mwmnp
Service Attendant
Just to add a little bit of historical perspective, the original transcontinental rail line built by the Great Northern (known as the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railway at the time) is the route through Grand Forks and Devils Lake. As time went on, however, there came to be an increased desire to shorten the transcontinental line and provide a more direct routing between Fargo and Minot. Of undoubtedly just as much concern was that, up until the cutoff was built, the Soo Line had the competitive edge in central North Dakota with their main line running through the region. Given the intense rivarly that existed between the Soo Line and the Hill Lines (the Great Northern and the Northern Pacific) during the first part of the twentieth century, allowing the Soo free range over any portion of the state was seen by the Hill Lines as being completely unacceptable. In other places of the state, the Great Northern literally built a competing line next to Soo tracks just to ensure the Soo could not gain any advantage.
Construction of the new main line from Fargo to Minot began in 1910 and ended in 1912. With the railroad essentially the be all and end all of transportation and economic vitality in North Dakota back then, the construction was widely covered by the region's media. The line was soon nicknamed the "Surrey Cutoff," perhaps recognizing how Surrey, which had been founded in 1900, stood to experience an enormous boom simply by being at the junction of two important main lines.
Ultimately, the Surrey Cutoff was the last major railroad construction project undertaken in North Dakota. Additionally, while many new towns were incorporated along the tracks in the hope that some of them would greatly prosper, none of them really did. They were just too late to the game and unable to significantly compete with the older, more established towns along the Soo's line to the south. Even to this day, there is no highway paralleling the Surrey Cutoff and connecting the towns with one another. Being isolated in this way, nearly all of the them, now more or less a century old, sit quiet, slowly becoming ghost towns. The biggest exception is New Rockford, which, having been reached by a Northern Pacific branch line in 1883 and incorporated as a county seat at the same time, was already an established and vibrant town before the Surrey Cutoff came in.
Another thing to note, when trains today take the Surrey Cutoff, they take a slightly different route than the original one envisioned by the Great Northern. This is due mostly to routing changes brought upon by the merger of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific into the Burlington Northern in 1970. Starting at the Amtrak station in Fargo, the distance to the station in Minot by way of today's Surrey Cutoff is 236 miles, compared to the 278 miles listed in the Amtrak timetable by way of Devils Lake. I have highlighted the contemporary Surrey Cutoff with a thick dark green line on the state rail map below. The line proceeding directly northwest out of Fargo is the traditional route of the Surrey Cutoff and, while Amtrak could easily use this line, they probably would not, as there would be nearly 40 miles of non-signaled track, allowing a speed of no more than 59 mph, to contend with. Furthermore, the traditional Surrey Cutoff is only about 4 miles shorter than today's route. That said, if Amtrak were to completely follow today's Surrey Cutoff, there would be about 2.5 miles of 10 mph track on the west side of Fargo to operate over.
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