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[quote user="VerMontanan"] Futuremodal: "I will reiterate:  Elk Park Pass has the best westbound approach for a Continental Divide crossing in mainstem Montana, better than Mullan, better than Homestake, better than Pipestone, and yes, better than Deer Lodge Pass.  Elk Park Pass is named for Elk Park, an 8 mile long flat basin at the top of the Continental Divide north of Butte.  From the breaks of Basin Canyon to the pass, it is nearly a 0% gradient from a geological perspective."**Not quite flat....the GN station at Elk Park at the east end of the area was at 6237 feet, and Woodville at the top of the Divide at the west end is at 6354.  The railroad was a 1.1 percent westward ascending grade.  But all this is irrelevant.  After all, who cares that it is relatively flat at Elk Park?  The grade is getting to this relatively flat basin, and that's where the grades are.  This is like saying that Soldier Summit is flat, because it is, relatively speaking.  It's getting to the flat part where the grades in excess of 2 percent on both sides come into play.Futuremodal: "The fact that JJ Hill and friends chose to convalute an up and down 2.2%  route between Helena and Butte in no way takes away from the geologic gift that Elk Park Pass would have made for a more mainline westbound approach, should NP or Milwaukee have chosen to use Elk Park Pass.  Hey, even JJ and friends could have rebuilt the GN Butte line into a more gentler alignment if it had been in their interests, you know, since JJ practically had to rebuild the entire GN in other places (insert fake coughing sound "Haskell's Pass")."**As for the "made for a more mainline westbound approach", I assume a word is missing here...but I am guessing you think Elk Park would have been better for the NP or MILW.  All the passes including Elk Park were surveyed by these railroads, and they chose to build elsewhere.  I agree with the decisions of the NP and MILW not to use Elk Park.  The GN line was steep enough between Boulder and the Continental Divide, and it didn't even have to climb out of the Boulder River Valley (where the Boulder townsite is located) as would have a railroad (like NP or MILW) that would have been built up the Boulder River Valley from near Cardwell (where the Boulder River flows into the Jefferson River).  The GN Boulder station was high above the community to the west as not to lose too much elevation between Amazon Tunnel and the entrance to the Boulder River Canyon.  Any railroad built up the Boulder River from Cardwell would have had all the more elevation gain to overcome.   One can only conclude that your stance is based on that your position is superior to the NP and MILW engineers who surveyed all the route alternatives and made their choice based on their findings as well as the resources they had available to perform the construction. It is interesting (and hypocritical) that you criticize the GN for changing some of its alignment on the on hand, but in this case suggest the NP and MILW should have changed theirs.  But in the case of James J. Hill rebuilding the Butte line had he wanted....well, he did that (this is, after all, a discussion of east-west routes across Montana).   When it came time for GN to build to the coast, routes out of Butte were briefly considered, but he didn't settle for his route over Elk Park Pass, but built west from Havre over Marias Pass and found the route that even today handles the most tonnage between the Mississippi River Valley and Pacific Northwest with the least amount of locomotive power.  And that's just not my opinion or shouldawouldacoulda,  that's daily operating reality.[/quote]Well, well, well, we finally figured out how to get a more relevant answer from Montana's recent winner of the "Sunniest Disposition Award"!First you say the westbound approach to Elk Park Pass was 2.2%, now you admit it is a more gentler 1.1%.  Sure, 1.1% is not 0%, but it's a heck of a lot more preferable for mainline operations (then and now) than that 2.2%.  That coupled with the fact that the pass needed no summit tunnel makes it on par with Marias Pass.  The difference of course is in the fact that, unlike JJ's approach to Marias using the ridgetops and the massive bridge over Two Medicine Creek, the Montana Central's builders decided to dip down into Boulder off the Prickly Pear Creek watershed via Amazon Tunnel, then followed the banks of Boulder River then the Bison Creek canyon to make it back to the more moderate gradient of the Elk Park basin, rather than maintaining a more constant elevation by keeping to the mountainsides.  A perfect example of this technique would be the comparison of the Milwaukee and NP in the St. Regis River canyon farther west, where NP stayed close to the river while Milwaukee started using the mountainsides past Haugen.Of course, for NP or Milwaukee there would have been no need for any tunnels like Amazon, since NP could have followed the Boulder River valley all the way, and Milwaukee could have cut across the Warm Springs Creek plateau between Lombard and the Boulder Valley.  And if one thinks about it (rather than a kneejerk response), the fact that both NP and Milwaukee could have (1) avoided the need for a summit tunnel (like they ended up having to do for Mullan and Pipestone respectively), (2) procured a gentler grade via the mountainsides of the Boulder Valley (at around 1% rather than their 2.2% and 1.9% respectively), and (3) avoided a lot of reverse curves in the process - such would have paid dividends for years for both railroads.  And all that would cost them operationally would have been slightly longer mainlines.I would venture that the major reason Milwaukee chose not to do so had more to do with GN already occupying Elk Park Pass, than any sophistric reasoning based on the Montana Central's chosen profile.  Who knows what kind of legal wrenches JJ might have tried to throw at the Milwaukee should they have attempted that approach?  As for NP, their charter limited grades to 2.2%, and they chose to test the max of the charter rather than having the foresight to keep gradients under the "helper district" degree.  Remember, NP could have utilized Deer Lodge Pass but chose the shorter and steeper Mullan Pass route, and farther west in Washington they chose Stampede Pass over the gentler grades of Snoqualmie Pass.  I doubt they even knew where Elk Park Pass was.
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