Lombard MT is 21 miles shorter via the MILW, and has easier grades, but it was not faster for trains with the same HP/T, and does not serve the CBQ interchange at Laurel. I suspect it would have become a long branchline with the merged road angling for trackage rights over the GN to reach Laurel so they could 200 miles or so of track.
Three Forks to Garrison would remain a branchline with perhaps some segments of the MILW replacing the NP, and the rest abandoned.
Garrison, MT to Lind, WA would be abandoned, with only short segments retained to reach valuable shippers, such as St Maries to Plummer ID. The NP via Spokane was longer, but just as fast, served Spokane directly, and had much easier grades.
Lind to Thorp (Ellensburg) is a question. It is 81 miles shorter via the MILW and a couple of hours faster for an intermodal train, but it had a 2.2% grade westbound and 1.6% eastbound verses 1% or less via the NP. The merged road would later regret not having it for intermodal and eastbound empty grain trains.
Snoqualmie Pass is the most likely candidate to have survived. Its’ 0.8% westbound grade was far superior to the NP’s 2.2%, and its’ 1.74% was better than the NP’s 2.2% eastbound. Perhaps the 3-mile Ravensdale connection could be justified by the locomotive savings.


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## Mark Meyer

The NP/MILW merger is an oft-touted scenario. But it never would have happened. For one thing, NP owned half of the CB&Q (along with GN) and they would hardly give up their half of the CB&Q to merge with the MILW which had a route structure which was highly inferior to the CB&Q. This unlikely "what if" would have logically resulted in the GN purchasing the NP's half of the CB&Q and merging with the CB&Q. GN already had the superior route between the Twin Cities and Pacific Northwest, and other than Snoqualmie Pass, the MILW had nothing that would have benefited the NP. And a combined GN/CB&Q would likely result in NP/MILW losing a lot of interchange traffic to/from the Pacific Northwest to/from the CB&Q at Laurel, which would move instead via the GN route through Great Falls to the main at Shelby.


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## Ziv

On a tangential note, the town of Harlowton still has not recovered from losing the Milwaukee Road jobs. The roundhouse is still there as is one locomotive on display in the center of town, but the tracks and jobs are long gone and the town is still really hurting. There has been very little in the way of updates, houses are pretty shabby, with a few fairly spectacular abandoned buildings. Median household income is just $23,600, which is hurting even for Montana. Jobs in Wheatland County started to disappear in the 1960's as mechanization of agriculture really started to take off, but the county was crippled by the loss of those Milwaukee jobs in the 1970's. 
My Mom bought a small cattle ranch outside of Harlowton and I go there fairly frequently. It is sad to see a small town that has never gotten its mojo back. The Milwaukee Road's failure is still affecting families in Montana.


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## sttom

The same can be said for many towns along now abandoned rail lines. I lived in Humboldt County, California for a year and that county was in decline until Marijuana legalization a couple years ago and the railroad was shut down by the FRA in 1998. The logging industry is all but gone now and manufacturing anywhere along the old NWP is sparse compared to what it used to be when the trains were still running. I know the demise of the railroad wasn't that only factor that hurt the economies of the counties that the NWP used to serve, but the loss of rail hasn't helped. Of those that have survived, they have been the biggest advocates for getting the trains back so they could have a cheaper and more environmentally friendly way of shipping their goods. The irony, is that some environmentalists have been trying to hold up the project for years and couple that with state level ambivalence and you get a mess. I know this is a bit of a tangent, but the Staggers Act was imperfect and frankly any law coming out of Congress is usually long on mandates and short on details. I understand that times were tough in the 70s, but Congress could have better dealt with the abandonment of lines than it did. But that is something for my generation to solve.


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## toddinde

lostcat said:


> I’ve sometime wondered what if the ICC had said “not ever” rather than “not yet” to the BN merger in 1968. Would the NP and MILW have merged? Assuming they could have resolved the issues that stymied a MILW-CNW merger, An NP-MILW merger would certainly have hastened the demise of the electrics rather than extend it.
> As has been stated by others, railroads in 1970 were in consolidation and survival mode, not looking to expand and grow for the future.
> How would they have consolidated the MILW and NP west of N. Dakota?
> Miles City to Lombard MT is 21 miles shorter via the MILW, and has easier grades, but it was not faster for trains with the same HP/T, and does not serve the CBQ interchange at Laurel. I suspect it would have become a long branchline with the merged road angling for trackage rights over the GN to reach Laurel so they could 200 miles or so of track.
> Three Forks to Garrison would remain a branchline with perhaps some segments of the MILW replacing the NP, and the rest abandoned.
> Garrison, MT to Lind, WA would be abandoned, with only short segments retained to reach valuable shippers, such as St Maries to Plummer ID. The NP via Spokane was longer, but just as fast, served Spokane directly, and had much easier grades.
> Lind to Thorp (Ellensburg) is a question. It is 81 miles shorter via the MILW and a couple of hours faster for an intermodal train, but it had a 2.2% grade westbound and 1.6% eastbound verses 1% or less via the NP. The merged road would later regret not having it for intermodal and eastbound empty grain trains.
> Snoqualmie Pass is the most likely candidate to have survived. Its’ 0.8% westbound grade was far superior to the NP’s 2.2%, and its’ 1.74% was better than the NP’s 2.2% eastbound. Perhaps the 3-mile Ravensdale connection could be justified by the locomotive savings.


Since we’re in fantasy scenarios, which are lots of fun, how about the ICC really preserving competition and having the GN merge with the Milwaukee and NP merge with the CB&Q. Then Rock Island and North Western find a home within those. To preserve competition, North Western goes to NP/CB&Q and Rock Island goes to Milw/GN. I think GN management would have whipped Milw and the Rock into shape. Or the whole crazy house of cards would have collapsed. But these combinations would have kept the maximum competition going to the maximum number of places. SP&S could have remained jointly owned.


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## toddinde

Ziv said:


> On a tangential note, the town of Harlowton still has not recovered from losing the Milwaukee Road jobs. The roundhouse is still there as is one locomotive on display in the center of town, but the tracks and jobs are long gone and the town is still really hurting. There has been very little in the way of updates, houses are pretty shabby, with a few fairly spectacular abandoned buildings. Median household income is just $23,600, which is hurting even for Montana. Jobs in Wheatland County started to disappear in the 1960's as mechanization of agriculture really started to take off, but the county was crippled by the loss of those Milwaukee jobs in the 1970's.
> My Mom bought a small cattle ranch outside of Harlowton and I go there fairly frequently. It is sad to see a small town that has never gotten its mojo back. The Milwaukee Road's failure is still affecting families in Montana.


This is the unfortunate and ridiculous impacts of bad decisions based solely on profit. If some combination could have kept the Milwaukee in business, it would have saves tons of jobs and the economic vitality of an entire region. I live in Southeast Arizona. This area has never recovered from the 1961 severing of the SP’s EP&SW south line through Douglas. It has been devastating to the whole county and change the economic equation to the worse. We need to stop pulling up railroads willy nilly. This is the harm caused by the Staggers Act which is our equivalent of Britain’s Beeching Axe which is severely hurting Britain to this day.


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## railiner

Any town that is a “one industry town”, is always in jeopardy. Look at places like Altoona or Roanoke....or for that matter, Lansing or even Detroit. Some have managed to overcome their losses, others not so much...


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## railiner

Regarding mergers, I think the ICC should have promoted end to end, rather than parallel ones...so that each “transcontinental” would pair up with a “trunk” road.


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## toddinde

railiner said:


> Regarding mergers, I think the ICC should have promoted end to end, rather than parallel ones...so that each “transcontinental” would pair up with a “trunk” road.


Absolutely. There were places infrastructure was overbuilt, but many places where it was overbuilt for the population at the time. If we clearly need something in 20 years, but it can’t turn a profit now, a subsidy to keep it going during the interim makes sense. The infrastructure will usually cover most of its costs. The current airline subsidies during COVID are an example. Imagine if we had just bailed Erie Lackawanna out after hurricane Agnes instead of letting it go bankrupt and having Conrail abandon it. So dumb. Penny wise and pound foolish.


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## west point

SAL should never gone to CSX. Better SOU or NS now


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## fredmcain

omaha said:


> A great description of the poor management of the Milwaukee Road is THE NATION PAYS AGAIN by Thomas Ploss.



I have this book. I found it a great read. It's a book that I like to put back on the shelf and then after a few years get it back down and read it again.

It's not all "legalese". Ploss throws in some interesting anecdotes. I wish I coulda met the man.

One of the best experts on the Milwaukee Road is Michael Sol. As far as I know, he's still alive.

Regards,
Fred M Cain


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## fredmcain

One sad irony about the Milwaukee Road is that most if not all of the energy needed to run the electrification was generated from water power. “White coal” they called it since so much of the hydro power came from melting snow.

If the line were still there today in today’s political environment, it would be very “politically correct” since the electric zones would have a zero carbon footprint.

It’s a sad tale, really. This should’ve never happened. Corrupt managers together with politicians who just plain didn’t care all failed us.

One well-known expert on the Milwaukee Road told me in an e-mail that back in 1980, the State of Montana raised almost enough funds to buy the line or, at least most of it. But they didn’t quite have enough. So, they appealed to Washington. Jimmy Carter was running for president as an incumbent and had an uphill fight against Ronald Reagan. He knew that he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning Montana anyways, so the State got no help from him.

“Sad, sad”, as “you know who” might say.


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## fredmcain

neroden said:


> Mike has strong views on this, but he's wrong. With electric traction and competent management, quite likely one of the other northern transcons would have been cut instead; either the NP or the GN.
> 
> The NP got downgraded and mothballed eventually anyway. The GN is probably the worst of the three routes, showing the problems with making national policy decisions by the random acts of private CEOs.



Neroden,

Michael Sol told me in an e-mail that back in the 1960s, The Milwaukee Road had a hot freight that ran from Chicago to Seattle that beat the competition by several hours *AND* they did that on bad and deteriorating track with slow orders appearing.

Imagine what they could've done if they'd had good track !


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## neroden

One of the Amazon reviewers of _The Nation Pays Again_ writes:

"I submit that even the reader with no experience in the executive side of a corporation will gnash their teeth at the remarkable ability of the Road's executives and senior management to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, time and time again, in order to line their pockets."


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## TrackWalker

At one time in the early 1980's I had a copy of a Milwaukee Railroad satire song sung to the tune of Union Pacific's song , "Great Big Rollin' Railroad.

Here is what I can remember of it...

*Milwaukee Railroad*
(Sung to the tune of the UP song)

We’re a great big rolling railroad
Hear our diesel engines chug
Barely doin’ 10 miles per hour
???

We’re a great big rolling railroad
Just a rusting in the sun
We’re the Milwaukee Railroad
(And our stories’ almost done)

From the shores of Lake Superior
To Tacoma’s stinky bay
We’re a-rocking and a-rolling
And derailing all the way.

We’re 10,000 miles of history
And our right-of-way’s all mud
We’re the Milwaukee Railroad
A great big rolling dud.


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## Willbridge

fredmcain said:


> Neroden,
> 
> Michael Sol told me in an e-mail that back in the 1960s, The Milwaukee Road had a hot freight that ran from Chicago to Seattle that beat the competition by several hours *AND* they did that on bad and deteriorating track with slow orders appearing.
> 
> Imagine what they could've done if they'd had good track !


That was the _XL Special _if I remember right. My dad explained to us that the Milwaukee Road could schedule a freight that fast because there was so little conflicting traffic.


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## Mark Meyer

fredmcain said:


> I have this book. I found it a great read. It's a book that I like to put back on the shelf and then after a few years get it back down and read it again.
> 
> It's not all "legalese". Ploss throws in some interesting anecdotes. I wish I coulda met the man.
> 
> One of the best experts on the Milwaukee Road is Michael Sol. As far as I know, he's still alive.



Ploss's book is indeed interesting. And he does have some amusing anecdotes, like meeting the stuff L&N executives over the entrance to Louisville. The problem with Ploss (and Sol) is they're both lawyers and both had zero exposure to day-to-day railroad operations. It shows in Ploss's book. No reference to Milwaukee's inferior profile or circuitous branchline network. To him, any traffic would have been good traffic even though west of Miles City, pretty much any car operating on the Milwaukee Road could move with less expense and therefore greater profit on the competition. In other words, the operation is all that really matters, and his book focuses on personalities, management ineptness (or conspiracy), and politics, while ignoring that if the Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension was worth keeping, someone would have stepped in to acquire it. Well, Ploss does kind of adderss this on page 148 describing just after the end of the Milwaukee Pacific Extension: "Burlington Northern bought hundreds of miles of the former transcontinental line and Union Pacific did the same..." That's right, something not even remotely true, and not a rarity in the book. (And yes, BNSF did acquire the ex-MILW main line in South Dakota and North Dakota to Terry, Montana in 2005 from the State of South Dakota, but Ploss's book was published in 1983.)


----------



## Mark Meyer

fredmcain said:


> Michael Sol told me in an e-mail that back in the 1960s, The Milwaukee Road had a hot freight that ran from Chicago to Seattle that beat the competition by several hours *AND* they did that on bad and deteriorating track with slow orders appearing.
> 
> Imagine what they could've done if they'd had good track !



Well, the Milwaukee had a train (XL Special) that had a SCHEDULE faster than the competition, but that's about all you can say. The schedule was 55.5 hours from Chicago to Seattle which meant the train had to average 39 MPH the entire way. Slow orders notwithstanding, it approaches nearly an impossibility considering the numerous permanent speed restrictions (45 MPH or less all the way from Haugan, MT to Malden, WA, and about half of that isn't mountainous territory even). Reality: The train often ran late. And, to make the schedule, the train had to be overpowered as to not require helpers at the train's four major grades. And of course, only some of the traffic going to the Pacific Northwest was going to Seattle or Tacoma. Everywhere else - like Great Falls, Spokane, Bellingham, Portland, Vancouver, BC, Yakima, Pasco-Richland-Kennewick, Salem, Albany, Eugene, Longview, etc...., the Milwaukee route was more circuitous or the Milwaukee didn't go there at all (mostly the latter). 

But it didn't take long for the competition to catch up. CB&Q/GN matched the running time of the XL Special 4 years later at 55.5 hours. The difference was that while the XL Special was restricted to 3,000 tons, CB&Q/GN train 97 was restricted to 5,500 tons as far as Spokane (where Portland traffic was set out). GN could do that with the same or less power than the Milwaukee needed as its route across Montana had a maximum grade of 1% instead of the Milwaukee's 2%. A fast running time is no big deal when you are expending more resources to move the same amount of freight than the competition.

In the Spring of 1971, BN created the Pacific Zip, scheduled from Chicago to Seattle in only 50 hours, and regularly made the trek in 46. To counter this much faster service, the Milwaukee threw in the towel (at least in published schedules), putting the XL Special on a Chicago-Seattle timing of 63 hours 45 minutes, and it was downhill from there.

Same story for the Olympian Hiawatha. Initially, it was scheduled to match the Chicago-Seattle schedule of the Empire Builder of 45 hours, which it did match for several years. But by the time the Olympian Hiawatha was discontinued in 1961, its running time had improved only 5 minutes to 44 hours, 55 minutes, while the Empire Builder was making the Chicago-Seattle trip in 42 hours, 50 minutes, over 2 hours faster.

Between Chicago and St. Paul, the Milwaukee did have the primary USPS mail contracts for the Pacific Northwest, but at St. Paul, they were interchanged to Great Northern for the trek to Seattle and Portland due to speed and reliability.

The bottom line is this: A claim to the "fastest" is only valid if it can be maintained. A one-off is only anecdotal. Without doubt, Great Northern has proven to be the "fastest" in passenger, mail, and freight consistently since the end of WWII.

And instead of stating "Imagine what they could have done if they'd had good track," the salient question is: Why didn't they have good track? And the answer is: You're less likely to when you're the high-cost railroad to the Pacific Northwest.


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## Mark Meyer

Willbridge said:


> That was the _XL Special _if I remember right. My dad explained to us that the Milwaukee Road could schedule a freight that fast because there was so little conflicting traffic.



That was the theory behind it. It debuted in 1963 after the Olympian Hiawatha was discontinued. A remnant of the Olympian Hiawatha operated west of Aberdeen until 1964, but the Milwaukee knew that its time was limited. The XL Special was predicated on the passenger trains being gone. That's a pretty sad commentary on a railroad when getting rid of the sole passenger train on the line was necessary to make an enhanced running time! Same story after the BN merger: The MILW gained some traffic as a result of some merger conditions, which resulted in up to 4 trains daily each way - literally the peak of train frequency on that railroad, and double what it was seeing previously. And when those extra trains started running, that's when the Milwaukee dumped the 55.5 hour schedule of the XL Special and lengthened it by over 8 hours. What was an iffy schedule before became impossible.


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## fredmcain

Willbridge said:


> That was the _XL Special _if I remember right. My dad explained to us that the Milwaukee Road could schedule a freight that fast because there was so little conflicting traffic.



Willbridge,

I really think that your dad was partly right about that – that does seem to make sense. But it’s also true that the line was rather splendidly engineered as well. Since it was the last transcon built (or maybe that was the WP, I’m not sure now) they had some heavy construction equipment available to use that the “YouPee” didn’t have in 1869.

For years I have been an advocate of rebuilding the line west of Terry, MT. That would have several advantages and benefits but the costs would be so enormous that it’s probably just not worth it. The rather intriguing fact is that probably 98-99% of the abandoned roadbed is still in existence albeit under a variety of owners such as the State, the U.S. Forest Service as well as a mish-mash of private owners. So a rebuilding really_ IS_ theoretically possible. The problem is that if private enterprise would do this, they would have to recoup their massive investment through freight rates that would be uncompetitive with the BNSF rates or even with the YouPee’s rates over a more circuitous route.

The government could do it. They could probably find the funding somewhere. Biden likes trains so, what the heck? But the problem with a government project is that the NIMBYS and environmentalists would pressure their elective representatives to oppose the line. It could be tied up in the courts for years or even decades.

The most unfortunate fact is that the line has been too gone for too long.

The sad part is there really _WAS _a narrow window of opportunity to fix up and rebuild the line but that window closed long, long ago and in my own personal, honest and humble opinion our Nation is NOT better off because of it.

Wouldn’t it make a splendid and scenic Amtrak route, though, if it were still there? In fact, to bring this thread back to the subject of Amtrak, I read where the North Coast Limited, when it was running back in the 1970s was diverted over the Milwaukee Road and Snoqualmie Pass in the State of Washington. They diverted the train either because of a derailment on the former NP line or maybe it was bad weather, I cannot recall.

Wouldn’t it have been a really cool experience to have been a passenger on that train? Today most of it is bicycle trail.


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## railiner

Fast freight brings this one to mind...









Santa Fe Says Surfer C is the Fastest Freight Train in the West (Published 1970)


Comment on Santa Fe Super C, fastest freight train in West, carrying only trailers and containers on flatcars for big shippers willing to pay more for extra speed, primarily US Post Office; train, in 2d yr of operation, makes daily Chicago-Los Angeles run in 40 hrs, stopping at Kansas City...




www.nytimes.com













Super C (freight train) - Wikipedia







en.wikipedia.org


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## fredmcain

In my own personal, honest and humble opinion, and I know some on this group would disagree, but I have always believed that the abandonment of the Milwaukee Road to the Northwest was a terrible and short-sighted decision. Corrupt or inept managers may have been to blame but so too were our Beltway politicians who dropped the ball.

In order to get inside the heads of the managers, we need to get into a time machine and return to the 1970s to really get a feel for what was going on in American railroading at that time.

In the ‘70s, the very future of American railroading was in doubt. Railroad managers and rail analysts alike were very pessimistic on the future. Wall Street was extremely bearish on rails. I recall an article in Railway Age in the late ‘70s that questioned if the rail network would even survive at all beyond a few “heavy-haul” lines. Thankfully, that never came to pass.

Things were so bad that railroads just about couldn’t borrow or raise money from investors. Track maintenance along with any improvements had to come out of net operating income or they didn’t get done.

With this kind of an economic and political environment, a consensus emerged that there were too many parallel lines – way too many. A second mainline from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest was deemed redundant and would probably need to be disposed of. There simply was not enough business to justify a second line never mind a _THIRD_ line!

So, out of the three the Milwaukee was in by far the worst physical shape in spite of the fact that it had been splendidly engineer and constructed. Where in the world could the money come from to fix it? Not from investors, that’s for sure. The only possibility was the Beltway and they dropped the ball. There was at least a suggestion made that perhaps legislation could be passed to bring Conrail west but there was insufficient support.

So, although it’s my sincere conviction that this was short-sighted, I can nevertheless understand why it happened and see the managers (corrupt or not) point of view.

It’s too bad, a pity, really. In today’s railroad world it could’ve made a nice intermodal route if they could’ve found a way to keep it. The Milwaukee Road could’ve well abandoned all their branch lines and secondary mainlines and just kept the one trunk line from Chicago to SeaTac.

One problem with human beings is that we have trouble seeing the future more than about five or ten years out. So, I can kinda understand what happened. But now that it is what it is, can we fix this? Tragically, probably not.


----------



## Mark Meyer

fredmcain said:


> Wouldn’t it make a splendid and scenic Amtrak route, though, if it were still there? In fact, to bring this thread back to the subject of Amtrak, I read where the North Coast Limited, when it was running back in the 1970s was diverted over the Milwaukee Road and Snoqualmie Pass in the State of Washington. They diverted the train either because of a derailment on the former NP line or maybe it was bad weather, I cannot recall.
> 
> Wouldn’t it have been a really cool experience to have been a passenger on that train? Today most of it is bicycle trail.



Fred seems to be referencing an Amtrak North Coast Limited. Amtrak never had a train by that name in one of its timetables. Anyway, the situation he's probably referring to is a storm in early December 1977 that closed the ex-GN, MILW, and ex-NP routes across the Cascade Mountains. The ex-GN route (used by the North Coast Hiawatha) and MILW route were opened in about a week, but the ex-NP route (used by the Empire Builder) had multiple bridge outages and wouldn't be open for months. Between Seattle and Ellensburg, Amtrak detoured the Empire Builder on BN's ex-Pacific Coast railroad from Argo (south of Seattle) to Maple Valley, and the Milwaukee Road from Maple Valley to Easton, missing the stop at East Auburn. The detour cost about 1.5 to 2 hours delay.

By April of 1978, the condition of the Milwaukee Road track was deemed too risky, and the train started operating from Seattle to Spokane via the ex-GN line via Wenatchee until the ex-NP Stampede Pass line was reopened. It was a precursor of things to come as the Empire Builder assumed the Wenatchee routing permanently 3.5 years later.

I recall working as an agent and telegrapher along the Empire Builder route in Montana that Spring after the train began detouring via Wenatchee. The westbound Empire Builder actually arrived in Seattle 1-2 hours prior to scheduled arrival time on the old timetable. I remember selling people tickets to Seattle, and some of them had heard about the detour and asked about a delay. "In this case" I told them, "the detour means you actually get to Seattle EARLIER."


----------



## Devil's Advocate

fredmcain said:


> One well-known expert on the Milwaukee Road told me in an e-mail that back in 1980, the State of Montana raised almost enough funds to buy the line or, at least most of it. But they didn’t quite have enough. So, they appealed to Washington. Jimmy Carter was running for president as an incumbent and had an uphill fight against Ronald Reagan. He knew that he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning Montana anyways, so the State got no help from him.


The purse is controlled by the legislature so unless the president vetoed a rescue bill or targeted supporters from the bully pulpit it makes little sense to blame him. Sounds more like an ideological grudge than a reasonable complaint.


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## Mark Meyer

fredmcain said:


> With this kind of an economic and political environment, a consensus emerged that there were too many parallel lines – way too many. A second mainline from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest was deemed redundant and would probably need to be disposed of. There simply was not enough business to justify a second line never mind a _THIRD_ line!



Fred has trouble counting to three. After the Milwaukee succumbed to operational reality, these routes were still available:
1. BN ex-CB&Q/ex-GN
2. BN ex-CB&Q/ex NP
3. C&NW-UP
4. MSt.P&SSM/CPR/UP
Just because the GN and NP merged, the track didn't go away. BN also had three routes across Washington State. History also tells us that if necessary, trains from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest on BN can be routed via Lincoln and Alliance, NE.



fredmcain said:


> So, out of the three the Milwaukee was in by far the worst physical shape in spite of the fact that it had been splendidly engineer and constructed.



Yes, the poorest maintenance, but hardly splendidly engineered. The Milwaukee benefited from improved technology in construction methods compared to the NP, constructed 25 years earlier. But unlike the GN and NP that performed numerous line changes throughout the years, such were rare on the Milwaukee. And engineering can't completely overcome an inferior route. All the "engineering" in the world couldn't make the Milwaukee's slow trek through Sixteen Mile canyon competitive with the GN route across the prairie to its north, or make the Milwaukee's treacherous climb over St. Paul Pass compete in time or grade to NP's mostly-water level route out of Western Montana into Idaho.



fredmcain said:


> It’s too bad, a pity, really. In today’s railroad world it could’ve made a nice intermodal route if they could’ve found a way to keep it. The Milwaukee Road could’ve well abandoned all their branch lines and secondary mainlines and just kept the one trunk line from Chicago to SeaTac.



No way. Seattle and Tacoma don't generate enough stack and TOFC traffic to support their own railroad all the way to Chicago, especially considering that both ports have not been competing well with burgeoning intermodal traffic for the American Midwest flowing through Vancouver and Prince Rupert, as well as playing second (or third or fourth) fiddle to Los Angeles/Long Beach. Also, given the increasing train tonnages (and lengths) of intermodal trains, the Milwaukee Road - the high cost route to/from the Pacific Northwest - is not the way to move large trains with its four significant mountain grades.



fredmcain said:


> One problem with human beings is that we have trouble seeing the future more than about five or ten years out. So, I can kinda understand what happened. But now that it is what it is, can we fix this? Tragically, probably not.



Another problem some human beings have is not learning from history. 41 years and counting and still not needing the Milwaukee Road.


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## Mark Meyer

fredmcain said:


> The problem is that if private enterprise would do this, they would have to recoup their massive investment through freight rates that would be uncompetitive with the BNSF rates or even with the YouPee’s rates over a more circuitous route.



I'm sure the UP would be surprised to discover that their route was "circuitous." Especially between the Pacific Northwest and Omaha, Kansas City, and Denver. Not every car to and from the Pacific Northwest moved in and out of Seattle or Tacoma. Most didn't. And when it came to the best routes or any route at all for traffic to/from Spokane, the Tri-Cities, Lewiston, Yakima, Wenatchee, Portland, the Willamette Valley, Vancouver, WA, Vancouver, BC, and Bellingham, as it turned out, the Milwaukee was largely right there to not move it for them!


----------



## Willbridge

Mark Meyer said:


> That was the theory behind it. It debuted in 1963 after the Olympian Hiawatha was discontinued. A remnant of the Olympian Hiawatha operated west of Aberdeen until 1964, but the Milwaukee knew that its time was limited. The XL Special was predicated on the passenger trains being gone. That's a pretty sad commentary on a railroad when getting rid of the sole passenger train on the line was necessary to make an enhanced running time! Same story after the BN merger: The MILW gained some traffic as a result of some merger conditions, which resulted in up to 4 trains daily each way - literally the peak of train frequency on that railroad, and double what it was seeing previously. And when those extra trains started running, that's when the Milwaukee dumped the 55.5 hour schedule of the XL Special and lengthened it by over 8 hours. What was an iffy schedule before became impossible.


I rode the _North Coast Limited _into Minneapolis in September 1967 and walked over to the Milwaukee Road station to watch the unnamed remnant of the _Olympian Hiawatha_ arrive from Aberdeen.


fredmcain said:


> In my own personal, honest and humble opinion, and I know some on this group would disagree, but I have always believed that the abandonment of the Milwaukee Road to the Northwest was a terrible and short-sighted decision. Corrupt or inept managers may have been to blame but so too were our Beltway politicians who dropped the ball.
> 
> In order to get inside the heads of the managers, we need to get into a time machine and return to the 1970s to really get a feel for what was going on in American railroading at that time.
> 
> In the ‘70s, the very future of American railroading was in doubt. Railroad managers and rail analysts alike were very pessimistic on the future. Wall Street was extremely bearish on rails. I recall an article in Railway Age in the late ‘70s that questioned if the rail network would even survive at all beyond a few “heavy-haul” lines. Thankfully, that never came to pass.
> 
> Things were so bad that railroads just about couldn’t borrow or raise money from investors. Track maintenance along with any improvements had to come out of net operating income or they didn’t get done.
> 
> With this kind of an economic and political environment, a consensus emerged that there were too many parallel lines – way too many. A second mainline from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest was deemed redundant and would probably need to be disposed of. There simply was not enough business to justify a second line never mind a _THIRD_ line!
> 
> So, out of the three the Milwaukee was in by far the worst physical shape in spite of the fact that it had been splendidly engineer and constructed. Where in the world could the money come from to fix it? Not from investors, that’s for sure. The only possibility was the Beltway and they dropped the ball. There was at least a suggestion made that perhaps legislation could be passed to bring Conrail west but there was insufficient support.
> 
> So, although it’s my sincere conviction that this was short-sighted, I can nevertheless understand why it happened and see the managers (corrupt or not) point of view.
> 
> It’s too bad, a pity, really. In today’s railroad world it could’ve made a nice intermodal route if they could’ve found a way to keep it. The Milwaukee Road could’ve well abandoned all their branch lines and secondary mainlines and just kept the one trunk line from Chicago to SeaTac.
> 
> One problem with human beings is that we have trouble seeing the future more than about five or ten years out. So, I can kinda understand what happened. But now that it is what it is, can we fix this? Tragically, probably not.


It's hard for some people now to visualize how dire things were in the 1970's. I've shown this photo here before, but here are the state rail planners from the ICC Eastern Region plus Wisconsin, Minnesota and South Dakota working into a December 1975 Madison, WI night on the draft 4R Act which was to be a start on straightening things out. All of the states were invited. I was there for Oregon. Notice the Milwaukee Road overlap with the ICC Western Region states that were interested enough to send someone. In Oregon we had just gained access to the Milwaukee Road and now we were about to lose it.

Two decades later the remaining routes through the Cascades (UP, BN-Stevens, BN-North Bank) were jammed with traffic including port traffic for which a decent Milwaukee Road line from Tacoma east would have been a natural carrier. In Denver I saw it reflected in the awful performance of the UP with the _Pioneer._

I understood Edward Hungerford's "Super Railway" and some other reorganization ideas but it took a long time to get capacity improvements on the remaining main lines. There still are bottlenecks. And now there is capital sunk in super railways for hauling coal. Stay tuned.

_
_


----------



## Mark Meyer

Willbridge said:


> It's hard for some people now to visualize how dire things were in the 1970's. I've shown this photo here before, but here are the state rail planners from the ICC Eastern Region plus Wisconsin, Minnesota and South Dakota working into a December 1975 Madison, WI night on the draft 4R Act which was to be a start on straightening things out. All of the states were invited. I was there for Oregon. Notice the Milwaukee Road overlap with the ICC Western Region states that were interested enough to send someone. In Oregon we had just gained access to the Milwaukee Road and now we were about to lose it.



No loss for the state of Oregon especially heading into 1980 and deregulation when BN would have drastically undercut the Milwaukee with its superior routes, especially with regard to grain - much more of which is exported through Columbia River ports than Seattle and Tacoma. As unit grain train sizes increased in the 1990s, the Milwaukee would have been shut out of this traffic due to its horrible profile. Much wheat grown in Montana is exported through Portland/Rivegate. BN could move this traffic to Portland with a ruling grade of 1% or less with one major hill (Marias Pass). Not only did the Milwaukee have four major grades between Montana and Tacoma, but then there was the prospect of the 3.6% grade out of Tacoma toward Portland. Obviously, this traffic would have all gravitated to BN and its flatter, straighter route. (As grain started moving west from Montana even when the Milwaukee was around, they often ended up giving it to the UP at Marengo due to their horrible route.) Anywhere to or from Portland could be handled with less cost via BN than the Milwaukee. Only reregulation and subsidy could have saved it.



Willbridge said:


> Two decades later the remaining routes through the Cascades (UP, BN-Stevens, BN-North Bank) were jammed with traffic including port traffic for which a decent Milwaukee Road line from Tacoma east would have been a natural carrier. In Denver I saw it reflected in the awful performance of the UP with the _Pioneer._



Two decades is a long time to keep a railroad "just in case", especially a Milwaukee Road that would have needed major rehabilitation and even upgrading (very short sidings in Washington State, no lineside safety devices such as hot box detectors, almost no power switches, and not even continuously-protected with ABS) just to be usable....whenever. Yes, things were dire in the 1970s, but they weren't great in the 1980s, either. I recall the dearth of traffic much of the time. When things started to heat up "two decades later", BNSF reopened Stampede Pass and upgraded existing routes. The Milwaukee's profile was always fantastically inferior to the ex-GN/ex-SP&S route to/from the Pacific Northwest, and that's what you do to efficiently add capacity: Add it to the most-efficient routes, not the least-efficient, aka the Milwaukee. And in that interim "two decades" until the Milwaukee might have been used, who would be responsible for its upkeep, paying its taxes, and paying its operations personnel to be available "just in case?" It's interesting: Whenever there there is a boom in traffic be it the 1990s or the 2010s Bakken Boom, someone always defaults to "we should have kept the Milwaukee Road" while failing to comprehend the expense of not only upgrading it, but maintaining it through the 1980s, the Great Recession, the Bakken Bust, and the pandemic. 

The performance of the Pioneer is meaningless. BN as well as UP saw an upsurge in traffic, but the Empire Builder fared much better than the Pioneer with timekeeping. BN's perspective on its Amtrak trains was simply different than that of the UP. Be it the Pioneer or Texas Eagle, nowhere was UP known for its stellar handling of Amtrak, regardless of the route or amount of traffic. And, since we know that freight railroads are not reimbursed for the full cost of operating Amtrak trains with the required priority, UP simply determined that other customers' trains merited priority handling.


----------



## fredmcain

Willbridge said:


> I rode the _North Coast Limited _into Minneapolis in September 1967 and walked over to the Milwaukee Road station to watch the unnamed remnant of the _Olympian Hiawatha_ arrive from Aberdeen.
> 
> It's hard for some people now to visualize how dire things were in the 1970's. I've shown this photo here before, but here are the state rail planners from the ICC Eastern Region plus Wisconsin, Minnesota and South Dakota working into a December 1975 Madison, WI night on the draft 4R Act which was to be a start on straightening things out. All of the states were invited. I was there for Oregon. Notice the Milwaukee Road overlap with the ICC Western Region states that were interested enough to send someone. In Oregon we had just gained access to the Milwaukee Road and now we were about to lose it.
> 
> Two decades later the remaining routes through the Cascades (UP, BN-Stevens, BN-North Bank) were jammed with traffic including port traffic for which a decent Milwaukee Road line from Tacoma east would have been a natural carrier. In Denver I saw it reflected in the awful performance of the UP with the _Pioneer._
> 
> I understood Edward Hungerford's "Super Railway" and some other reorganization ideas but it took a long time to get capacity improvements on the remaining main lines. There still are bottlenecks. And now there is capital sunk in super railways for hauling coal. Stay tuned.



Willbridge,

Thank you much for your most insightful and informative comments. I appreciate reading them !
Regards,
Fred M. Cain


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## jis

I think what is truly unfortunate is that the ROW was not preserved in a reclaimable form. It is understandable that a fully maintained track cannot be retained when there is no traffic. But the unfortunate penny wise pound foolish way in which taxation was structured in many places ensured the destruction of ROWs almost as quickly as the track became non-viable.


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## fredmcain

jis said:


> I think what is truly unfortunate is that the ROW was not preserved in a reclaimable form. It is understandable that a fully maintained track cannot be retained when there is no traffic. But the unfortunate penny wise pound foolish way in which taxation was structure in many places ensure the destruction of ROWs almost as quickly as the track became non-viable.



Good thoughts, jis, I fully agree !


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## fredmcain

toddinde said:


> <SNIP>. I live in Southeast Arizona. This area has never recovered from the 1961 severing of the SP’s EP&SW south line through Douglas. It has been devastating to the whole county and change the economic equation to the worse. We need to stop pulling up railroads willy nilly. This is the harm caused by the Staggers Act which is our equivalent of Britain’s Beeching Axe which is severely hurting Britain to this day.



Tod,

Most interesting. You see although I now live in northern Indiana, I largely grew up in Arizona in the Tucson and Phoenix areas. I have always lamented the loss of the Douglas or "south line" as the SP used to call it.

In my own personal, honest and humble opinion, this is yet another example of how managers have trouble seeing more than about ten years into the future. Had the line survived, they could have organized a directional system with all westbounds moving over the north line and all eastbounds over the south line and vice versa. That could perhaps have obviated the need to double track the North Line. Then an added plus would've been to keep rail freight service in southeastern Arizona.

It might not have helped matters much that back in the 1960s, the State of Arizona imposed some of the highest property taxes on rail lines in the country. At one point the SP and AT&SF brought suit against the state. I do not remember how that litigation was resolved.

But what's truly intriguing is that the YouPee, a few years ago, repurchased the abandoned right of way. For what? I have no idea. If I were to ask they prbly wouldn't tell me anyhow. I don't know if they reacquired the entire thing or just Benson to Douglas.


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## fredmcain

neroden said:


> More fantasylanding from Mark Meyer. It's hardly even worth commenting on.
> 
> <SNIP>
> 
> Mark Meyer believes in the "just world" fantasy. He wants to believe that whatever has happened, must have made sense. This isn't true. All kinds of idiotic nonsense happens. History is a series of accidents.
> 
> <SNIP>



Not sure if I should type this or not - perhaps moderation can delete if they wish. But I just have to say that I have had some correspondence, well, a lot of correspondence, really, with people who had worked for the Milwaukee and were inside the Company. They have told me that Mr. Meyer is just plain flat wrong. Oh, sure, he does his homework extremely well, but the conclusions he draws are not right. There are no doubt people who would agree with Mr. Meyer and both they and Meyer are certainly entitled to their opinions. But that doesn't make their opinions fact.

Can I prove them wrong? No. I don't even want to try but I trust those who have told me that he's wrong.

Regards,
Fred M. Cain


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## Mark Meyer

jis said:


> I think what is truly unfortunate is that the ROW was not preserved in a reclaimable form. It is understandable that a fully maintained track cannot be retained when there is no traffic. But the unfortunate penny wise pound foolish way in which taxation was structured in many places ensured the destruction of ROWs almost as quickly as the track became non-viable.



This could be true to a certain extent. I think a national transportation policy - especially for present and future passenger routes - would be beneficial. Examples are the Big Four Route from Kankakee to Indianapolis and the ex-SAL route from Petersburg, VA to Norlina, NC. But beyond that, it gets complex, especially considering that the government provides all the infrastructure for the railroads' competition, and that most of the freight railroads' infrastructure is privately-owned. So, there has to be judgment calls somewhere. In the case of this topic, if it was widely acknowledged that extra freight railroad capacity was needed across the Northern Tier and the goal was to draw as much traffic away from truckers, why would anyone contemplate rebuilding the Milwaukee (the higher cost route than BNSF) rather than simply adding capacity to the lower cost route?


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## Mark Meyer

toddinde said:


> I live in Southeast Arizona. This area has never recovered from the 1961 severing of the SP’s EP&SW south line through Douglas. It has been devastating to the whole county and change the economic equation to the worse. We need to stop pulling up railroads willy nilly. This is the harm caused by the Staggers Act which is our equivalent of Britain’s Beeching Axe which is severely hurting Britain to this day.



Well just to interject some reality here: The Staggers Act was enacted on October 14, 1980. The EP&SW ceased as a through route in 1961, and the Milwaukee Road west of Miles City in March of 1980. Therefore, the concept of time being what it is, the mere suggestion that these two railroads disappearing were as a result of the yet-to-be-enacted Staggers Act is ridiculous.

In regard to the EP&SW, railroads exist to serve customers. The loss of the railroad is linked to the loss of customers, in this case, mining and smelting. That reality aside, other than property taxes, what specific benefit would there be today just having trains running through Douglas on their way between Tucson and El Paso? And what should the government have done to force SP (later UP) to keep both routes? And should whatever entity that forced continued operation via Douglas have been required to compensate SP for the additional expense associated with doing so? And more specifically, why do you think the Sunset Route needed this alternative route in this area, but not elsewhere?

For those unfamiliar, the El Paso and Southwestern Railroad was a railroad acquired by the Southern Pacific. It was built primarily to serve the rich (mostly copper) in the Douglas and Bisbee areas. As a Southern Pacific entity, it was referred to as the "South Line" in reference to the Sunset Route (current UP route) to the north (routes between El Paso and Tucson). The "South Line" slower, curvier, and 30 miles longer than the North Line. Douglas and Bisbee did retain service after the route was severed, becoming a branch line from Benson. Currently, all that's left is 7 miles of track from Benson. The North Line continues as UP's Southern transcontinental, and is access to two ex-SP branchlines (now the Arizona Eastern Railroad) at Bowie, AZ and Lordsburg, NM as well as the Southwestern Railroad at Deming, NM (a BNSF connection via Rincon).


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## Mark Meyer

fredmcain said:


> But I just have to say that I have had some correspondence, well, a lot of correspondence, really, with people who had worked for the Milwaukee and were inside the Company. They have told me that Mr. Meyer is just plain flat wrong. Oh, sure, he does his homework extremely well, but the conclusions he draws are not right. There are no doubt people who would agree with Mr. Meyer and both they and Meyer are certainly entitled to their opinions. But that doesn't make their opinions fact.



Well, Fred, you can believe as you wish, and you have demonstrated that you do. I know of the people you speak, and there is no greater verification of my point of view than their thinking I'm wrong. But it's not about homework, it's about experience. Having managed power on 32,000 miles of a present-day Class I railroad and its connections, I can state without fear of contradiction that there is nowhere where a 2% grade is as efficient as a 1% grade or where a serpentine 1.7% grade is anywhere as palatable as a .8% straighter railroad largely along a river. 

It should also be noted that these "inside the company" at-the-time people are not speaking with any knowledge of the evolution of railroading. Specifically, the huge trains that are now commonplace on today's railroads, but never existed on the Milwaukee. There is simply no place in this country where unit trains of 16,000 tons operate on a profile that would necessary if the Milwaukee were to run unit grain trains between Montana and Columbia River ports (one of many examples).

Referring to item #3 here:


Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension: The myth of superiority


The unit grain train fuel use comparison between the current BNSF route and the Milwaukee main line was done with current BNSF fuel use and simulation of the Milwaukee route inputting actual Milwaukee road operating characteristics using a program actually in use today. There is no speculation or opinion, just the data. While the scenarios of operation on the Milwaukee Road vary (because there are so many possibilities because the route has so many steep grades so many miles distant), the conclusion that the Milwaukee Road operation would likely to be twice as costly is clear.

And it's not just my "opinion." Remember, even after WWII, Milwaukee management knew their operation was marginal at best. As parallel railroads upgraded their routes, the lack of business and higher cost didn't allow the Milwaukee to do the same. Toward the end when the Milwaukee was trying to unload its Pacific Extension (either by merger or sale) on anyone - there were no takers, despite the fact that both the UP and BN had surveyed the route and were intimately familiar with its operation. Unlike the Rock Island that also went away in 1980 with longstanding management ineptness conspiracy theories surrounding it, the Milwaukee Pacific Extension was pretty much jettisoned in one fell swoop. Yet, long stretches of the Rock Island from Chicago to New Mexico and St. Paul to Texas survived because even in 1980 - a dark time for railroads - many saw the value in keeping it. So, please ask yourself (conspiracies notwithstanding), why did no one choose to save the Milwaukee when opportunities were abundant to do so? Because so many understood its operating deficiencies. I'm in good company. And a lot of it.

In other words, Fred, color me: Happy To Be Wrong!


----------



## toddinde

fredmcain said:


> In my own personal, honest and humble opinion, and I know some on this group would disagree, but I have always believed that the abandonment of the Milwaukee Road to the Northwest was a terrible and short-sighted decision. Corrupt or inept managers may have been to blame but so too were our Beltway politicians who dropped the ball.
> 
> In order to get inside the heads of the managers, we need to get into a time machine and return to the 1970s to really get a feel for what was going on in American railroading at that time.
> 
> In the ‘70s, the very future of American railroading was in doubt. Railroad managers and rail analysts alike were very pessimistic on the future. Wall Street was extremely bearish on rails. I recall an article in Railway Age in the late ‘70s that questioned if the rail network would even survive at all beyond a few “heavy-haul” lines. Thankfully, that never came to pass.
> 
> Things were so bad that railroads just about couldn’t borrow or raise money from investors. Track maintenance along with any improvements had to come out of net operating income or they didn’t get done.
> 
> With this kind of an economic and political environment, a consensus emerged that there were too many parallel lines – way too many. A second mainline from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest was deemed redundant and would probably need to be disposed of. There simply was not enough business to justify a second line never mind a _THIRD_ line!
> 
> So, out of the three the Milwaukee was in by far the worst physical shape in spite of the fact that it had been splendidly engineer and constructed. Where in the world could the money come from to fix it? Not from investors, that’s for sure. The only possibility was the Beltway and they dropped the ball. There was at least a suggestion made that perhaps legislation could be passed to bring Conrail west but there was insufficient support.
> 
> So, although it’s my sincere conviction that this was short-sighted, I can nevertheless understand why it happened and see the managers (corrupt or not) point of view.
> 
> It’s too bad, a pity, really. In today’s railroad world it could’ve made a nice intermodal route if they could’ve found a way to keep it. The Milwaukee Road could’ve well abandoned all their branch lines and secondary mainlines and just kept the one trunk line from Chicago to SeaTac.
> 
> One problem with human beings is that we have trouble seeing the future more than about five or ten years out. So, I can kinda understand what happened. But now that it is what it is, can we fix this? Tragically, probably not.


You are absolutely correct. The loss of the Milwaukee was stupid and shortsighted. The current configuration of the railroad industry are regional monopoly systems. They abandon infrastructure to carry less freight at higher prices with poor customer service. A better approach would have been to keep more railways and only allow competition where it enhanced competition. If operating subsidies were required to keep a railroad operating them provide it. We don’t hold highways to any metrics, and we don’t close money losing highways. It’s a stupid mindset which left us with an industry right sized to 1980 while the country is a third again larger today and continues to grow. It’s time we own up to these mistakes and understand what caused them; corporate greed, monopolization, and idiotic thinking.


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## toddinde

Mark Meyer said:


> Well just to interject some reality here: The Staggers Act was enacted on October 14, 1980. The EP&SW ceased as a through route in 1961, and the Milwaukee Road west of Miles City in March of 1980. Therefore, the concept of time being what it is, the mere suggestion that these two railroads disappearing were as a result of the yet-to-be-enacted Staggers Act is ridiculous.
> 
> In regard to the EP&SW, railroads exist to serve customers. The loss of the railroad is linked to the loss of customers, in this case, mining and smelting. That reality aside, other than property taxes, what specific benefit would there be today just having trains running through Douglas on their way between Tucson and El Paso? And what should the government have done to force SP (later UP) to keep both routes? And should whatever entity that forced continued operation via Douglas have been required to compensate SP for the additional expense associated with doing so? And more specifically, why do you think the Sunset Route needed this alternative route in this area, but not elsewhere?
> 
> For those unfamiliar, the El Paso and Southwestern Railroad was a railroad acquired by the Southern Pacific. It was built primarily to serve the rich (mostly copper) in the Douglas and Bisbee areas. As a Southern Pacific entity, it was referred to as the "South Line" in reference to the Sunset Route (current UP route) to the north (routes between El Paso and Tucson). The "South Line" slower, curvier, and 30 miles longer than the North Line. Douglas and Bisbee did retain service after the route was severed, becoming a branch line from Benson. Currently, all that's left is 7 miles of track from Benson. The North Line continues as UP's Southern transcontinental, and is access to two ex-SP branchlines (now the Arizona Eastern Railroad) at Bowie, AZ and Lordsburg, NM as well as the Southwestern Railroad at Deming, NM (a BNSF connection via Rincon).


My comment was a short paragraph on short sighted decisions and their impact on communities. I never said the Staggers Act, a stupid piece of legislation, had anything to do with the demise of the South Line. I also mention the Beeching Cuts. Did you think I was asserting that Beeching had something to do with the demise of the South Line? I am taking issue with your whole premise which is based on a simplistic view of an economy based solely on engineering profiles and existing customer base, and doesn’t take into account economic growth and creating wealth on a macroeconomic level. It’s that kind of thinking that created anemic economic growth, and consigns regions of the country to whither on the vine. Arizona has very low levels of rail use. Arizona continues to grow, and the lost rail lines would have been an economic engine for the future. By the way, there is talk of building a new rail line from Douglas north to the UP.


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## toddinde

Mark Meyer said:


> Well, Fred, you can believe as you wish, and you have demonstrated that you do. I know of the people you speak, and there is no greater verification of my point of view than their thinking I'm wrong. But it's not about homework, it's about experience. Having managed power on 32,000 miles of a present-day Class I railroad and its connections, I can state without fear of contradiction that there is nowhere where a 2% grade is as efficient as a 1% grade or where a serpentine 1.7% grade is anywhere as palatable as a .8% straighter railroad largely along a river.
> 
> It should also be noted that these "inside the company" at-the-time people are not speaking with any knowledge of the evolution of railroading. Specifically, the huge trains that are now commonplace on today's railroads, but never existed on the Milwaukee. There is simply no place in this country where unit trains of 16,000 tons operate on a profile that would necessary if the Milwaukee were to run unit grain trains between Montana and Columbia River ports (one of many examples).
> 
> Referring to item #3 here:
> 
> 
> Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension: The myth of superiority
> 
> 
> The unit grain train fuel use comparison between the current BNSF route and the Milwaukee main line was done with current BNSF fuel use and simulation of the Milwaukee route inputting actual Milwaukee road operating characteristics using a program actually in use today. There is no speculation or opinion, just the data. While the scenarios of operation on the Milwaukee Road vary (because there are so many possibilities because the route has so many steep grades so many miles distant), the conclusion that the Milwaukee Road operation would likely to be twice as costly is clear.
> 
> And it's not just my "opinion." Remember, even after WWII, Milwaukee management knew their operation was marginal at best. As parallel railroads upgraded their routes, the lack of business and higher cost didn't allow the Milwaukee to do the same. Toward the end when the Milwaukee was trying to unload its Pacific Extension (either by merger or sale) on anyone - there were no takers, despite the fact that both the UP and BN had surveyed the route and were intimately familiar with its operation. Unlike the Rock Island that also went away in 1980 with longstanding management ineptness conspiracy theories surrounding it, the Milwaukee Pacific Extension was pretty much jettisoned in one fell swoop. Yet, long stretches of the Rock Island from Chicago to New Mexico and St. Paul to Texas survived because even in 1980 - a dark time for railroads - many saw the value in keeping it. So, please ask yourself (conspiracies notwithstanding), why did no one choose to save the Milwaukee when opportunities were abundant to do so? Because so many understood its operating deficiencies. I'm in good company. And a lot of it.
> 
> In other words, Fred, color me: Happy To Be Wrong!


Mark, you have made the same mistake people often make: you’ve fell in love with your opinion, and now you’re so invested in it you need to keep justifying it even as it’s proven wrong. Most rational people can see that the Milwaukee was the best engineered line to the Pacific, and with sound business decisions, would have been the railroad to the Pacific Northwest. Many railroaders share that view as do many insiders. The Carter Administration took a different and wrong headed approach. If a Conrail type entity had been formed to take over the Milwaukee and the Rock Island, it would have been just as successful and been around today in some form. The Milwaukee Road’s Pacific Extension would be thriving. Poor planning, poor decisions, and monopolies in the railroad industry caused this. You need to open your mind to other opinions and not just keep justifying bad decisions.


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## Mark Meyer

toddinde said:


> Mark, you have made the same mistake people often make: you’ve fell in love with your opinion, and now you’re so invested in it you need to keep justifying it even as it’s proven wrong.



It's never been proven it's wrong. So I challenge you: Explain how a train between two common points, such as Minneapolis and Seattle or Great Falls and Portland, where the Milwaukee train could be handled with fewer resources than the competition. I've given you actual numbers used by actual railroads and railroaders in determining locomotive utilization and equipment and fuel usage, and the Milwaukee fails badly. So, let's see your proof. 



toddinde said:


> Most rational people can see that the Milwaukee was the best engineered line to the Pacific, and with sound business decisions, would have been the railroad to the Pacific Northwest.



Not true. There's a huge difference between "best engineered" and best profile. Sure, the Milwaukee - when it was built - was the best engineered because it had decades of technology on its side during its construction. But with the exception of the Loweth line change and a few other inconsequential changes, the Milwaukee at the end was pretty much the same as it was when it was built. Not the same for the GN and NP which rebuilt much of their main line routes eliminating huge amounts of grade and curvature. The salient point is that you can have really good engineering on a route, but if the route is inferior to begin with, there is likely no amount of "engineering" to fix this. Example: The Milwaukee Road's St. Paul Pass was a horrible piece of railroad with numerous huge trestles, 1.7% grade and much curvature. The last year that Milwaukee Road's Olympian Hiawatha ran, it and the NP North Coast Limited departed Missoula westbound only 1 minute apart, but the NP train arrived in Ellensburg, WA 2 minutes before the Milwaukee train, despite having to travel 99 more miles. The reason was that NP made a lot of line changes to increase efficiency and track speed. In fact, in 1961, the Olympian Hiawatha averaged only 48,73 MPH from Chicago to Seattle, whereas the North Coast Limited 51.15 MPH and the GN Empire Builder 51.6 MPH. (The Empire Builder was also over 2 hours faster than the Olympian Hiawatha). The Milwaukee was a well-engineered railroad over an inferior route, necessitated by the fact that the best routes were already in use by the competition. And as operationally deficient as the Milwaukee's main line was, its branch lines were that much worse, which made the whole operation all the more costly.



toddinde said:


> Many railroaders share that view as do many insiders. The Carter Administration took a different and wrong headed approach. If a Conrail type entity had been formed to take over the Milwaukee and the Rock Island, it would have been just as successful and been around today in some form. The Milwaukee Road’s Pacific Extension would be thriving. Poor planning, poor decisions, and monopolies in the railroad industry caused this.



Many more railroader's don't share that view as did many insiders. The Milwaukee's routes were well-known by the competition that had every - repeat EVERY - opportunity to purchase and/or merge with the Milwaukee. NO ONE (with the financial wherewithal) wanted it. How could so many people be so wrong? Well, because they weren't. They correctly identified the Milwaukee as the high-cost railroad. Your reference to the Rock Island and Conrail proves your reasoning is fatally flawed: The Rock Island didn't meet the same fate as the Milwaukee. While a lot of it was abandoned, huge sections of it were saved. And since it was probably in worse shape as far as physical plant than the Milwaukee, that proves that a huge cost in rehabilitating infrastructure is no deterrent to acquiring a railroad when it is know to be worth saving. Twin Cities to Texas, Chicago to Council Bluffs, and the connection to SP's Golden State route all still survive because unlike the Milwaukee Pacific Extension, they were identified as a valued entity. The Conrail analogy is not accurate because in the Northeast just about all the railroads were included, including Penn Central which included the ex-NYC and ex-PRR. Other than the B&O which only had minimal penetration in the area, there were no strong or solvent railroads. Not the case with the Milwaukee Road. Not only did it have the poorest operating profile, most circuitous branchline network, and failed to serve (adequately or altogether) major markets, it was surrounded by solvent railroads who - unlike the Milwaukee over the years - had upgraded and improved their right-of-way capacity. A "Western Conrail" simply wasn't needed.



toddinde said:


> You need to open your mind to other opinions and not just keep justifying bad decisions.



I'll be happy to do that the minute that anyone can show me that more tonnage can be moved with the same amount of locomotive power over the 2% grade of Milwaukee's Pipestone Pass than GN's 1% Marias Pass, that the Milwaukee's climb over the Saddle Mountains is flatter than the SP&S route along the Columbia River, or that the Milwaukee's serpentine climb to St. Paul Pass is faster than NP's trek along the Clark Fork. Never was the case when the Milwaukee was operating, and wouldn't be now. And, my opinion is bolstered by 40 years of railroad dealing with what it takes to move tonnage. But you have my challenge, and I await your response.


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## Mark Meyer

toddinde said:


> The loss of the Milwaukee was stupid and shortsighted. The current configuration of the railroad industry are regional monopoly systems. They abandon infrastructure to carry less freight at higher prices with poor customer service.



Prove it. An article in the June 2003 issue of TRAINS magazine with an accompanying map showed that between 1979 and 2001, traffic (ton-miles) handled by Western railroads increased 65% (while the population increased only 25%). And no, it was far from all being coal. NAFTA was cited as one of the main contributors with routes in Texas as well as CP and CN interchange locations along the northern border, as well BNSF's route from Portland to Sandpoint as one of the over-performers. DOT tonnage maps published in 1980 shows the ex-GN route in Western Montana handling between 20 and 30 million gross ton-miles of traffic, while the ex-NP route handles between 10 and 20 million. By 2003, the ex-GN route was handling over 40 million, and the ex-NP between 20 and 30. Things change over the years, so I challenge you to prove your "higher prices" claim. That would be proving that the tonnage handled in loose box car traffic was moved at a cheaper rate than lading handled in today's stack container trains (because that's how many consumer goods move today). Likewise, prove that single car movements of grain were cheaper than today's unit trains.



toddinde said:


> A better approach would have been to keep more railways and only allow competition where it enhanced competition.


This is vague at best, but it appears to be a good argument for doing away with the Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension. Since it couldn't compete with the competition due to its inferior profile and circuitous feeder route structure, you appear to be understand that it would not be a railway that should have been kept.



toddinde said:


> If operating subsidies were required to keep a railroad operating them provide it.



Who would pay for the subsidy?



toddinde said:


> We don’t hold highways to any metrics, and we don’t close money losing highways. It’s a stupid mindset which left us with an industry right sized to 1980 while the country is a third again larger today and continues to grow. It’s time we own up to these mistakes and understand what caused them; corporate greed, monopolization, and idiotic thinking.



Highways are also not beholden to stockholders like freight railroads are. Hating railroads has been popular since the turn of the 20th Century. But doing so also ignores that governments provide the infrastructure for the competition. This is the problem. We have no national transportation policy nor do we invest in our railroads like we invest in highways, airports, and waterways. So, it's no surprise that freight railroads look at things a little different when it comes to infrastructure additions or rationalizations. It's unfortunate that railroads are discriminated against as they are in the country, but that's the reality. The real competition for railroads are the other modes of transportation, and that's why the best chance to win back business lost to the subsidized competition is to focus on routes that are the most efficient to operate. There have been many questionable abandonments in the U.S., but the Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension was not one of them. With 5 major grades between Chicago and Portland versus one for the competition, the cost of rehabilitating and upgrading, and the perpetual cost of subsidization to create a tariff even remotely comparable to the competition would have been/would be enormous - a continuing albatross.


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## Seaboard92

I think there is a wording problem in here. "Best Engineered" can mean from construction but that has nothing to do with the actual profile of the route. In my opinion the Seaboard Airline Mainline was the "Best Engineered" route from Richmond south. But it's profile was horrible as far as Gaston, SC with tons of curves and grades as part as the sandhills. While the EX Atlantic Coastline was flat and straight. The fact that the Seaboard was able to compete with the Coastline was sheerly incredibly fast running and they maintained the physical plant and continued tweaking it where they could. 

I love the Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension. And I can see an argument for keeping it for some form of a capacity reliever route but it was a poor alignment. Few cities and towns with any sort of overhead customer base. The NP had and still has the more populous route to the PNW, while the GN has the fastest overall. The Milwaukee was slower than their competition and had little on line traffic base to rely on. It really needed the long thru moves that it just couldn't achieve. 

The SP&S route from a grade standpoint is superior to any of the alternatives other than the UP south bank line just because it's largely water level. Now there is only so much space available to double track the route available especially in the areas of Home Valley to Bingen. To add a track you would have to essentially put a fill into the River which would be incredibly costly and time consuming. 

The GN's major issue is you can only run so many trains in Cascade Tunnel per hour which gives you a capacity problem. Stampede Pass has somewhat relieved the strain and I believe has some excess capacity. But it is largely a directional railroad at this point in time. 

I think had the Rock Island been able to shed at least 60 percent of their Granger Era roots and eliminate most of those branch lines across the midwest they might have been able to survive. There is a reason most of their routes have survived to this day. The real shining examples of this being the Spine line south from St. Paul, MN to Texas, and the Golden State route from Kansas City, MO to Tucumcari, NM. Iowa Interstate has done a tremendous job transforming that property from the weeds they acquired into the modern right of way it is today. Even in the 1970s the Rock Island was operating a few time freights a day off the Union Pacific who routed them that way because of a disagreement with the Chicago, & Northwestern, and Milwaukee Road. The Rock Island route honestly is the premier passenger route from Chicago to Omaha hitting the Quad Cities, Iowa City, and Des Moines whilst the Burlington hits relatively small towns. If the right of way could be upgraded to 79 mph you could make the argument for rerouting the California Zephyr off her home rails onto the route of the Rocky Mountain Rocket. 

I agree there really wasn't a reason for a western version of Conrail because only the Rock Island and Milwaukee Road were in dire straights. Union Pacific, Chicago & Northwestern, Southern Pacific, Burlington Northern, and the Santa Fe were all in relatively good financial state. The problem Conrail was designed to fix was all of the railroads in the Northeast and eastern midwest were on their last legs. There really wasn't a healthy one left by the time Conrail emerged. Which would have tanked the entire nation's economy had rail service ceased. 

Even if the smaller railroads in the northeast could have survived they all had to deal with the hulk that was the Penn Central which would have decimated them had it closed down. The Erie Lackawanna had a route west but it wasn't really a superior route bypassing most major cities. Basically an extended branch line into Chicago. The Reading relied on the Penn Central essentially for any car that had to be transported west, just like the Lehigh Valley, Central Railroad of New Jersey, and so many others included in Conrail. Penn Central was really the main culprit and honestly should have never been approved. Without that merger while the Northeastern Railroading scene was shaky because of the closures of industries along their routes Conrail likely wouldn't have happened. As there would have been some way for those other lines to get cars in and out had one collapsed. Both the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central were showing the beginning signs of a recovery just before the merger. Had they stayed independent our railroad history would have been different.


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## Willbridge

Mark Meyer said:


> No loss for the state of Oregon especially heading into 1980 and deregulation when BN would have drastically undercut the Milwaukee with its superior routes, especially with regard to grain - much more of which is exported through Columbia River ports than Seattle and Tacoma. As unit grain train sizes increased in the 1990s, the Milwaukee would have been shut out of this traffic due to its horrible profile. Much wheat grown in Montana is exported through Portland/Rivegate. BN could move this traffic to Portland with a ruling grade of 1% or less with one major hill (Marias Pass). Not only did the Milwaukee have four major grades between Montana and Tacoma, but then there was the prospect of the 3.6% grade out of Tacoma toward Portland. Obviously, this traffic would have all gravitated to BN and its flatter, straighter route. (As grain started moving west from Montana even when the Milwaukee was around, they often ended up giving it to the UP at Marengo due to their horrible route.) Anywhere to or from Portland could be handled with less cost via BN than the Milwaukee. Only reregulation and subsidy could have saved it.
> 
> 
> 
> Two decades is a long time to keep a railroad "just in case", especially a Milwaukee Road that would have needed major rehabilitation and even upgrading (very short sidings in Washington State, no lineside safety devices such as hot box detectors, almost no power switches, and not even continuously-protected with ABS) just to be usable....whenever. Yes, things were dire in the 1970s, but they weren't great in the 1980s, either. I recall the dearth of traffic much of the time. When things started to heat up "two decades later", BNSF reopened Stampede Pass and upgraded existing routes. The Milwaukee's profile was always fantastically inferior to the ex-GN/ex-SP&S route to/from the Pacific Northwest, and that's what you do to efficiently add capacity: Add it to the most-efficient routes, not the least-efficient, aka the Milwaukee. And in that interim "two decades" until the Milwaukee might have been used, who would be responsible for its upkeep, paying its taxes, and paying its operations personnel to be available "just in case?" It's interesting: Whenever there there is a boom in traffic be it the 1990s or the 2010s Bakken Boom, someone always defaults to "we should have kept the Milwaukee Road" while failing to comprehend the expense of not only upgrading it, but maintaining it through the 1980s, the Great Recession, the Bakken Bust, and the pandemic.
> 
> The performance of the Pioneer is meaningless. BN as well as UP saw an upsurge in traffic, but the Empire Builder fared much better than the Pioneer with timekeeping. BN's perspective on its Amtrak trains was simply different than that of the UP. Be it the Pioneer or Texas Eagle, nowhere was UP known for its stellar handling of Amtrak, regardless of the route or amount of traffic. And, since we know that freight railroads are not reimbursed for the full cost of operating Amtrak trains with the required priority, UP simply determined that other customers' trains merited priority handling.


Of course the North Bank line is superior to anything. What interested the State of Oregon - not me personally - was the Milwaukee Road's cooked up through north-south service with the SP.

I appreciate you being honest about the UP's malingering with the _Pioneer. _That wasn't the party line from Omaha. Nor was it the conclusion of the 2008/9 Pioneer Restoration study.


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## Willbridge

Of course the North Bank line is superior to anything parallel. We learned that in 3rd grade when we studied the Port of Portland. What interested the State of Oregon - not me personally - was the Milwaukee Road's cooked up through north-south service with the SP.

I appreciate you being honest about the UP's malingering with the _Pioneer. _That wasn't the party line from Omaha. Nor was it the conclusion of the 2008/9 Pioneer Restoration study.


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## railiner

Seaboard92 said:


> I think had the Rock Island been able to shed at least 60 percent of their Granger Era roots and eliminate most of those branch lines across the midwest they might have been able to survive. There is a reason most of their routes have survived to this day. The real shining examples of this being the Spine line south from St. Paul, MN to Texas, and the Golden State route from Kansas City, MO to Tucumcari, NM. Iowa Interstate has done a tremendous job transforming that property from the weeds they acquired into the modern right of way it is today. Even in the 1970s the Rock Island was operating a few time freights a day off the Union Pacific who routed them that way because of a disagreement with the Chicago, & Northwestern, and Milwaukee Road. The Rock Island route honestly is the premier passenger route from Chicago to Omaha hitting the Quad Cities, Iowa City, and Des Moines whilst the Burlington hits relatively small towns. If the right of way could be upgraded to 79 mph you could make the argument for rerouting the California Zephyr off her home rails onto the route of the Rocky Mountain Rocket.


Agree with this. That is why they built I-80 on that route, and not along one of the many alternatives.
As for The Rock...the Union Pacific was actively pursuing the purchase of the entire railroad, dating back to the early sixties. The Interstate Commerce Commission kept denying it, until the point that the Rock Island went bankrupt, and was on the verge of liquidation. At that point, the UP no longer wanted that line, and ironically got to purchase the North Western instead for its entry to Chicago. Had the merger with The Rock been allowed, the Rock would be the premier route between Omaha and Chicago, and the North Western might have been the one to become a short line RR.


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## Mark Meyer

Willbridge said:


> What interested the State of Oregon - not me personally - was the Milwaukee Road's cooked up through north-south service with the SP.



Glad you were wise enough not be interested in Milwaukee Road/SP interchange. It went OK for awhile, but mostly because SP was retaliating against BN for shifting some of its California traffic away from the SP at Portland to the Inside Gateway via the WP and ATSF. One of the main shipments to divert to the Milwaukee at Portland were copper concentrates from Arizona going to the smelter in Anaconda, Montana. SP&S/NP later BN took the cars on a route to interchange with the Butte, Anaconda, and Pacific on a route that never exceeded a 1% grade. The Milwaukee route was further, and had helper grades at Snoqualmie (1.74%), the Saddle Mountains (1.6%), and St. Paul Pass (1.7%), but of course got the same cut of the rate that the BN did. Pretty typical of the traffic in and out of Portland with the cars to Portland having to endure the 3.6% grade of Tacoma Hill.

Same for service between Portland and Sumas, which the Milwaukee actually advertised in the Official Guide. The idea was that the Milwaukee was an alternative to BN as an intermediary between the SP at Portland and the Canadian Railroads at the border. While the BN route was direct with a maximum grade of 1% each way, the Milwaukee's was a hodgepodge of former logging railroads, branch lines, and trackage rights over the BN with a 2% grade northbound and 3.6% southbound. From Portland, the Milwaukee operated over BN to Chehalis, then over a Milwaukee branch to Tacoma, then the Milwaukee "main line" to Black River where it got new trackage rights over the ex-NP to Snohomish, and then ex-GN to Everett. From Everett, it got trackage rights on the ex-GN main line to Vancouver (instead of haulage rights where GN trains had handled Milwaukee traffic) as far as Bellingham. At Bellingham, it accessed actual Milwaukee Road track for the short jaunt to Sumas (and a 2% grade) to interchange with Canadian Pacific via a branch line from Mission. Interchange with Canadian National required first using short line British Columbia Hydro and Power Authority. BN's ex-GN main line to Vancouver had direct access to CP and CN interchange (and as a matter of fact, CN had to use GN/BN to get to Vancouver; this was also the route that accessed CN's bridge over the Second Narrows to North Vancouver and the Pacific Great Eastern; in other words, a direct route for GN/BN interchange to PGE). Because the "new" route crossed GN/BN trackage just north of the border, BN received access to the Roberts Bank superport, used today by BNSF coal trains. In summary, GN/BN had ready access to much of Vancouver's port facilities and interchanges, whereas the Milwaukee needed another carrier from Sumas. In the mid-1970s, the Milwaukee petitioned to be granted trackage rights on BN between Bellingham and Vancouver BC and the right to serve customers on existing route from Black River to Everett via Woodinville. It also requested trackage rights on BN from Chehalis to Tacoma to avoid Tacoma Hill. None of this came to pass.

The Milwaukee was able to abandon its branch between Cedar Falls and Monroe (then via BN to Everett) when it received trackage rights between Black River and Everett via Snohomish. It could be argued that the additional trackage accessed by the Milwaukee as a result of the BN merger in the area was far from the optimum route, and that could be correct. But it really was a microcosm of the west end of the Milwaukee as a whole. To be sufficiently competitive with the BN, the Milwaukee would have needed to receive trackage rights over the enter BN system west of Miles City, abandoning most of its own lines, giving us pretty much what we have today.


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## neroden

Mark Meyer said:


> Highways are also not beholden to stockholders like freight railroads are. Hating railroads has been popular since the turn of the 20th Century. But doing so also ignores that governments provide the infrastructure for the competition. This is the problem. We have no national transportation policy nor do we invest in our railroads like we invest in highways, airports, and waterways.



So, we agree. Much of the Milwaukee Road route should have been kept by a nationalized operation. I have said that a proper "USRA" operation would have combined the NP and Milwaukee to get the best bits of each, and scrapped the GN.

I'll make a point you may not appreciate because of your myopic focus on for-profit freight operation: when passenger routes are designed, grades are much less of a worry. Curves are much more of a worry, of course. The same is true with light freight, which again, you weren't thinking about in the 1980s because you'd lost all the business to trucks.

The primary worry for a passenger route, however, is actual access to cities. And for most freight routes, this is also the primary issue.

The NP route and the Milwaukee Road route both have pros and cons in different places, with the NP route arguably being better. (The NP route, of course, was downgraded and mothballed in parts.) They both actually stop in cities on the way, though.

The GN route has no intermediate points. (OK, fine. Grand Forks.) It's fundamentally a "flyover" route. And that makes it fundamentally a *bad route*. (Yes, it probably has the best Rockies pass. This is why NP's Rockies pass was abandoned. But that's a small part of the route.)

This is the same underlying problem as the Erie route in the East, which was scrapped for worthlessness and which basically nobody misses. (The Lackawanna route was weak, and exceptionally curve-filled, but there are cities along the way which still want service back. Not so much on the Erie.)

The survival of the GN route is a *historical accident*, due to short-term thinking and very specific oddities in the business environment at the time the Milwaukee was being scrapped and the NP downgraded -- specifically, the fact that nearly all business had been steered to trucks by government policy, and railroads were taking the scraps of the heaviest and slowest traffic, and were also abandoning most of the short hauls even on that traffic -- and the company which owned it made it their priority because it was the route the management had started out on -- BN management was GN management.

It's not a route which actually supports anything much in the states it passes through, though. It's left BNSF in a funny position, begging governments for handouts to upgrade a route which doesn't provide much local service. It usually gets the handouts.

The GN route in Washington will be removed or seriously altered within my lifetime, though, because the flooding, mudslide-covered beach section is fundamentally non-viable. Pity GN/BN/BNSF ripped out all the parallel routes from Seattle north. I wonder what the reroute will end up being; it's impossible to afford the old dismantled parallel routes now that they're highly expensive urban Seattle real estate. Beach routes are an attractive short-term choice which never works out well in the long run.

The survival of the GN route through North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and Washington is just as much an accident as the survival of the BNSF route across Iowa, where the Iowa Interstate route (ex-Rock Island) is clearly the better route, but was just owned by the wrong company at the wrong time.


So regarding the Pacific Extension: The financials, once they were unearthed in bankruptcy court, showed that the Pacific Extension was the only profitable part of the Milwaukee Road. Hilariously, the worthless money-losing granger lines and the line east of Terry, MT, which have the underlying problem of *not actually having any cities en route*, were mostly picked up by other companies after the final bankruptcy, because they hadn't been scrapped. The conclusion is that the profitable line would also have been picked up by someone if they hadn't been lying about the accounting, mismanaging it, and eventually scrapping it. 

Mark, you may never have been an investor; it does scare investors off when management presents books claiming that a business is losing lots of money, *even if it isn't true* (as in the case of the Pacific Extension).

Mark, the facts don't support you, even on the narrow question of whether the Milwaukee management's behavior was short-term sensible. It wasn't. There's no world in which abandoning the only profitable part of your railroad while retaining the unprofitable part makes the slightest bit of sense on the planet, even if the profitable part is less profitable than your competitors. Give it up. 

The Milwaukee Road is an example of the fact that sufficiently incompetent management can wreck pretty much anything. There are numerous other examples. 

They were in a bad position for some of the same larger reasons the Rock Island and eastern railroads were in a bad position: passenger-centric, online-traffic-centric railroads were all in trouble at the time due to aggressive government subsidization of roads and trucks; routes with curves and grades always have some disadvantage -- but the Milwaukee Road was not suffering from the larger problems as badly as the eastern roads or the Rock Island, and managed to inflict an astounding amount of their own problems on themselves. Their own management was their worst enemy. You may want to give them some slack for not seeing the future (the oil crises), but they couldn't even see the present (with their inaccurate accounting books).

It is interesting to think about why the Milwaukee wasn't included in the GN/NP monopolist merger, and it probably should have been; the answer is clearly merely historical accident. BNSF ended up buying up the line east of Terry. If the Pacific Extension had been intact, they probably would have bought it too. It could effectively be used to form an extra track on the NP route from Three Forks to St. Regis. Using Snoqualmie and Stampede tunnels directionally would have many advantages; the Milwaukee route from Ellensburg to Lind would be a shortcut with far fewer curves than the river-following NP route, though missing Yakima and Pasco. The St. Paul Pass route would probably still have been abandoned, certainly (the very nearby NP route was also abandoned), but the rest of the route? No way.


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## Mark Meyer

railiner said:


> Agree with this. That is why they built I-80 on that route, and not along one of the many alternatives.
> As for The Rock...the Union Pacific was actively pursuing the purchase of the entire railroad, dating back to the early sixties. The Interstate Commerce Commission kept denying it, until the point that the Rock Island went bankrupt, and was on the verge of liquidation. At that point, the UP no longer wanted that line, and ironically got to purchase the North Western instead for its entry to Chicago. Had the merger with The Rock been allowed, the Rock would be the premier route between Omaha and Chicago, and the North Western might have been the one to become a short line RR.



The ICC kept putting off the merger because there was so much opposition from other carriers, not surprisingly. Whether the UP really wanted to merge with the Rock Island is debatable (some at the UP didn't want it). The condition of the merger was that the Rock Island would be split up with the UP getting the railroad north of Kansas City and the St. Louis branch and the SP getting the railroad south of Kansas City (Kansas City to Topeka on UP, then the line to Herington, and the lines southwest and south from Herington).

I have trouble believing that the UP would have actually upgraded the Rock Island line to St. Louis, as it was by far the worst between Missouri's largest cities: hilly, curvy, and didn't serve any towns of note (kind of like the Milwaukee Pacific Extension!). Beyond that, the Rock Island had problems. It was not in good shape, and was mostly single-track across Iowa, and had street running in the Quad Cities. It would take a lot to upgrade, and some at the UP were not convinced that the Rock's other routes were of benefit. On the other hand, its access to Chicago from the Southwest allowed much better interchange access to Eastern Railroads than did the C&NW and other railroads. But the C&NW was still considered the best route. It had the most double track, was the flattest, served a fair number of good-sized communities like Cedar Rapids and Marshalltown, and it had the one thing that the Milwaukee, the Wabash, and the Rock Island didn't: Its own crossing of the Missouri River. (The IC did have its own Missouri River crossing, but its route was longer with no double track and was dark territory from Fort Dodge/Tara to Omaha). All those other railroads had to use the UP's bridge between Council Bluffs and Omaha, whereas the C&NW had its own route from their main line at Missouri Valley, IA to Fremont, NE. Today, this route is used somewhat directionally with eastward trains operating via the ex-UP through Omaha, and westward trains running via the ex-C&NW through Blair. The UP acquisition of the C&NW keeps a lot of transcontinental traffic out of the busy Omaha-Council Bluffs terminal.

And no discussion of railroads between Chicago and Omaha would be complete without mention of another of the Milwaukee's huge mistakes: Spending millions to upgrade their Chicago-Omaha route in 1955 to wrest UP's "Cities" trains away from the C&NW (actually it wasn't much of a "wrest", the C&NW didn't want them anymore) in the mistaken hope that freight traffic would follow. This never could have happened as traffic was pretty much evenly distributed by agreement or shipper preference. The Milwaukee spent a lot of money to handle five extra passenger trains per day each way that was down to two in a couple of years (and eventually one in the years just before Amtrak). Another example of the Milwaukee's delusion of adequacy; that is, thinking it could compete with railroads that had decent routes across Iowa. All that money and attention to a route that became the only trans-Iowa route mostly abandoned! (The CGW merged with the C&NW before it was largely abandoned, and the Wabash didn't cross the entire state west-east).


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## Seaboard92

In reality Iowa was one of the most overbuilt states in the United States as far as railroads specifically east-west. Whereas the north south was not nearly as dense for mainlines. Branch lines that entire state is a mess. Here is a glimpse of passenger service in Iowa in 1952. The basic key seeing my interactive map has the ownership information on the actual line is this. Red Is the the Milwaukee Road, Pink is the Rock Island, Green is the Chicago & Northwestern, Orange is the Illinois Central, Gray is the Burlington, Light Purple is the Minneapolis & St. Louis, Dark Purple is the Chicago & Great Western, Blue is the Wabash, and any other color is a shortline. Blue dots indicate a train station. This project took me over two years to complete by gathering data from the 1952 Official Guide, typing it in the station info, and then highlighting the route. Finding abandoned rail lines was a real challenge but a fun one. 

Another overbuilt state is Ohio in my opinion. 

For those that want the link to the map. https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1jkHbsLBcg4kh-n7s0DYXjNGnLdHz5J8l&usp=sharing


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## Mark Meyer

Wow. Yes, "back in the day" it was said you couldn't go 12 miles in any direction in Iowa without crossing a railroad track. Not the case now, obviously.


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## neroden

Yeah, Iowa was very overbuilt.

Ohio went from overbuilt to underbuilt -- another example of where a rational nationalized transportation policy would have left us with a reasonable network, but instead we were left with too few lines in some areas and too many in others due to the vagaries of individual management decisions.


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## fredmcain

Mark Meyer said:


> This could be true to a certain extent. I think a national transportation policy - especially for present and future passenger routes - would be beneficial. Examples are the Big Four Route from Kankakee to Indianapolis and the ex-SAL route from Petersburg, VA to Norlina, NC. But beyond that, it gets complex, especially considering that the government provides all the infrastructure for the railroads' competition, and that most of the freight railroads' infrastructure is privately-owned. <snip>



Mark,

Well, well ! Will wonders ever cease! You have finally made a statement here that I can agree with!

Regards,
Fred M. Cain


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## fredmcain

Group,

I’d like to explain one more thing about the Milwaukee Road debacle that seems to be little discussed in railfan circles. I’m certain that Mr. Meyer will sharply disagree with me and that’s fine, it is what it is, I guess.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the railroading world of the 1970s was a nightmare. The future looked so bleak that railroads found it nearly impossible to raise badly needed funds from investors. About the only hope of luring investment dollars would be if they could somehow show that they were profitable. Who would want to invest in an unprofitable company? Especially in an unprofitable _RAILROAD_ company?

One way they did this was by taking money out of maintenance to put toward the bottom line so they could show that the roads were profitable when actually they really weren’t. This helped send roads like the Penn Central, the Rock Island and the Milwaukee into a death spiral. (Those three roads come to mind but probably there were others with this issue).

However, at the Milwaukee, this issue was really severe due to a feature in the clause following a previous reorganization.

In order to help refinance the earlier reorganization, the Milwaukee issued a bunch of preferred shares that guaranteed dividends. It was _guaranteed_ that if the Company failed to pay a dividend on those shares for two or more consecutive quarters, the preferred shareholders had the right to call a meeting and oust the board including the president.

So, management bent over backwards to pay those dividends regardless as to where the money came from.

In the book _The Nation Pays Again_, Thomas Ploss explains this better than I can since I am typing this at work without the book in front of me.

I have always been of the opinion that during that reorganization, the board and managers should have _NEVER_ agreed to a deal like that in the first place.  Why they did I can’t imagine. Maybe they had their reasons but it proved to be one of the Achilles heels that helped lead to the Company’s undoing.


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## jis

The impression that I have from reading many books on the subject, Penn Central indulged in some straight old fashioned lying and cooking the books, until they reached a point where they could not overcome the incredulity problem, and that is when they threw in the towel and held everyone hostage instead of just themselves. Of course the regulatory environment did play a significant role in causing that eventuality to unfold, as the guardians of the environment continued to be wilful participants in the deception even after it was quite obvious to anyone that was paying attention as to what was going on. But for them political expediencey was more important than finding solutions.


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## sttom

One thing I don't really understand is why a Rock Island/Milwaukee Road merger would have made sense or even been seen as viable by either companies management. Both companies wanted to merge with a larger system and even though the Rock Island *might* have been in a better position than the Milwaukee in the early 60s, it probably wouldn't have been see as a good match when compared to UP. But a UP/Milwaukee Road merger would have had the same issues as the Rock Island/UP merger since it would give the UP a direct link to Chicago which would hurt the other 3 railroads that would be left out of the merger. Add about 10 years to this and both railroads would have been in the toilet financially speaking. Merging the Rock Island and Milwaukee Road wouldn't have helped at that point. 

As to whether or not the Milwaukee Road was worth keeping and who would have done it, I frankly don't see who would have wanted them if BN wasn't interested in them and merging with the UP would have started a legal firestorm and the other granger lines didn't want them, then who? The only other railroad that they interacted with (that I know of) would have been the Southern Pacific. But, why would they have wanted them either? If the Rock Island had merged with the Southern Pacific instead of spending a decade pursuing the Union Pacific, then I could see this alternate history SP maybe considering taking a bet on the Milwaukee Road, or at least the transcontinental connection assuming the SP got to keep the BN trackage rights. 

The SP had experience with railroading in rough country, Donner Pass is one, the entire Northwestern Pacific was a pain. The ground literally got wet and melted out from under the tracks. I doubt anywhere along the Milwaukee Road was that bad. The main thing that seemed to effect the history of the railroads in the upper Midwest (to me at least) was not only that Iowa and some of the other states had more rail miles than they needed, but that the region's rail business after the BN merger was that the companies were just waiting until they could get gobbled up by the UP or BN or wait for their inevitable demise. Prior to that it seemed that the Rock Island, CNW and Milwaukee Road were all vying to be the road to the UP's future and the CBQ was being the eastern go between for the NP and GN. History would have been different if there was a third player in the mix. And with how the railroad industry was going in the early 60s, I would expect the SP to the most likely partner that wouldn't have been a merger within the region. 

The other option I could see happening is the Milwaukee Road getting bought by one of the predecessors of the Seaboard System and CSX maybe being a truly transcontinental system. The Milwaukee Road did dip into Indiana and got close to Cincinnati where the L & N ran, not to mention they both met in St Louis. I'm not familiar with the L & N or its history so I wouldn't know how viable that would be.

Also, a side note, freight taking some extra time to get somewhere (especially grain or rocks) isn't that big of a deal. So long as the freight shows up when its supposed to, things will be fine. The problem with a railway in decline is that reliability becomes an issue, which will hurt business a lot. Add skimping maintenance to the pile of problems they were facing. Getting absorbed into a bigger railroad would have helped with some of those problems. Even if their transcontinental line was barely profitable, being a part of a much larger system would make taking low margins on a train from the Pacific Northwest to somewhere outside of the Milwaukee Road's system potentially worth it. Its not just the amount that could have been made hauling a train over the Pacific Extension, but whether or not having it added to another railroad. And the thing is, it didn't seem like any other railroad thought that of the Milwaukee.


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## railiner

Another "what if"....the Rock Island merged with the Rio Grande and Western Pacific? Instead of a 'CZ', we could have had a 'CR' or "California Rocket"...
On second thought...that combination would have been buried by the UP+C&NW or MILW, so....never mind...


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## jis

railiner said:


> Another "what if"....the Rock Island merged with the Rio Grande and Western Pacific? Instead of a 'CZ', we could have had a 'CR' or "California Rocket"...
> On second thought...that combination would have been buried by the UP+C&NW or MILW, so....never mind...


But then if you threw the MILW into the mix you could have the CRH! California Rocket Hiawatha! *Grin*


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## jiml

jis said:


> But then if you threw the MILW into the mix you could have the CRH! California Rocket Hiawatha! *Grin*


Surely in these PC times you'd have to come up with a new name, since someone would object to using the word "rocket".


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## sttom

My point is, that to the management of the Rock Island and Milwaukee Road, any merger wouldn’t do, only a merger with the Union Pacific would do (although the Milwaukee would have accepted BN). They were blinded to any other possibility that would have made some business sense. The Rock Island, Milwaukee Road, and Chicago & Northwestern were in a war of attrition with each other to become the UP's route to Chicago. Only one of them needed to survive to give the Union Pacific direct access to Chicago and the Northwestern was the one that survived long enough to be the one. The other two were sold for parts and the Pacific Extension wasn't needed by BN at the time, thus it's loss. If the Rock Island had picked a different partner to merge with, like the SP, it would have (hopefully) been a wake up call to the Mikwaukee Road's management that they should pursue other options, but that never came to pass.

This to me is also a very sad point. That the two dying railroads that had links between Chicago and Omaha saw that link as they only thing worth saving of themselves. The Rock Island for example not only met the SP in New Mexico, but it also cross with it or the Cotton Belt in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Missouri, but none of those links were seen as valuable as their connection to the Overland Route at Omaha. In the context of the Milwaukee, whether or not the Pacific Extension was worth anything to them or anyone else was irrelevant, they only saw their connection at Omaha as worth anything. And from the sounds of it, a BN merger was just an easy way to put them out of their misery.


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## railiner

jis said:


> But then if you threw the MILW into the mix you could have the CRH! California Rocket Hiawatha! *Grin*


Ha ha...
There actually was a “Zephyr Rocket” joint operation between St. Louis and St.Paul...
The Burlington and Rock Island also ran thru trains between Ft. Worth and Houston


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## Mark Meyer

neroden said:


> So, we agree. Much of the Milwaukee Road route should have been kept by a nationalized operation. I have said that a proper "USRA" operation would have combined the NP and Milwaukee to get the best bits of each, and scrapped the GN.



I don’t agree on other’s speculation. We have no idea about a “nationalized operation” or anything else that hasn’t actually happened. But in the realm of reality and privately-run railroads, we know that superior operating characteristic (grade, curvature, on-line business, supporting routes, etc.) do matter and that’s why the GN route was the clear choice for the primary transcontinental route across the Northern Tier, and why the Milwaukee Road is gone.



neroden said:


> I'll make a point you may not appreciate because of your myopic focus on for-profit freight operation: when passenger routes are designed, grades are much less of a worry. Curves are much more of a worry, of course. The same is true with light freight, which again, you weren't thinking about in the 1980s because you'd lost all the business to trucks.
> 
> The primary worry for a passenger route, however, is actual access to cities. And for most freight routes, this is also the primary issue.
> 
> The NP route and the Milwaukee Road route both have pros and cons in different places, with the NP route arguably being better. (The NP route, of course, was downgraded and mothballed in parts.) They both actually stop in cities on the way, though.
> 
> The GN route has no intermediate points. (OK, fine. Grand Forks.) It's fundamentally a "flyover" route. And that makes it fundamentally a *bad route*. (Yes, it probably has the best Rockies pass. This is why NP's Rockies pass was abandoned. But that's a small part of the route.)



The NP’s “Rockies Pass” never was abandoned. Mullan Pass is still in use. Service over Homestake Pass is discontinued, but it is not abandoned. The NP operated passenger trains over both, but the Homestake Pass route was never designed to be anything but secondary. You know not of what you speak.

With regard to freight traffic, all of Northern Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas are “flyover” country. In general, it matters not a lot what cities are accessed in these states. The main purpose of the railroad in these states is to get shipments from the real major population centers (none of which are in those states) to the West Coast and vice versa. Therefore, the Great Northern route is primary conduit for such traffic. Freight traffic doesn’t care whether it’s passing through Havre or Billings – it just wants to get across Montana, which is the fourth-largest state, but just recently cracked a population of a million.

The ex-GN route across North Dakota has more online business than the ex-NP route. In Montana, 90+% of the shuttle grain facilities are on ex-GN trackage. On the ex-NP route, Montana Rail Link operates the equivalent of about one train daily each way to handle its local business between Billings, Laurel and Missoula, including the BNSF interchange at Garrison. West of Missoula, except for a local and the gas local, traffic is such that it’s handled on BNSF run-through trains. The vast majority of traffic on this route today are cars that just want to get across Montana.

Freight routes matter for passenger trains in the United States because outside the Northeast Corridor and a few other short segments, passenger trains rely on freight train infrastructure being available. The history of Amtrak is rife with instances of trains being rerouted or discontinued because freight traffic was insufficient or the line was being abandoned. 

Your contention that the GN route is “bad” as a passenger route is not born out by history or reality. From near the end of WWII to the beginning of Amtrak, GN always offered the faster service, the greater frequency, the superior amenities and was the primary route for mail and express – never the NP or Milwaukee. Early on, part of this was the demand to just get across states like Montana and North Dakota the fastest way possible. But GN solidified is status as the primary passenger carrier with its feeder network to Vancouver, BC, Winnipeg, and Duluth, where GN trains were always the most-frequent and featured the best onboard service. This carried over to Amtrak, where 50 years ago this month, the GN route (mostly) was chosen for the lone Chicago-Seattle train due to higher existing ridership. For most of the past 30+ years, the Empire Builder (on the ex-GN route, primarily) has been Amtrak’s most-ridden long distance train. Of course, there has been no corresponding train on the ex-NP or ex-MILW route through the Dakotas and Montana to compare it with, but the mere fact that the Empire Builder is better patronized than other routes (all of which serve a larger on-line population) suggests that no other route between Chicago and Seattle/Portland could guarantee better patronage.

The Empire Builder shows that on-line population is not the sole determiner in ridership. Lack of alternate transportation, direct access to a major national park, reliability in an area with severe weather, and historical usage by online communities all play a role. The ex-NP route has bus and air service, and is paralleled by an Interstate highway. It serves more online population in Montana to be sure (again, that’s largely irrelevant), but fares poorly against even the non-air competition. The bus is 5 hours faster than the last NP North Coast Limited (on a schedule that could not even be replicated today), and driving is 9 hours faster. The Milwaukee Road route was completely “bad.” Its population base in South Dakota was less than the GN or NP, and west of there, it had little exclusivity in service (in 1970, for instance, the Milwaukee exclusively served only three communities with more than 3,000 people west of Mobridge, SD…and two of those were on branch lines. West of Miles City, its route was even slower than the longer NP. No wonder its passenger train service went away (west of Deer Lodge) in 1961, and no wonder how the whole railroad did the same 19 years later with few negative effects.


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## Mark Meyer

neroden said:


> The survival of the GN route is a *historical accident*, due to short-term thinking and very specific oddities in the business environment at the time the Milwaukee was being scrapped and the NP downgraded -- specifically, the fact that nearly all business had been steered to trucks by government policy, and railroads were taking the scraps of the heaviest and slowest traffic, and were also abandoning most of the short hauls even on that traffic -- and the company which owned it made it their priority because it was the route the management had started out on -- BN management was GN management.



Fact check:
President and CEO: Louis Menk, off the NP
Vice President and later CEO: Norman Lorentzen, off the NP
President, Resources Division, C. Robert Binger off the NP

The reality is that top management was shared by the GN and NP and other positions from all the predecessor roads. While many GN routes were indeed used as the primary routes of the merged company, superior operating characteristics clearly show the “why.” It also shows why NP terminal facilities such as in Portland, Spokane, Minneapolis, and Duluth were used in preference to that of the GN. 

Another complete fabrication.



neroden said:


> It's not a route which actually supports anything much in the states it passes through, though. It's left BNSF in a funny position, begging governments for handouts to upgrade a route which doesn't provide much local service. It usually gets the handouts.



More complete fabrication. BNSF has asked NOTHING for line upgrades. Period. In stark contrast to supporters of plans to revive the failed Milwaukee Road in the late 70s, wanting the state and federal governments to pitch in millions for a physical plant that couldn’t support itself. Historically speaking, the GN route has received by far the least “handouts” of any. The UP and NP were land grant of course. Both the GN and MILW had some predecessor companies who received land grants, but none in the actual construction of their Pacific Extensions. The difference is that the MILW used the land grant NP heavily to transport material to construct its railroad, as well as benefitting from paralleling the NP much of the way and not having to establish communities and services therein as that had been done by the NP – a huge benefit of land grants. And, the GN route does support a huge agricultural industry in North Dakota and Montana with a huge majority of those states’ unit grain/fertilizer facilities. 



neroden said:


> The GN route in Washington will be removed or seriously altered within my lifetime, though, because the flooding, mudslide-covered beach section is fundamentally non-viable. Pity GN/BN/BNSF ripped out all the parallel routes from Seattle north. I wonder what the reroute will end up being; it's impossible to afford the old dismantled parallel routes now that they're highly expensive urban Seattle real estate. Beach routes are an attractive short-term choice which never works out well in the long run.



Hard to argue with that, Methuselah. Text me in the hereafter and let me know if the flooding thing happens before the Yellowstone Caldera takes out the NP and MILW rights-of-way in Montana, since you’ll be around to see all that. And 130 years and counting is a pretty good long run so far, all the while saving the railroad scores of millions of dollars annually in operating costs, and accessing port facilities.



neroden said:


> The survival of the GN route through North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and Washington is just as much an accident as the survival of the BNSF route across Iowa, where the Iowa Interstate route (ex-Rock Island) is clearly the better route, but was just owned by the wrong company at the wrong time.



Nope. Just like in Montana and North Dakota, the BNSF route in Iowa gets the traffic where it wants to go: Across Iowa. CB&Q/BN/BNSF had the traffic. The Rock Island didn’t, and even the UP got cold feet when it came time to merge. The advantage of the C&NW and CB&Q routes is that they had their own bridges across the Missouri River to avoid the Omaha/Council Bluffs terminal area. BNSF avoids it completely except for Omaha traffic, and UP now uses both the UP and C&NW lines between Missouri Valley and Fremont directionally.



neroden said:


> So regarding the Pacific Extension: The financials, once they were unearthed in bankruptcy court, showed that the Pacific Extension was the only profitable part of the Milwaukee Road. Hilariously, the worthless money-losing granger lines and the line east of Terry, MT, which have the underlying problem of *not actually having any cities en route*, were mostly picked up by other companies after the final bankruptcy, because they hadn't been scrapped. The conclusion is that the profitable line would also have been picked up by someone if they hadn't been lying about the accounting, mismanaging it, and eventually scrapping it.
> 
> Mark, you may never have been an investor; it does scare investors off when management presents books claiming that a business is losing lots of money, *even if it isn't true* (as in the case of the Pacific Extension).
> 
> Mark, the facts don't support you, even on the narrow question of whether the Milwaukee management's behavior was short-term sensible. It wasn't. There's no world in which abandoning the only profitable part of your railroad while retaining the unprofitable part makes the slightest bit of sense on the planet, even if the profitable part is less profitable than your competitors. Give it up.



Sorry, I don’t “give up” on reality, and you’re not one familiar with “facts.” Sure is funny that the claims by the Rock Island losing lots of money didn’t scare off the SP, C&NW and what would become the Iowa Interstate from acquiring huge swaths of that railroad. If the Milwaukee Pacific Extension was all that profitable – or profitable at all with a future of remaining so – someone would have stepped in to save it, and no one did. So, to accept your claim, I have to think that only the pro-Pacific Extension zealots were right, and everyone else – on the Milwaukee, the BN, the UP – hundreds and hundreds of professional railroaders that were totally familiar with its operation – were wrong. Nope.



neroden said:


> The Milwaukee Road is an example of the fact that sufficiently incompetent management can wreck pretty much anything. There are numerous other examples.
> 
> They were in a bad position for some of the same larger reasons the Rock Island and eastern railroads were in a bad position: passenger-centric, online-traffic-centric railroads were all in trouble at the time due to aggressive government subsidization of roads and trucks; routes with curves and grades always have some disadvantage -- but the Milwaukee Road was not suffering from the larger problems as badly as the eastern roads or the Rock Island, and managed to inflict an astounding amount of their own problems on themselves. Their own management was their worst enemy. You may want to give them some slack for not seeing the future (the oil crises), but they couldn't even see the present (with their inaccurate accounting books).



But that means that ALL parties involved were “sufficiently incompetent.” Again, not likely. Especially with its myriad deficiencies and abundant competition. Conspiracy! Conspiracy!


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## Mark Meyer

neroden said:


> It is interesting to think about why the Milwaukee wasn't included in the GN/NP monopolist merger, and it probably should have been; the answer is clearly merely historical accident. BNSF ended up buying up the line east of Terry. If the Pacific Extension had been intact, they probably would have bought it too. It could effectively be used to form an extra track on the NP route from Three Forks to St. Regis. Using Snoqualmie and Stampede tunnels directionally would have many advantages; the Milwaukee route from Ellensburg to Lind would be a shortcut with far fewer curves than the river-following NP route, though missing Yakima and Pasco. The St. Paul Pass route would probably still have been abandoned, certainly (the very nearby NP route was also abandoned), but the rest of the route? No way.



No way? Really? It happened, didn’t it? (Probably your single – among so many – reality-free statement!)

As for the “what if” of BNSF buying the MILW west of Terry “if still intact.” Never. Its worn out infrastructure notwithstanding, the line still didn’t have CTC, hot box detectors, power switches, sidings of sufficient length, etc. Much more cost-effective to upgrade existing routes that did not have that additional albatross. A Milwaukee Road merged into the BN would look very much like what we have today.

As for the BNSF buying the line west of Terry having to do with it buying the line east: It has nothing in common. It’s interesting that you use the term “monopolist merge.” This is of course erroneous because the Milwaukee simply could not compete due to its horrible profile and circuitous branch line network – and this term would only be remotely true someplace like Montana, where the Milwaukee missed most of the state’s rail business anyway. And of course the reason that BNSF ended up purchasing the Milwaukee trackage in South Dakota was that the Milwaukee wanted out and the state designated the BN as operator. The Milwaukee was the primary railroad in South Dakota – as much of a “monopoly” it turns out as the BN was Montana – or more. The Milwaukee had received some money to fix its main line across the Dakotas after 1980, but it wasn’t enough of a “handout” so the state of South Dakota stepped in to save the line and finance its upgrade (handout continued). With the state showing preference to the Milwaukee routes, C&NW abandoned and shortlined its remaining routes, and BN did the same, leaving the state with mostly ex-Milwaukee Road trackage. It actually worked out for the best for the state’s agricultural community as the state’s routes accessed more-efficient BN (later BNSF) routes at Appleton, Terry, Sioux Falls, and Sioux City – especially important in today’s unit-train operations, which would have been cost-prohibitive over the Milwaukee Pacific Extension. Nonetheless, it’s interesting that fabrications about the BN monopoly still exist, but the Milwaukee route’s monopoly in South Dakota never seems to come up….


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## Mark Meyer

fredmcain said:


> Mark,
> 
> Well, well ! Will wonders ever cease! You have finally made a statement here that I can agree with!
> 
> Regards,
> Fred M. Cain



Fred: As you believe that every railroad everywhere should be rebuilt, this was inevitable.


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## Mark Meyer

sttom said:


> The other option I could see happening is the Milwaukee Road getting bought by one of the predecessors of the Seaboard System and CSX maybe being a truly transcontinental system. The Milwaukee Road did dip into Indiana and got close to Cincinnati where the L & N ran, not to mention they both met in St Louis. I'm not familiar with the L & N or its history so I wouldn't know how viable that would be.



The Milwaukee went to Kansas City, not St. Louis. And they got to Louisville as a condition of the L&N taking over the Monon. By 1969, the L&N already had acquired their part (the MP got the Thebes bridge part) of the C&EI and had access to Chicago. The main purpose of getting trackage rights on L&N/Monon into Louisville was to interchange with the Southern. But this didn't work because the Milwaukee track was so bad across Illinois and Indiana. The Southern wanted to run an Atlanta-Chicago train via Louisville on a 48-hour schedule to compete with L&N, but the Milwaukee claimed that it would take 48 hours just on their portion of the run.



sttom said:


> Also, a side note, freight taking some extra time to get somewhere (especially grain or rocks) isn't that big of a deal. So long as the freight shows up when its supposed to, things will be fine. The problem with a railway in decline is that reliability becomes an issue, which will hurt business a lot. Add skimping maintenance to the pile of problems they were facing. Getting absorbed into a bigger railroad would have helped with some of those problems. Even if their transcontinental line was barely profitable, being a part of a much larger system would make taking low margins on a train from the Pacific Northwest to somewhere outside of the Milwaukee Road's system potentially worth it. Its not just the amount that could have been made hauling a train over the Pacific Extension, but whether or not having it added to another railroad. And the thing is, it didn't seem like any other railroad thought that of the Milwaukee.



Well, "freight taking extra time to get somewhere" really is a big deal, especially today with unit trains. Longer cycle time takes more equipment, both cars and locomotives. That's extra expense, especially if you don't have them. In the case of locomotives, that decreases availability for other commodities, too, so everything suffers. In the case of unit grain trains on some railroads (and other commodities, too) "sets" of cars are sold for period of time or a number of trips. If the trip time goes from like 7 days for a round trip to 12 (like during extreme cold or a service interruption), that increases costs in the entire cycle. And then as you say, for a railroad "in decline" the situation is exacerbated.

There pretty much wasn't any long-haul traffic on the Milwaukee that BN couldn't move cheaper or faster, which was also exacerbated by the Milwaukee not being able to keep up with the BN installing ribbonrail, CTC, power switches, lineside warning detectors, and lengthening sidings. I think a lot of railroaders were able to look into the future and see how deregulation would price the Milwaukee out of most markets to the Pacific Northwest, and how things that we take for granted today such as a cabooseless operation would have been an expensive fix for the Milwaukee that had few power or even spring switches. The ultimate heavy lift.


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## Mark Meyer

fredmcain said:


> Group,
> 
> I’d like to explain one more thing about the Milwaukee Road debacle that seems to be little discussed in railfan circles. I’m certain that Mr. Meyer will sharply disagree with me and that’s fine, it is what it is, I guess.



No, I actually agree with you, Fred. Freight railroading in general was between the proverbial rock and proverbial hard place. Such antics are indeed debatable because the exact outcome is not known if a different course was taken.

That's why I believe it's best to avoid all the what-ifs about accounting, politics, and personalities and focus on the facts and the constants: The Milwaukee had a high-cost operating main and auxiliary line network compared to the competition no matter who was in charge doing whatever. Conversely, if the route was known to be operationally competitive with the competition, someone would have stepped in and saved it. Just like the Rock Island. And it wouldn't have taken much, evidently....especially when one considers that the biggest chunks of the railroad ended up with the MKT, SP, and C&NW, not known at the time to be rolling in dough (or even moderately solvent in some cases!). But no one did that with the Milwaukee Pacific Extension. Enough said.


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## fredmcain

sttom said:


> My point is, that to the management of the Rock Island and Milwaukee Road, any merger wouldn’t do, only a merger with the Union Pacific would do (although the Milwaukee would have accepted BN). They were blinded to any other possibility that would have made some business sense. The Rock Island, Milwaukee Road, and Chicago & Northwestern were in a war of attrition with each other to become the UP's route to Chicago. Only one of them needed to survive to give the Union Pacific direct access to Chicago and the Northwestern was the one that survived long enough to be the one. The other two were sold for parts and the Pacific Extension wasn't needed by BN at the time, thus it's loss. If the Rock Island had picked a different partner to merge with, like the SP, it would have (hopefully) been a wake up call to the Mikwaukee Road's management that they should pursue other options, but that never came to pass.
> 
> This to me is also a very sad point. That the two dying railroads that had links between Chicago and Omaha saw that link as they only thing worth saving of themselves. The Rock Island for example not only met the SP in New Mexico, but it also cross with it or the Cotton Belt in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Missouri, but none of those links were seen as valuable as their connection to the Overland Route at Omaha. In the context of the Milwaukee, whether or not the Pacific Extension was worth anything to them or anyone else was irrelevant, they only saw their connection at Omaha as worth anything. And from the sounds of it, a BN merger was just an easy way to put them out of their misery.


Tom,

I seem to recall reading that the “You Pee” did express some interest in buying the Milwaukee. I suppose somebody could argue that it could’ve made a good fit for them. But it would’ve only taken one tour of the Railroad to see what kind of condition the Milwaukee’s track was in to forever change their minds. Indeed, I don’t know if such a tour ever took place or not but even if it didn’t, they probably would’ve gotten wind of the track condition somehow. It was pretty much common knowledge at the time at least by railroaders if not Wall Street.

In his book _The Nation Pays Again_, Thomas Ploss threw in a neat anecdote. As he was learning the ropes at headquarters, some head honcho asked him, “Hey, you wanna go for a train ride?”

So he got the grand tour. He rode the Milwaukee’s passenger train out to Aberdeen South Dakota or somewhere which was actually a cut back of the Olympian that had been truncated. Then west of there they coupled the Company’s business car to the back of a freight train for the remainder of the trip to Seattle. Part of the time Ploss was riding in the cab of a “Little Joe”. He related to the reader the deteriorating condition of the track and the catenary supports.

Ploss discussed at length the aborted Milwaukee-C&NW merger that never was. The president (Quinn, I think?) was really pushing this but the irony of it all was that the C&NW didn’t have any freakin’ money, either. The condition of their Chicago-Council Bluffs mainline got so bad that it wasn’t much better than the Milwaukee’s track. They limped along until into the 1980s when they secured a federal loan for rail improvements. That helped turn the C&NW prospects around somewhat. In the end, the You Pee gobbled them up.

One thing that I’ve always wondered about is the possibility of a Conrail-Milwaukee merger. That would’ve been interesting if only the MILW could’ve limped along a bit longer until Conrail was sold in a IPO. As a single server provider of transcontinental service one could argue that it could’ve been turned into a powerhouse. It might’ve sparked an east to west series of mergers.

But once again there was that track issue. Virtually _NO ONE_ it seemed wanted go out on a limb or jump off a cliff and try to fix it. So in the end, about the only option for management that was left was abandonment. They got painted into the corner at least in part with those preferred shares that I mentioned in an earlier post. 

One sad anecdote that Ploss related, near the end of the book, he and his daughter Ariel attended an employee’s reunion in Montana after the road had been abandoned. It was really kinda sad to read.

Perhaps the only way this could’ve ever ended is the way it did. But are we really better off as a nation? In my own personal, humble and honest opinion, we are not. What could’ve been done? I don’t know. We live in a different environment today. If this were all transpiring today instead of the 1970s, perhaps someone could’ve found an answer with a better outcome.


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## fredmcain

Mark Meyer said:


> Fred: As you believe that every railroad everywhere should be rebuilt, this was inevitable.


Mark,

Well, it is true that I could advocate and support the rebuilding of some lines but I don’t know about “every railroad everywhere”.

First of all, I’m not sure how practical that would be to rebuild any lines. Possible, yes, but not necessarily practical. I do know of one line in Texas that was rebuilt and another (also in Texas) that they were planning on rebuilding but I don’t know what the status is on the second line.

Could I support rebuilding all or even most abandoned rail lines? Hmmmmn. I have to be careful there. What about the abandoned Denver, South Park & Pacific? Or the West Side Lumber rail line? What about the Milwaukee Road’s Olympic Peninsula line that was only connected to the rest of the rail freight network by a ferry? Seeing some of those lines getting rebuilt would be fun but what would be the point? The kind of economic and market conditions that were in place at the time they were built no longer exist.

But here’s what I strongly believe although I know a lot of people will disagree with me: Our federal, state and local governments have spent a huge amount of money on our highway system. This had made it difficult for privately owned rail lines to compete with.

But it gets worse. Many states and local governments assess property taxes on railroad properties. You have to realize a fact here. High taxes discourage investment and if those taxes are punitive enough, they can actually _ENCOURAGE_ disinvestment. That fact does not just apply to railroads but to a lot of businesses in general.

The county I live in in northeastern Indiana no longer has any rail freight access at all. How much of a role did property taxes play in that development? I can’t say but I’m skeptical that taxes had no effect.

I could add that at times the political and economic environment towards rail transport in the U.S. has been so hostile that the very fact railroads have survived at all is a testimony to the high efficiency of a steel wheel rolling on a steel rail.


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