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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by gngoatman88 Of all the Hill lines, the NP was the shaky one. It went bankrupt a number of times before Hill bought it out due to its poor financial footing, poor ROI, and bad management. An interesting tidbit I read somewhere a while back, the COMBINED operations of the MILW and the NP together were something less than 50% of the traffic that the GN carried. The NP was about 40% and the MILW about 10% of what GN carried. That should tell something right there about what line was better and which company was managed better.[/quote] What is your source for this claim? [quote]QUOTE: Hill built the GN to be an efficient carrier of freight and did it without federal land grants. [/quote] You should remember that the original GN alignment was not something to brag about, and the GN's Cascade crossing by far was the worst of the three. It took alot of later reroutes to achieve the ostensible GN profile superiority. Haskell's Pass, Stevens Pass, the Kootenai/Moyie River area, and finally the SP&S into Portland. Hill would not have been able to achieve this massive realignment of the GN had he not had access to the NP and it's land grants. You should note that ALL of the ex-NP transcon is still intact, while the GN mainline Sandpoint to the West Plains of Spokane is gone or no longer mainline. The Milwaukee had the option of rerouting at two areas - a new "Cascade"-like tunnel under St. Paul Pass and a reroute via Great Falls and Cadette Pass - but chose (for better or worse) to electrify the mountain sections of it's mainline. The NP apparently had no options/funds for it's "wish list" of alignment improvements, and Hill made no effort to gift the NP with a new Cascade Tunnel under Stampede Pass or a longer lower tunnel under Mullan Pass. The GN got all the upgrades, while the NP and CB&Q got nothing from Hill. [quote]QUOTE: The MILW was doomed to failure because it was just too late in the game when it decided to expand to the Pacific. It went bankrupt, I believe several times, in the process and could never generate much traffic because all the territory was already saturated by GN, NP & UP interests. I believe it was one of the receivership ressurections of the MILW that added the "Pacific" part to the name, maybe in the 1930's??? I'm not much of an historian on MILW matters. As one might discern, I'm a James Hill admirer. He had his faults, but you have to say he built a good railroad that never went bankrupt and always paid its own way. You can't say that about ANY of the other transcontinentals. [/quote] To say the Milwaukee was doomed to failure due to being the last of the PNW transcons is a nonsensical statement. At best, the toll of being last into the PNW resulted in some higher land aquisition costs, and Milwaukee may have had to deal with higher labor costs than either GN or NP, both of which contributed to a higher than expected cost of PCE construction and was ultimately a major contributing factor to it's first bankruptcy a few years later. However, the other railroads also experienced bankruptcies, so having experienced a bankruptcy or two does not necessarily correlate into an eventual line abandonment, as the ex-NP line, ex-SP line, and the UP line into the PNW still exist. Milwaukee's ultimate PCE demise was due to political influence, no doubt greatly aided by the Hill/BN interests, and not by anything else. Even by the standards of relative line profiles as being the deciding factor in a line existing today or not (not a clear cut analysis by any means), the Milwaukee PCE at least had the second best profile of the PNW transcons, and was far superior to either the NP line or the UP line, or the SP line up from California for that matter. Yet, the PCE is gone while the NP, UP, and SP lines are still in play. Obviously, other factors played a far greater role in the PCE's demise than having the second best profile of the 5 PNW trancons (GN, NP, UP, Milw, and SP). And since GN effectively took over the NP and CB&Q via the Hill proxy, you cannot make the statement that GN "paid its own way." GN piggybacked on the other Hill lines to avoid it's probable bankruptcy fate. JJ was a shrewd businessman, who knew how to exploit other assets to buttress his "baby". However, if indeed one were to bestow the label of "great railroad man" on Hill, the way he left the NP and CB&Q in shambles would speak otherwise.
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