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[quote user="Chris30"] So Futuremodal your taking the posistion that Coos Bay / Newport would have become a major shipping terminal?? Even though all of the major west coast ports are in major cities? Of course the argument could be made that changes would have been made to divert to a major city. Coos Bay could have become Portland and Eureka Oakland. I don't know. I'm stilling riding fence on this issue. I just don't see the Northwestern as a transcon. If this was ever built to wherever on the west coast then my vision is of a struggling transcon that probably would have suffered the same fate as the Milwaukee PCE if it wasn't for the Northwestern's saving grace; the PRB in the mid 1970's. Back to the history mind-benders... Would the Northwestern throw its PCE on the scrap heap west of the PRB and then kick itself for doing so later with the explosion of intermodal imported from the far east? Or, would the Northwestern be forced to keep its PCE because the UP had no other choice but to take over the Rock Island to establish its own west-east transcon. Maybe the Chicago Northwestern & Pacific would still be around today. My vision says that any Northwestern PCE would have been scrapped west of the PRB (or possibly southern Idaho) in the late 1970's with traffic arangements set up with the UP similar to what they were from the late 1970's until the mid 1990's. The UP still would have turned down the Rock becasue of the delays and conditions of the physical property. Bridge traffic on the Northwestern still would have been a better option. The big difference is that the Northwestern would have had control of the PRB my using its own tracks. This is all a big guessing game though as one can only speculate the condition of the "Cowboy" line on struggling PCE. Maybe there really isn't a history mind-bender after all. Maybe the Northwestern ends up at the same spot - broke, needing assistance to get to the PRB and then evetually being taken over by the UP in the mid 1990's. CC [/quote] My feeling is that, if the CNW had successfully made it to the Pacific coast, such would have accelerated the likelyhood of an eventual merger, such as either a CNW-Milwaukee merger, or (more likely) a UP-CNW merger.  Remember, the BN lines were duplicative across the Northern Tier, yet most still remain in play today.  It is likely a UP-CNW merger would have resulted in UP having a valuable duplicative line into the PNW to supplement it's OSL line.
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