Northern Pacific Railway

The Northern Pacific Railway has a very rich historical beginning. Josiah Perham, along with Asa Whitney, Isaac Stevens and Edward Johnson were the first to put in motion a railroad across the route that was traversed by Lewis & Clark on their expedition to the northwest, spanning May 1804 to September 1806. President Abraham Lincoln signed the Federal Charter for Perham's railroad in December of 1864.

Perham's efforts lasted almost two years. Then on July 2, 1866, with a construction deadline looming, heavily in debt and his health failing, another organization stepped in, paid Perham's debts of $102,000. This group did not meet with any better success. Headed by J. Gregory Smith, their initial fundraising efforts were thwarted. But Smith and his group did manage to get the construction deadline (for starting operation) extended to July 4, 1870, with final completion by July 4, 1877.

Enter the infamous firm of Jay Cooke & Company in 1869. He is credited with being very influential in getting the finances flowing. The summer of 1869 saw two survey parties in the field. With the necessary money and land grants, it appeared the railroad was beginning to move. On February 15, 1870, near Duluth, Minnesota, ground breaking ceremonies for the Northern Pacific Railway took place. Construction began July 1870. The Western Terminus had yet to be chosen, but 25 miles of track had been laid in the Cowlitz Valley between Kalama and Puget Sound. All of which was required under the initial Charter.

Tacoma was chosen as the Western Terminus in the Fall of 1872. Storm clouds, however, were building on the horizon. On September 18, 1873, the Northern Pacific and Jay Cooke were felled by the Financial Panic of 1873. Things did not improve in 1874, with no credit available and no cash to continue construction. The Railroad was reorganized by Fredrick Billings in 1876 and by early 1877 it began to slowly move forward. By the end of 1878, the only construction being performed was inconsequential preparation work for the years ahead.

One of the most noted occurrences in the history of the Northern Pacific came in 1879. This was the construction of the temporary bridge across the Missouri River. The river was frozen over with ice. Crews built the bridge across the River by laying 3 inch thick by 12 foot long ties, directly onto the frozen surface. This practice continued until 1882.

The Railroad continued to move westward during 1879. Then in late 1879, one Henry Villard appeared on the scene. Villard and the NP reached an accord on October 20, 1879. This agreement gave the Northern Pacific use of the rail owned and built by the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company. This usage agreement gave trackage rights to the NP until its own line could be completed to Tacoma.

In February of 1881, Villard formed the now famous Blind Pool. The Blind Pool was a committee of prominent financiers of the time. The Blind Pool contributed $8.5 million to the Railroad's fundraising efforts. Throughout 1881 and well into 1882, the NP experienced a litany of legal challenges. Most of this legal action was derived from a power struggle between Villard and Fredrick Billings. The Board of Directors ultimately elected Villard as President of the Northern Pacific. Under his leadership, he raised $60,000,000 and then boldly predicted that the railroad would be completed in two years.

With money, men and material, he was able to complete that prediction. On September 8, 1883, with bands playing and the final 1000 feet of track laid, the two lines were connected. The final spike, with each sound being relayed by telegraph, was driven into the line. Not made of gold as one might think. Instead, the spike used was the very first spike driven into Northern Pacific track some 14 years earlier at Thompson Jct, Minnesota.

As the 19th century drew to a close, the Northern Pacific faced its greatest geographic hurdle: the rugged Cascade Range. Before the completion of a permanent tunnel, the railroad relied on the legendary "Switchbacks" to traverse Stampede Pass. This ingenious but harrowing series of zig-zags required enormous power and precision, as trains were literally pushed and pulled up grades as steep as 5.6 percent. While the switchbacks allowed the NP to fulfill its promise of connecting Eastern Washington to the Puget Sound, they were a temporary solution. In 1888, the completion of the nearly two-mile-long Stampede Tunnel finally provided a direct, all-weather route, cementing Tacoma’s status as the primary gateway for cross-mountain commerce.

With a reliable path through the mountains, the railroad became the lifeblood of Tacoma’s early economy. The NP didn't just move people; it moved the raw materials of a burgeoning city. Vast quantities of timber from the dense forests of the Cascades were hauled to the mills on the Tacoma tideflats, while coal from the mines in Wilkeson and Carbonado fueled both the railroad’s own locomotives and the steamships in the harbor. This steady flow of "black gold" and "green gold" transformed Tacoma into a bustling industrial hub, providing the freight revenue necessary to sustain the railroad through the economic turbulence of the late 1890s.

By the turn of the century, the Northern Pacific had evolved from a speculative venture into a sophisticated transportation network. The synergy between the railroad and the port allowed Tacoma to outpace many of its regional rivals, handling a diverse array of freight that ranged from agricultural exports to heavy machinery. As the NP entered the 1900s, it stood as a testament to Gilded Age engineering and industrial ambition, having successfully linked the natural wealth of the Pacific Northwest to the hungry markets of the East. This era of dominance set the stage for the next great chapter of Tacoma’s history: the arrival of new competitors and the grand opening of Union Station.

The new century opened with new masters. The Northern Pacific had not escaped the Panic of 1893; it went into receivership that year and emerged in 1896 reorganized as the Northern Pacific Railway, with financier J.P. Morgan and Great Northern president James J. Hill holding a strong hand in its affairs. Hill's Great Northern had reached Puget Sound in 1893, and it chose Seattle, not Tacoma, as its western terminus. In 1901 the NP and GN jointly purchased the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, giving both roads a route to Chicago, and Hill and Morgan placed the two railroads under a single holding company, the Northern Securities Company. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered that company dissolved in 1904 as an illegal combination, but the NP and GN remained close allies, sharing the Burlington and later the Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway, for the next sixty-six years.

For Tacoma, the arrival of the Great Northern marked a turning point. The Northern Pacific had all but created the city, and its land company had platted the streets of the "City of Destiny." But Seattle, boosted by the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897 and Hill's railroad, grew rapidly, and the NP had to follow the traffic. NP trains served Seattle over the line through the Puyallup and White River valleys, and in 1906 the NP and GN opened the jointly owned King Street Station in Seattle. Tacoma remained the NP's operating stronghold on the Sound, home to the sprawling South Tacoma Shops, which built and repaired locomotives and cars and became one of the city's largest employers.

The Northern Pacific answered its rivals with service. On April 29, 1900, it inaugurated the North Coast Limited, an all-new train linking St. Paul with Tacoma, Seattle and Portland. It would remain the railroad's flagship for the next seven decades. The same year, the NP sold some 900,000 acres of its Washington land grant timber to Frederick Weyerhaeuser and his partners, who established their new company's headquarters in Tacoma. The sale secured a steady stream of lumber traffic for the railroad and helped make the tideflats one of the busiest milling districts in the nation.

Competition soon arrived on the NP's own doorstep. The Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, better known as the Milwaukee Road, completed its Pacific Extension in 1909, crossing the Cascades at Snoqualmie Pass and building yards, docks and a passenger station in Tacoma. By 1920 the Milwaukee had electrified its line from Othello over the mountains to Tacoma, a remarkable achievement. At about the same time, the Union Pacific, through its Oregon-Washington Railroad & Navigation subsidiary, pushed its own line into Tacoma and Seattle. Rather than build duplicate lines, the NP, GN and UP agreed to share the NP's main line between Portland and Puget Sound, a cooperative arrangement that shaped rail travel in the region for decades.

With traffic growing and Tacoma's old depot inadequate, the Northern Pacific commissioned a grand new station. It chose the architectural firm of Reed and Stem, the same firm then designing New York's Grand Central Terminal. Tacoma's Union Station opened on May 1, 1911. Crowned by a great copper-clad dome and built in the Beaux-Arts style, its soaring waiting room welcomed travelers on the Northern Pacific as well as tenant railroads including the Great Northern and the Union Pacific. For generations of Tacomans, Union Station was the gateway to the rest of the country, the scene of countless arrivals and farewells, and a proud symbol of the city's place on the transcontinental map.

The NP continued to improve its routes around the Sound. In 1914 it opened the Point Defiance Line, a nearly level water-grade route that followed the shoreline south from Tacoma, passing through tunnels at Point Defiance and running along the Narrows and Nisqually Reach. The new line spared trains the climb over the older inland route via Lakeview and quickly became the main line between Puget Sound and Portland. More than a century later it remains one of the most scenic stretches of railroad in the Northwest.

The two World Wars brought the railroad some of its heaviest traffic. Camp Lewis, established south of Tacoma in 1917 and later known as Fort Lewis, depended on the NP for troops and supplies. During the Second World War, trains carried soldiers, shipyard workers, aircraft parts and war materials through Tacoma and Seattle in unprecedented numbers, and Union Station's waiting room was crowded around the clock. The heavy demands of wartime tested the railroad's aging steam fleet and set the stage for the changes to come.

In the postwar years the Northern Pacific modernized quickly. Diesel locomotives replaced steam through the 1950s, and in 1954 the railroad introduced the Vista-Dome North Coast Limited, whose glass-topped dome cars gave passengers sweeping views of the Rockies and Cascades. Yet the automobile, the airliner and the new interstate highways steadily drew passengers away from the rails, while trucks competed for freight. Like railroads across the country, the NP faced rising costs and shrinking passenger revenue, and the logic of combining forces with its longtime partners grew harder to ignore.

The idea of merging the Northern Pacific and Great Northern was not new; the Interstate Commerce Commission had approved a merger in 1930, but only on the condition that the roads give up the Burlington, a price they refused to pay. The effort was revived in the 1950s and 1960s and, after years of hearings and appeals, the merger was upheld by the Supreme Court. On March 2, 1970, the Northern Pacific, Great Northern, Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, and Spokane, Portland & Seattle merged to form the Burlington Northern. The NP's name passed into history after more than a century, but its legacy endures in the Puget Sound region: in the tracks along Point Defiance, in the cities it built, and in Tacoma's Union Station, which, after its last trains departed in 1984, was restored and reopened in 1992 as a federal courthouse, its great dome still overlooking the city the railroad created.