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Milwaukee Road history - Wikipedia version

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[quote user="billbtrain"][quote user="futuremodal"][quote user="ChuckHawkins"] What exactly do you question in their route choice? [/quote]I assume you're refering to my concurrence on the Wikipedia entry in which "some historians" questioned the initial route choice......Since I'm on a roll, I believe in hindsight the best route for Milwaukee, CB&Q, or CNW through Montana to Puget Sound would have been to avoid the Belts and head for Great Falls.  Right there you maintain a Prairie Division profile all the way to Great Falls, and that pesky NP isn't your constant companion.  Then head west/southwest over Cadette or Rogers to Missoula, then over Lolo to the Clearwater River drainage near present day Lowell ID.  That's your primary Mountain Division, Great Falls to Lowell, two passes, roughly 200 miles, and the only time you see another railroad is when you cross over the NP at Missoula.  Then from Lowell you're running water level grade all the way to Benton County in Washington, and if you can't get the Gorge, then head northwest along Umtanum Ridge over the Saddles to Ellensburg (1% grades both ways), and then head over Snoqualmie at 0.7% ruling westbound grade, 1.6% eastbound.  That's your secondary Mountain Division, less grades but more snow to deal with, either way a much better alignment than your competitors NP and GN.But whatever you do, try to get that North Bank of the Columbia as Priority Number 1.  If you do it'll pay dividends for years to come.[/quote]Thank you,Dave.Good overview of Milwaukee's misses.I've been looking over the PCE from Forsyth,Montana to the coast on MSN Live Search (satellite images and such)in 3D.Looks like some changes could have been made with tunnels or even daylighting some areas to reduce or even eliminate curvature and maybe some short sections of grades.Worst choices of all was abandoning the PCE instead of the midwest lines.Looks like Milwaukee Road could have captured a lot of container traffic out of Tacoma and eliminated some capacity issues.Have a good one.Bill B[/quote]Well, just my opinion.  For what it's worth, I think James Hill made some route choice blunders as well.  He too had the chance to route the GN along the North Bank of the Columbia, or he also could have utilized Snoqualmie Pass if he just had to have a direct line to the Puget Sound, but for some reason he chose to go straight west out of Spokane over Stevens Pass, the worst of all the Cascade passes.  In retrospect, the Milwaukee was fortunate that Snoqualmie Pass was still available so late in the game, not to mention the fact that Milwaukee was so close to getting the North Bank of the Columbia!  JJ Hill did make up for his poor GN route by incorporating the SP&S along the North Bank before the Milwaukee could act.As for NP and UP, I tend to be more forgiving of their initial ventures into the Pacific Northwest.  The NP was a pioneer line which seemed to constantly be on shaky ground finance-wise, and constuction techiques were not as sophisticated as they were just a few decades later.  They were wise to utilize the ORN from Wallula to Portland, too bad they couldn't keep that trackage!  As for the choice of Stampede Pass, well.....this was the NP - it's amazing to me that such an abject example of poor routing has become such a stamp of misplaced fatalism for BNSF even today!UP basically took what someone else had built - ORN, OSL, OWRN, SI - and incorporated them into it's system.  What are you going to do?
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