Chicago & NorthWestern : The non-transcontinental

[Murphy Siding]

Anyone remember the beginning of "Blazing Saddles"?

Actually, about the only part I remember is the campfire & baked beans scene, but that's a whole different story.

     What was at the beginning?

[Murphy Siding]

     After the original survey was done, and the railroad decided to put a line in to somewhere, did the original surveyor (or was he an engineer?) then get the job of building the line?  Or, was it more common to turn the job over to someone else, or a group of people?

[Railway Man]

     After the original survey was done, and the railroad decided to put a line in to somewhere, did the original surveyor (or was he an engineer?) then get the job of building the line?  Or, was it more common to turn the job over to someone else, or a group of people?

There's about as many variations as there are cows in South Dakota.  But, here's sort of a common pathway in the mid- to late-19th century:

1.  Early surveys done by Army topographers, explorers, geologists, naturalists: establishes general route possibilities.

2.  Reconnaisance survey done by railroad locating engineer/surveyor (direct employees or consulting engineering firm): establishes specific route and general alignment (i.e., chooses the valleys the line will follow, passes, river crossings, and likely gradient, earthwork/tunneling/bridging quantities, standards of construction.

3.  Engineering survey done by railroad engineering party (direct employees or consulting engineering firm):  establishes specific alignment -- horizontal and vertical alignment, establishes engineering stations, establishes control points, establishes contractual quantities and limits.

4.  Construction survey done by either contractor, consultant, or railroad engineering party:  checks results, completes details, measures quantities for payment, provides detailed construction survey information such as toe of fill, etc.

RWM 

 

[zardoz]

Anyone remember the beginning of "Blazing Saddles"?

Actually, about the only part I remember is the campfire & baked beans scene, but that's a whole different story.

     What was at the beginning?

THe movie starts with a track gang laying track in the middle of nowhere, with mountains directly in the background towards which the tracks are leading.

[mudchicken]

Anyone remember the beginning of "Blazing Saddles"?

Actually, about the only part I remember is the campfire & baked beans scene, but that's a whole different story.

     What was at the beginning?

THe movie starts with a track gang laying track in the middle of nowhere, with mountains directly in the background towards which the tracks are leading.

Surveyors find "quicksand" and talk about relocating the line to Rock Ridge .... guys on handcar find ("Yup, Quicksand")

[Falcon48]

One thing to keep in mind about dreams of transcontinental railroads in the late 19th and early centuries is that railroading was a much different business than it is today.  For a railroad like the CNW in that era, its bread and butter was the regional passenger and freight traffic in its own service territory.  Transcontinental traffic was, of course, desireable, but to actually build your own transcontinental was not a decision to be made lightly, since such a railroad, by its very nature, involved hundreds of miles of trackage across unproductive territory.  It's only since the 1920's, as trucks and automobiles took away the once lucrative regional traffic, that transcontinental traffic has assumed the relative importance it has today.  As one of the other writers noted, CNW did seriously consider Pacific coast extensions, but two things prevented it from happening.  One was the alliance with UP, and the other was the Milwaukee Road's Pacific Coast extension, which told CNW management at the time that there was probably no more room for yet another transcontinental - as it turned out, a wise decision.

Another posting suggests that CNW shelved plans to use the Cowboy line as its coal route from the PRB as a result of Larry Provo's death.  Actually, the idea survived Provo.  I believe what ultimately sunk it was CNW's realization that the FRA financing CNW was seeking to upgrade the Cowboy line (which would have required, essentially, the building of an entirely new railroad on the existing ROW) was not likely to be obtained, and private financing was not going to be available.  Also, the ICC had made clear that when it originally approved construction of the PRB line, that it was to be a two railroad operation (the ICC had approved a single line opeated by two railroads rather than two separate lines originally proposed).  As such, there was a real possibility that, if CNW was unable to finance entry, the ICC would permit UP to take CNW's place as the second railroad, leaving CNW completely out of the picture.  Powerful reasons for CNW to make the deal with UP it ultimately made.   

 

[MisterPleasant]

This thread has to be one of the most fascinating reads I have come across on this forum.  I have always wondered about many of the RR western extensions and why they stopped where they did.

CNW certainly came close to breaching the contintental divide.  Lander is nearly the same longitude as Grand Junction, CO, so their extension was considerably further west than those of the other wannabes.  Based on the comment here that they were considering a route to Coos Bay, OR, it seems that they would have had a fairly straight shot across the Snake River plain in Idaho, and an equally flat and straight crossing of central Oregon through Burns.  But of course the central OR Cascades and the Coast Range would have given them fits.  But it is fun to imagine a possible route.

[Murphy Siding]

Adding to RWM's comments: 

The serial case files of the GLO/BLM ......

BLM I presume, is Beaureau of Land Management?  GLO is Government something?

[Murphy Siding]

 

The "what if" question that always intrigued me is "What if Moffat had drilled the 2.6-mile tunnel instead of going over the top at Corona."  That would have kept the line below timberline and the howling wind-drifted snow that killed the operating ratio, and eliminated the 4% helper grades, too.  It's a question I've been meaning to put to lowwater if a tunnel at that lesser depth of cover would have run into all the crush zone and water problems that were so horrendous in the Moffat Tunnel.  Had Moffat's miners encountered such problems 20 years earlier I think it would have ended the venture, stopped his line on the spot, and there never would have been any Moffat Tunnel in the 20's either.

RWM 

   I meant to ask about this earlier.  I'm none too familar with this line.  If it was such an advantage to put in a 2.6 mile tunnel, why didn't they?  That would not have been too outrageous to consider back then was it?

[mudchicken]

Adding to RWM's comments: 

The serial case files of the GLO/BLM ......

BLM I presume, is Beaureau of Land Management?  GLO is Government something?

General Land Office - predecessor to Bureau of Land Management/BLM (1785-1946)

[Railway Man]

 

The "what if" question that always intrigued me is "What if Moffat had drilled the 2.6-mile tunnel instead of going over the top at Corona."  That would have kept the line below timberline and the howling wind-drifted snow that killed the operating ratio, and eliminated the 4% helper grades, too.  It's a question I've been meaning to put to lowwater if a tunnel at that lesser depth of cover would have run into all the crush zone and water problems that were so horrendous in the Moffat Tunnel.  Had Moffat's miners encountered such problems 20 years earlier I think it would have ended the venture, stopped his line on the spot, and there never would have been any Moffat Tunnel in the 20's either.

RWM 

 

   I meant to ask about this earlier.  I'm none too familar with this line.  If it was such an advantage to put in a 2.6 mile tunnel, why didn't they?  That would not have been too outrageous to consider back then was it?

(This started as a two-sentence answer ... ... really ... so bear with me ...)

When Moffat dreamed up his railroad, he knew he had enough personal money to build and equip the line permanently from Denver to the Yampa Coal Field in northwest Colorado except for the main-range tunnel.  He gambled that outside investors would take up the road's bonds if not as soon as the scheme became public, or at least as soon as the line reached the Yampa, its first source of traffic -- that this first source of traffic was 190 miles distant should make you blanch about just how much Moffat was betting on the come. 

Denver didn't actually need this coal having adequate sources practically at its doorstep in Boulder and Weld Counties 30 miles north, plus ample high-value coal from the Canon City and Raton Fields hauled north by D&RGW and C&S, plus -- if it should ever need even more -- coal supply from the Hanna Basin in Wyoming, all of which could be mined and delivered to Denver for at least as good a price as Yampa Basin coal.  Moffat's overarching goal was of course not a branch line, but a through railroad to Salt Lake City, then the West Coast, as a transcontinental that would generate traffic and hand it off to the Burlington and Rock Island in Denver, in direct competition with the Harriman System of Union Pacific and Southern Pacific.

Both goals discouraged investors.  If limited to reaching the coal fields, the line would hardly pay its cost of operation even with a tunnel, much less repay the bonds.  If extended to Salt Lake City, the road's outlook was paradoxical, for it would be a high-cost operation seeking to share in the transcontinental business -- which was at that point little more than a glimmer in a futurist's eye - with a low-cost competitor, UP-SP, which would forever have a cost advantage with its superior location.  Had the Moffat reached the West Coast it would have had to wreck the existing transcontinental rate structure to attract traffic which then it would have hauled at a loss. 

Moffat was no fool wishing to be parted with his money.  He grasped this basic truth plus the less well-known but vastly more important truth that local traffic -- traffic originated and terminated on the same railroad on hauls of 50 to 200 miles -- was where the real profits lay.  Head-to-head competition, as dramatized by the express passenger train and the fast freight, made good press but was inevitably ruinous to railroads.  He held out a two-pronged appeal to investors.  To the optimists, he held forth the idea that the economic development of the West had only just begun to unfold, and population expansion and simultaneous technological innovation would populate the western arid lands that to that time appeared hopeless and generating so much traffic that the Harriman System would never catch up, and creating "local traffic basins" along each discrete transcontinental route that would support that line's cost structure.  For example he pointed to the Denver & Rio Grande Western system -- Moffat had been its president -- which had the highest operating costs of any major railroad in the U.S., as well as the highest rates, which it could pull off because its traffic was entirely local and of sufficient value to bear the costs and return a profit to the railroad.  To the pessimists, he fully acknowledged that his road would need to wreck the transcontinental rate structure but pointed out that Harriman would never countenance that event and would either join with Moffat in a traffic pooling arrangement to preserve the rate structure, or purchase Moffat's railroad and operate it as a feeder to the Harriman System, either way returning the investor's capital.

The investors didn't much swallow either of Moffat's outcomes.  The most important fact to an investor in an abuilding railroad is the likelihood of his own reward in the near future due to the grossly speculative nature of the investment.  Moffat's "limitless Western growth plan" was a bet on the come, and the experience of the investor in the Western development railroad in the last half of the 19th century usually followed a script that read "promoter takes fees, disappears, money is exhausted on construction, traffic appears too slowly, investor wiped out."  If technology and population pressure was to extend economic development into the arid, desolate basin between Denver and the West Coast, beyond the tenuous grip it had on the skinny fields at the base of the high mountains watered by the trickles from melting mountain snows, they wanted to see some evidence first.  True, there were rich mineral deposits and vast forests, but the investor knew that both would remain fallow for many years as they had no local population clamoring for their output, and demand in the Midwest was fully met by closer sources that did not bear the enormous penalty of long-distance overland transportation costs.  Moffat's "Harriman will buy us out" scheme was equally unpalatable.  The investors perceived it as a series of all-in bets by a small player with a small pile of chips against a big player with a huge pile of chips who could be dealt the worst possible cards and call and lose ten all-in bluffs in a row and still hold most of the chips.  

Moffat needed two very different outcomes to occur to make his railroad pay -- very large economic growth or very little economic growth.  Untenable ground for his plan lay anywhere in the middle, and in fact that's what occurred.  Historians of the Moffat claimed, without presenting evidence, that Harriman threatened investors with reprisal, and that investors were jealous of Moffat.  The first supposes that investors could not recognize the obvious that Moffat was making a run at an impregnable position and needed Harriman to tell them that.  I'm sure Harriman would have been happy to explain railway economic fundamentals but he didn't need to make any threat

[gabe]

Actually, when I suggested that you write a book, I meant one that you could publish in hard copy and I couldn't get for free . . . .

[Railway Man]

Yeah, but generally in a book the author has to put his name to it, and generally career suicide follows for industry insiders who write about their own tribe.  My name is "Railway Man" not "Author Man."  However, if you can find another 100,000 people like you who will buy a book from me every year for the next 20 years, let me know.  I'll happily turn the Blackberry off so I don't get calls at 5 a.m. on Saturday and feel obliged to answer e-mails at 3 a.m. every day of the week.

RWM 

[Murphy Siding]

(This started as a two-sentence answer ... ... really ... so bear with me ...)

RWM

That's what we like about you..

[Murphy Siding]

  Later another modern-day Moffat would appear and replay the same scheme, making a zero-cost investment into a hopelessly unprofitable railroad, threatening to wreck the rate structure, and forcing a buyout of astonishing size onto a large and wealthy railroad, once again aided unwittingly by a federal government still trapped by free-market ideology into the impossible belief that we can simultaneously enjoy inter-railroad competition and equal availability and price of railroad service to all points on the map.

RWM

That, I take it, was the Western Pacific?

     After reading this, I'm wondering if Moffat was playing with a full deck?  Can you think of any good books about Moffat and his railroading adventures?

[Railway Man]

Sources about Moffat:

Standard railfan works on the railroad are as follows.  All are hagiograpic when it comes to Moffat.

1. "The Giant's Ladder" by Harold Boner, published by Kalmbach back when I was a lad in 1962, which I like the most because it has the classic Kalmbach attention touch and oozes quality -- excellent maps, graphic quality, editing, tone.
2. "Rails that Climb" by Edward T. Bollinger," published by the Colorado Railroad Museum, still in print.  A previous version of the same book is "The Moffat Road by Bollinger and Frederick Bauer, which my parents foolishly gave me in 1967 and thereby lost me to railroading.
3. "The Denver & Salt Lake" and "The Denver, Northwestern & Pacific" by P.R. "Bob" Griswold, published by the Rocky Mountain Railroad Club in 1995 and 1996, both still in print I think.

Athearn, below, is the standard history of the D&RGW in which Moffat figures heavily.  While not quite as much into hero-worship, Athearn was writing during an era in Colorado where its people felt misused and abused by "eastern capital" and anyone who rose up to do battle with that bogeyman was a veritable knight of the round table no matter how many bones he had collected in his closets.

1. "Rebel of the Rockies," Robert Athearn, 1962, University of Colorado press, reprints widely available.
2. "The Denver and Rio Grande Project, 1870-1901," O. Meredith Wilson, very hard to find but deeply describes the railroad conditions of the era.

The only work that examines Moffat's character and business practices is:

1. "A Mine to Make a Mine: Financing the Colorado Mining Industry, 1859-1902" by Joseph E. King, University of Illinois Press, 
   

This book follows Moffat closely through his career as a mining stock promoter, and while it ends prior to his railroad-building days, I don't think he suddenly changed his M.O. from sharp operator and to benevolent benefactor of the people just because he was investing in railroads instead of mines, street railways, and waterworks.

Moffat had a singular talent for selling his shares in profitable mines at fancy prices about one week before the mine announced it had run out of profitable ore.  For example, in 1905 he and co-horts Jerome Chaffee and Horace Tabor secretly deserted the stock of the Little Pittsburg Mine in Leadville when it was paying monthly dividends of $100,000, selling 85,000 shares at $30/share.  The next month the mine management announced it was cancelling the dividend due to exhaustion of ore reserves and the stock price crashed to $5.  Moffat and Chaffee were sued in New York State Supreme Court by a disgruntled stockholder.  Early in the suit they brought together many of the mine foremen and managers, treated them to dinner, whisky, and cigars at a cost of $195, then asked them to recall for the lawyers how promising the mine looked until the day it didn't.  The lawyer who put this together wrote to Moffat and said he did not "see how you can lose the suit with the testimony furnished."  In another instance, Moffat encouraged claim holders surrounding the rich Anaconda Mine in Cripple Creek to bring injunction against it for trespass, which depressed the Anaconda's stock, which Moffat brought at a huge discount, then defended successfully against the same injunctions he had earlier encouraged.  In 1900, the U.S. comptroller of the currency objected to the practice of the First National Bank of Denver, the largest in the reason, of making heavy loans to mining companies that happened to have as president the same person as the president of the bank, one David Halliday Moffat.

Moffat's shrewdest practice, however, was to make sure that when shareholders were mulced they were out of state or foreign shareholders, and reinvested his earnings almost entirely in Colorado and Utah.  Rooking absentee shareholders was practically an American industry in the 19th century, so long as the one being rooked always lay to the east of where you were standing.  The west was a capital-poor region in a capital-poor nation, so Moffat, while his practices were lacking in scruples in a broad sense, was very much a Robin Hood to Colorado and Utah -- and had the same standing as a local hero.

There was a popular ditty at the time that memorialized how the money was really made in mining:

There are mines that make us happy,
There are mines that make us blue,
There are mines that steal away the tear drops,
As the sunbeams steal away the dew.
There are mines that have the ore chutes faulted,
Where the ore's forever lost to view.
But the mines that fill my heart with sunshine,
Are the mines that I sold to you.

RWM

[edblysard]

Sure...

You have at least one in line already.

Where do I send the check?

Yeah, but generally in a book the author has to put his name to it, and generally career suicide follows for industry insiders who write about their own tribe.  My name is "Railway Man" not "Author Man."  However, if you can find another 100,000 people like you who will buy a book from me every year for the next 20 years, let me know.  I'll happily turn the Blackberry off so I don't get calls at 5 a.m. on Saturday and feel obliged to answer e-mails at 3 a.m. every day of the week.

RWM 

[HarveyK400]

Aerial photos were useful in preliminary studies of alternatives for the Hammond Rail Relocation and a possible Southlake branch for the South Shore.

More recently, I realized this resource is useful in finding possible station locations with space for adequate parking. 

[Murphy Siding]

     To add to the fire about old threads coming back to life... Some threads are just worth rereading, and we forget they were ever there. This thread reminds me of when the forum was a lot more active. It features enough good info to write a book. It has a lot of really smart posters, many who have left the forum, and at least one who has left the earth. It also includes one guy who asks a lot of questions. I kinda long for the days when we could have a discussion like this, on this forum, or anywhere on the the interent. Those days seem to be gone as the internet matures into being a crabby old man who wants to fight the world and get kids off his lawn.

[kgbw49]

Wyoming or bust!

Lander WY is still under 8,000 population.

Think how different things would have been if, say, NP had merged with CB&Q and then GN had merged with CNW.

[charlie hebdo]

MichaelSol

I realize that hindsight is always 20/20 vision.  But, what did these railroads *think* they were going to accomplish?  It would seem that any railroad that was planning on going toe to toe with the 800 pound gorilla would at least have some grand plan?

 

Even hindsight requires a perspective. Exactly who was the 800 lb Gorilla?

By 1925, which was relatively late in the game, the Gorillas respectively weighed something different than you seem to believe:

Operating Revenues, 1925:

MILW   $162,000,000

CBQ     $159,000,000

CNW    $148,000,000

GN      $115,000,000

UP      $110,000,000

Tons of Freight, 1925:

CNW     56,000,000

MILW    50,000,000

CBQ      43,000,000

GN        34,000,000

UP        18,000,000

During the era that various expansion plans were being made, 1890-1905, of the named railroads above, Union Pacific had been the only one that had gone broke.

Where on earth do people get this "800 lb Gorilla" idea?

 

 

 

Mr. Sol made a fascinating post then, but it was ignored. Maybe that's one of the things wrong with the forum. Concerted, coordinated shunning by some members and heavy-handed banishment by moderators have largely killed interest. The latter applies to Wanswheel among others.

 

[SD70Dude]

And yet the mainlines of CB&Q, C&NW, GN and UP all survive today under one name or another and are busier than ever before.

Only the Chicago-St. Paul portion of MILW is anything more than a branchline, though the Chicago-Kansas City route also stands to regain mainline status with the CP-KCS merger.  

[CMStPnP]

SD70Dude

Only the Chicago-St. Paul portion of MILW is anything more than a branchline

Though you also have to admit that some of Milwaukee's former branchlines are now maintained to at least Class II track standards and host a lot more traffic than they did when Milwaukee had them in the waning years of it's bankruptcy.    Waukesha to Platteville, WI is one example which stretches across the Southern Tier of Wisconsin from the Milwaukee Metro area to the banks of the Mississippi River.    That branch could only support GP9's or MP15's in the 1970's and was overgrown with weeds, the trains would bump along at maybe 5-10 mph with just a handful of cars.      Now they travel with multiple SD40-2's at 35-45 mph with a much longer train behind.     If it was up to me I would restore the bridge across the Mississippi at Platteville, and let WSOR expand further West with traffic over CP's remainder of that same line.

Some of the branches in the Dakota's now run by BNSF, same deal.    Much better shape, much more traffic.

[SD70Dude]

You are of course correct that many MILW branchlines have lived on under new ownership, and this is also the case for much of the former Rock Island system.

I've heard Rock Island described as the 'one railroad too many', and this could also apply to Milwaukee in many areas.  

I wonder what would have happened if those two had focused on keeping their own houses in order, instead of cutting spending to inflate numbers and pushing for mergers that ultimately never happened.

[CMStPnP]

SD70Dude

You are of course correct that many MILW branchlines have lived on under new ownership, and this is also the case for much of the former Rock Island system.

I think BNSF still runs on the former Burlington - Rock Island joint line between Dallas and Houston but prefers to run on the former Santa Fe route between Fort Worth and Houston.   Though I read they still run 4-6 trains a day on the BRI routing so it must be in fairly good shape still.

[Murphy Siding]

charlie hebdo

 

 

MichaelSol

I realize that hindsight is always 20/20 vision.  But, what did these railroads *think* they were going to accomplish?  It would seem that any railroad that was planning on going toe to toe with the 800 pound gorilla would at least have some grand plan?

 

Even hindsight requires a perspective. Exactly who was the 800 lb Gorilla?

By 1925, which was relatively late in the game, the Gorillas respectively weighed something different than you seem to believe:

Operating Revenues, 1925:

MILW   $162,000,000

CBQ     $159,000,000

CNW    $148,000,000

GN      $115,000,000

UP      $110,000,000

Tons of Freight, 1925:

CNW     56,000,000

MILW    50,000,000

CBQ      43,000,000

GN        34,000,000

UP        18,000,000

During the era that various expansion plans were being made, 1890-1905, of the named railroads above, Union Pacific had been the only one that had gone broke.

Where on earth do people get this "800 lb Gorilla" idea?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mr. Sol made a fascinating post then, but it was ignored. Maybe that's one of the things wrong with the forum. Concerted, coordinated shunning by some members and heavy-handed banishment by moderators have largely killed interest. The latter applies to Wanswheel among others.

 

 

Yes, that's probably part of it, but the bigger issue is that the world has changed. Internet Message Board Forums have become mostly extinct. At one time I was active on 6 forums, 3 railroad related, 3 car racing related. Four of those have dried up and blown away. I'm now on the 2 remaining ones, which are both quiet like this one; and I'm on FightBook.

      As far as MichaelSol goes, there's a lot of gray area in how to view that guy. Yes, he was smart and articulate, but he had some issues with some of his 'truths'(?)  As an example, in the above quote, he wants you to believe that The Milwaukee Road was the big cheese back then. We all know that the big player then was a group of railroads all under one ownership group. If you add the GN, CBQ, NP and SPS together, they probably total more than $400,000 operating revenue- about 2-1/2 the next biggest player, Milwauke Road. He did things like that on purpose. In this example, he left off NP and he also left out the southern transcontinentals for some reason.

[Murphy Siding]

CMStPnP

Some of the branches in the Dakota's now run by BNSF, same deal.    Much better shape, much more traffic.

 

     To be fair, that happened only after South Dakota dumped a lot of taxpayer money into the lines to make them decent, something the Milwaukee Road couldn't do. Also, a lot of the Milwaukee lines in SD are gone now.

[Convicted One]

Murphy Siding

. Those days seem to be gone as the internet matures into being a crabby old man who wants to fight the world

Yes, but......

[MidlandMike]

I just read this "dead" thread from its 2008 OP thru to today's posts, and am glad it was revived.  One question I had about UP's route building over Sherman Summit.  The Pony Express and Overland Stage routes were previously well known and passed just south and bypassed Sherman Summit.  Later UP also built the Harriman Bypass south of the summit on a route with about 1/3 the gradient.  Why didn't UP explore this lower gradient route from the start?

[SD60MAC9500]

 

kenneo

My understanding is that they knew about the Fort Laramie route, but chose to build through Cheyenne because it was easier.

The reference in Trains is a paragraph in a box in the top corner of page 39. I believe the altitude near Medicine Bow would top out at 7000', compared to 8000' at Sherman.

 

A cut-off was surveyed in 1909 between Yoder and Medicine Bow that would have saved 40 miles and 2000 feet in grade. Project was abandoned because of the crippling effect it would have had on the well established cities of Cheyenne and Laramie

 

 

 

By 1910, probably true.  But in 1865, it was snow removal for both South Pass and Fort Laramie as the main reasons.  South Pass also had the disadvantage of a difficult construction route up the Sweetwater (similar to the DSL West of Tabernash) above Casper and a longer distance.  Even with helpers, Sherman was then - and is now - much cheaper to operate than pushing the snow around on the other routes.

 

This made me think about WYDOT's proposal, to reroute the Laramie-Walcott section of I-80 away from the base of the Medicine Bow Mountains. Too much snow. Relocating to the current US30 alignment which follows the Overland Route.

Building to the Pacific could be akin to the dot.com boom and bust. This seems to be a trend with new tech, and the railroads were no exception at the time. Many wanted to build a railroad and cash in. Yet only the efficient operations would survive and remain. You'll be seeing the same scenario playout with the current EV boom in the next decade or sooner..