Edit post

Edit your reply below.

Post Body
Enter your post below.
Well, hindsight is 20/20. The other "excuses" I've read regarding Milwaukees route choices had similar airs of manipulation due to either a perceived online market penetration, or an existing small railroad ripe for takeover that could be utilized as part of the main. The route over St Paul Pass and down the St Joe River valley was ostensibly to access the timber stands there. Might have worked, unfortunately most of that timber burned up in the Great Fires of 1910-1911, all that was left was salvage timber. In hindsight, Milwaukee's actions of avoiding a more logical line routing to acess this timber base was a failure. Regarding the Butte question, you have to remember that the other lines (GN, NP, and UP) could afford to "subsidize" their rates out of the Butte basin because their primary mainlines had less expensive operations and more traffic to pay the overhead. The Milwaukee might have made some revenue from locating their mainline into Butte, but this was wiped out by the unnecessarily higher operating costs ascribed to their transcon trains. Again in hindsight, it would have made more sense for Milwaukee to route the mainline farther north out of Forsyth MT toward Great Falls, having the line situated south of the Missouri River and north of the Little Belt and Big Snowy mtns. This would have allowed the grades to stay under 1% eastbound and westbound until the approach to the Continental Divide at Rogers Pass was undertaken. Once that was accomplished(the line down the Lincoln valley roughly parallel to Montana Highway 200 today), it would have been easy to constuct a 90 mile branch line south to Butte via the Deer Lodge Valley. (This line would have roughly paralleled Montana Highway 141 to Avon then along the eventually chosen route past Deer Lodge). Now regarding the rest of the way west, whether or not the North Bank of the Columbia Gorge could have been secured or not, it still would have made more sense to go over Lolo Pass and maintain the water level grade advantages until the Cascades were reached. Again, the ostensible reason MIlwaukee avoided this route was that they did not want to be "trapped in a box canyon, unable to branch out into the timber and agricultural markets" in North Central Idaho. Hmmmm, the same box canyon didn't stop the NP and UP to do that very thing from the west via the co-owned Camas Prairie Railroad. Since the Camas Prairie was already up and running when the Milwaukee was building west, they easily could have seen that the ability to branch out out of the Clearwater River Valley would not be a difficulte task. The timber resources available in North Central Idaho were just as vast (if not more so) as those in the St Joe River Valley. The MIlwaukee DID build a branch south to reach these timber lands a few years later, so one has to question why they would locate as they eventually did. As I mentioned before, there was always a right of way available on the opposite side of the Clearwater River canyon from the Camas Prairie line, so accessabilty wasn't an issue. The greatest advantage of building over Lolo Pass and down the Clearwater River Valley was that Milwaukee would have been the only mainline through this area. Contrast this with it's line just south of Spokane and its secondary main into Spokane. Spokane already had three Class I mainlines and UP's secondary international connection. Instead of building online market autonomy in conjunction with a superior mainline alignment, the Milwaukee chose a more convaluted route in competition with four other Class I's. As I mentioned before, the Milwaukee's one saving grace was the choice of locating the Cascade crossing at Snoqualmie Pass with it's gentle westbound grades of under 1%. If they would have located the eastern approaches to the Saddle Mountain crossing a little farther south, they could have avoided the 2.2% grades over the Saddle Mountains. A line coming out of the Snake River valley would have logically allowed this more southern and less steep approach to the Saddle Mountain crossing. Think of it. If the Milwaukee would have taken the more logical routings and avoided the manipulations of some of its directors, they would have had the ONLY northern transcon line with all it's westbound grades under 1%! This might have forestalled the expensive need to electrify parts of it's lines, and would have made the Northern Pacific the odd man out in terms of line operating quality. Food for thought.
Tags (Optional)
Tags are keywords that get attached to your post. They are used to categorize your submission and make it easier to search for. To add tags to your post type a tag into the box below and click the "Add Tag" button.
Add Tag