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Rob and Michael, Thanks for some excellent insider information. Rob, I will slightly disagree with you on the point regarding the "ideal" time for Milwaukee to have terminated it's electrification. True, most of the electric locomotives were paid for and still running in excellent condition in the 1950's, but there is something to be said for standardization, and when it became apparent that diesels were the way to go, it seems the wiser railroads jumped at this opportunity. One of the problems with Milwaukee's electrification was the location of its intermediate terminals. Going west to east, you had one electrified section running from Seattle/Tacoma (a logical terminal) to Othello (not a logical terminal) where Milwaukee had to turn over to diesels. Then you had another illogical terminal at Avery, where again Milwaukee electrification ran all the way to Harlowtown. At Avery, Milwaukee could either change over completely to electrics or add electrics as helpers to the incoming diesels, or they could just run the diesels through without the electrics. Same situation westbound at Harlowtown. If diesels ran through, it begs the question as to why have a redundant physical plant that needs to be maintained. If electrics were added at these points, then Milwaukee missed the opportunity to move its crew change/refueling points to more logical sites, such as Missoula or Deer Lodge. (I'll admit, I'm at a loss to determine where the first logical terminal location eastbound out of Puget Sound should be. Othello was too soon, Spokane would make sense except through freights did not go through Spokane, Plummer Id was the eastern junction of the mainline and Spokane branch and is roughly halfway between Puget Sound and Deer Lodge but there's nothing there!) The point I'm trying to make is that the location of the changeover points from the electrified portions to the non-electrified portions restricted Milwaukee's ability to extend terminal points to a day's haul, as well as forced crew change points at far out of the way locations. Whether this added unnecessary costs to the point of making the electrification less profitable than complete dieselization back in the 1950's I do not know, but I suspect it did. Since some diesels did start running through as early as 1947 with the new FM-powered Olympian Hiawatha, it had to have occured to management that such could also be done for through freights. BTW, does anyone know the relative dates when other electrified railroads scrapped their respective electrifications, e.g. Virginian, South Shore, et al?
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