Great Northern Railway

James J. Hill, neither the Great Northern Railway nor its predecessor road, the St. Paul & Pacific (SP&P) can be mentioned without his name being a central part of the conversation. Hill, born September 16, 1838, was a long time St. Paul, Minnesota resident. He was employed by various enterprises in and around St. Paul. By 1866, he began his association with the railroad. His first job was as a station agent for the SP&P. He later started a fuel distributorship with the SP&P as his primary customer.

The SP&P had its roots in the Minnesota and Pacific Railroad Company (M&P), which was chartered in 1857. M&P was to connect Stillwater and St. Paul, with an extension to St. Cloud. Financing was a problem early on and due to speculation, M&P was forced to sell its assets and was bankrupt in 1860.

The state of Minnesota purchased the assets for a small sum and the company was reorganized in 1862 as the St. Paul & Pacific Railroad Company. On June 28, 1862, the first revenue train of the newly chartered SP&P whistled its way across the Mississippi Valley. Financing continued to be problematic, and only 210 miles of track was laid by 1865, with little to no progress by 1871.

The Northern Pacific stepped in to complete the line, purchasing the SP&P in December 1870. When the financial panic of 1873 hit the entire nation, the Northern Pacific went bankrupt and lost its rights to the SP&P. After the bankruptcy, Hill met with several Minnesota businessmen and formed James J. Hill & Associates. On February 24, 1878, the firm paid $5,540,000 (equivalent to $.25 on the dollar) to the bankruptcy court and purchased the SP&P.

By the end of 1878, the company was in trouble. Concentration on expansion had hampered operations and the red ink flowed heavy. By March of 1879, the company was back in the bankruptcy court and into foreclosure. The undaunted Hill then formed the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba. It bought the rights to the SP&P from the bankruptcy court for $6,780,000 in cash and bonds. By 1888, Hill branched out his St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba by forming the Northern Steamship Company. Then on the occasion of his 51st birthday, September 16, 1889, Hill formed a company that would ultimately build a railroad that would stretch across the Great Plains, over the Rockies, through the Cascades and to the Puget Sound. That company would fly the banner of and henceforth be called the Great Northern Railway.

The one constant amid all of the events and changes of the decade was the westward push of the mainline. Land was available and the farmers who owned it were eager to sell right-of-way to the railroad. Hill took great advantage of this fact. One of his first unprecedented moves was to lease land from these farmers for 999 years. One of the key men in Hill's empire was John F. Stevens. Stevens was given the task of improving the route west. On December 11, 1889, Stevens was following a branch of the Marias River in Montana, when he discovered a route that shortened GN's mainline by over 150 miles and at a grade of only one percent.

In the spring of 1892, Hill met with several key citizens of Spokane, Washington. The issue was whether Hill would run the railroad through Spokane, or several miles to the North. A future without the railroad meant diminished prosperity, as such the citizens relented and Hill generously accepted their offer of free right-of-way through the city. At this same time, trains started running across Marias Pass and Hill was looking westward to the Puget Sound. The Cascade Mountains posed a significant challenge to that effort. Once again, John Stevens was summoned, this time to conquer the Cascades.

Doing his professional best, Stevens tried to find a direct route over the mountain range, but all efforts failed. He ultimately determined that the best route through the Cascades would include a tunnel. This tunnel would take years to construct, so in the interim, switchbacks were built. Four of the switchbacks were located on the East Side of the mountains and five on the West Side. The switchbacks were used to "lift" the railroad over the mountains and would be kept in service until completion of the first Great Northern Cascade Tunnel in 1900.

Once over the mountains, the GN continued to drive west to meet the lines laid in previous years from Seattle to the east. This happened on January 6, 1893 when the last spike was driven into the line at Scenic, Washington.

The switchbacks did their job, but they were slow, costly and dangerous, and Hill had always intended them to be temporary. Work on a tunnel beneath Stevens Pass began soon after the line opened, and on December 20, 1900, the first Cascade Tunnel was placed in service. At 2.6 miles long, it eliminated the switchbacks entirely. Yet the new tunnel brought problems of its own. Heavy freights laboring upgrade filled the bore with smoke and gas, endangering crews, and in 1909 the Great Northern electrified the tunnel district, one of the earliest mainline electrifications in the West. Electric locomotives now hauled trains through the mountain, steam engines and all, while the crews breathed easier.

Picture, if you will, a winter night on the west slope of the Cascades in those years. Snow falls for days without stopping, piling higher than the cab roofs, and the drifts in the cuts can swallow a train whole. A rotary snowplow, pushed by one or two steam locomotives, chews its way up the grade, its great wheel hurling a white arc into the darkness. Behind it, a freight inches along with helper engines cut in on the rear, their exhaust thundering off the canyon walls. On a grade of more than two percent, a broken coupler or a slip of the drivers can bring everything to a halt, and every man on board knows that above them, on the steep slopes, the snow is waiting.

In late February 1910 that danger became a tragedy. A week of storms trapped a westbound passenger train and a mail train at Wellington, the small railroad town at the west portal of the Cascade Tunnel, as slides closed the line on both sides. Rotary plows fought to clear the tracks but could not keep up. Then, early on the morning of March 1, a thunderstorm shook loose a massive avalanche that swept both trains off the mountainside and into the Tye River gorge below. Ninety-six people, passengers and railroad men alike, lost their lives, making it the deadliest avalanche in American history. The Great Northern renamed the town Tye to escape its painful memories and built miles of concrete snowsheds to protect the line.

The lasting solution would be to go deeper. Under the direction of president Ralph Budd, the Great Northern bored a new Cascade Tunnel nearly eight miles long, far below the old line and the avalanche slopes above Wellington. Opened on January 12, 1929, it was the longest railroad tunnel in the Western Hemisphere. A new electrification stretched from Skykomish to Wenatchee, and the old line through Wellington was abandoned. Today that grade is part of the Iron Goat Trail, where hikers can walk past the ruins of snowsheds and the site of the 1910 disaster.

On Puget Sound, Hill was building an empire on the water as well as on land. The Great Northern established extensive terminals at Smith Cove and Interbay in Seattle, and in 1905 it completed a tunnel beneath downtown Seattle to link its waterfront line with the new King Street Station, opened jointly with the Northern Pacific in 1906. Hill's Great Northern Steamship Company launched the giant liners Minnesota and Dakota to carry American goods from Seattle to Asia, while GN lines reached north through Everett to Vancouver, British Columbia. The railroad reached Tacoma over trackage rights, and its trains became familiar sights at Tacoma's Union Station after 1911.

James J. Hill died on May 29, 1916, but the railroad he built continued to grow under his son Louis W. Hill and later Ralph Budd. The Great Northern's famous passenger trains carried his memory west: the Oriental Limited, and from 1929 the Empire Builder, named for Hill himself, running between Chicago and Seattle. Streamlined in 1947 and later fitted with full-length dome cars, the Empire Builder became one of the most celebrated trains in America, its mountain goat emblem a symbol of the scenic Northwest. In the 1950s diesel locomotives replaced both steam and electric power, and in 1956 the Cascade electrification was retired once a new ventilation system allowed diesels to run safely through the long tunnel.

Like its longtime partner the Northern Pacific, the Great Northern faced mounting competition from highways and airlines after the Second World War. The two railroads, which had jointly controlled the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy since 1901 and the Spokane, Portland & Seattle since its founding, had long considered combining. After years of hearings and court challenges, the merger was approved, and on March 2, 1970, the Great Northern, Northern Pacific, Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, and Spokane, Portland & Seattle became the Burlington Northern. Hill's dream of a single great railroad across the northern tier had finally been realized, more than half a century after his death. His tunnels through the Cascades still carry trains to Puget Sound today.