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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by arbfbe Dave, Nice analysis but there are a few problems there concerning Montana. The MILW knew about Rogers pass and had a plan to build there. The long term plan was to connect the line west out of Great Falls with the line east out of Bonner to allow grain from northern Montana to move west to the Pacific Coast without going first to Harlowtown. Much of the row for US200 is on alignments owned by the MILW but forfeited to the state of MT during bankruptcy proceedings. Lolo Pass would be quite an engineering feat and when you got to the west side the valley was already occupied by the NP lines which became part of the Camas Prairie. The north side of the canyon was occupied by that line and the south side by the road. The MILW would have had to found another route off the pass. The MILW alignment over St Paul Pass was aligned for the construction of a tunnel between Bryson, MT and Adair, ID which would have eliminated much of the mountain grade and heavy snow areas. The tunnel would have been about 7 miles long and no one had built one that long when the MILW was building in 1908. The dream was still there to build that tunnel but bankruptcies kept moving that back until it never happened. The limiting factor for the GN mainline is the Flathead Tunnel in western Montana. The number of trains run through it in a day is determined by the length of time it takes to flu***he diesel exhaust out of it. There are times trains have to wait before being allowed to enter and until improvements are made like higher capacity horsepower fans, the GN main is closer to max capacity than other factors would indicate. Milw was able to generate four thru trains a day over the transcon following the BN merger so the argument would boil down as to whether or not that was enough revenue to support that track or not. Whether or not the original construction made any sense or not once the line was in it was a matter of what the traffic generated could support. Given today's intermodal market there would appear to be enough traffic for the UP, GN and MILW mainlines to survive. The BN/BNSF would have abandoned the NP lines west of Laurel by now in order to feed the GN main giving the MILW a shot at all that NP traffic. Alan [/quote] I think what you are refering to regarding Milwaukees knowledge of Rogers Pass was a plan for a secondary main from Harlowtown to Missoula via Great Falls. The question I have is if Milwaukee knew of Rogers Pass during the initial planning for the Pacific Coast Extension, why did they choose the Butte route? I think part of the problem was the lure of taking over the right of way of the Montana Central from Harlowtown to Lombard (which would cut down on initial construction costs). This action kind of redirected the line in a WSW direction toward Butte. If the Milwaukee had not gotten the deed for this line, it is likely they would have rerouted farther north through Great Falls for the initial line. The Lolo Pass option would have required a number of unavoidable ess curves/trestles/tunnels to make it from the summit down to the Locsha River valley on the west side, similar to what they did on the West side of St Paul Pass. However, they would have had the river grade all to themselves for 100 miles unitl they came to Kooskia ID where the Camas Prairie rails were, and could have taken the opposite side of the river from CPR for their own line, as the roads were not constructed in the canyon until the 1920's. At the time of the Milwaukee's westward construction there was room in the Clearwater River canyon for two railroads, but not much more. If they had managed to secure the North Bank of the Columbia Gorge before James Hill snatched it up, it is likely they would have chosen the Lolo Pass alignment. Long tunnels are a problem, both then and now. Any resonable locating engineer at the time would have (or should have) selected a routing that would avoid the need for a longer summit tunnel in the future. The one great failing of GN Chief Engineer John Stevens was his selection of the Stevens Pass routing for the original GN line over the Cascades, rather than going over an available Snoquailmie Pass which the Milwaukee eventually chose for it's Cascade crossing.
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