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

[toddinde]

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.

 

[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...

 

[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.

 

[toddinde]

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.

 

[west point]

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

 

[fredmcain]

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

 

[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.

 

[fredmcain]

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 !

 

[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."

 

[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.

 

[Willbridge]

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.

 

[Mark Meyer]

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]

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.

 

[Mark Meyer]

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.

 

[fredmcain]

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.

 

[railiner]

Fast freight brings this one to mind...

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/07/19/...is-the-fastest-freight-train-in-the-west.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_C_(freight_train)

 

[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]

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]

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.

 

[Mark Meyer]

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

[Mark Meyer]

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]

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.

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]

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.

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]

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

 

[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.