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.
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.
