Great Northern Railway (U.S.)
Based on Wikipedia: Great Northern Railway (U.S.)
The Railroad That Built Itself
Most transcontinental railroads in America were built with generous helpings of government land grants—millions of acres handed over to railroad barons who then sold the land to settlers to finance their iron ambitions. The Great Northern Railway did something different. It bought every acre it needed from the federal government, then sold that land to farmers one family at a time. No handouts. No land grants. Just a Canadian immigrant with an unshakeable belief that he could build a railroad from Minnesota to the Pacific Ocean and make money doing it the hard way.
That immigrant was James J. Hill, and the railroad he built would become the northernmost transcontinental line in the United States—a steel ribbon stretching from Saint Paul, Minnesota, to Seattle, Washington, threading through some of the most spectacular and unforgiving terrain on the continent.
From Bankruptcy to Empire
The Great Northern didn't spring fully formed from Hill's imagination. It grew from the bones of a failed railroad called the Saint Paul and Pacific, owned by a man named William Crooks who had gone bankrupt trying to run a modest line between Saint Paul and Minneapolis. Crooks had named his locomotive after himself, and that engine—the William Crooks—would eventually become the first locomotive of the Great Northern Railway.
In 1878, Hill assembled a consortium of wealthy investors to purchase the struggling railroad. The group was a fascinating collection of frontier capitalists: John S. Kennedy, a New York banker; Norman Kittson, who had made his fortune in the fur trade; Donald Smith, an executive with the Hudson's Bay Company; and George Stephen, Smith's cousin and president of the Bank of Montreal. Together, they put up five and a half million dollars to acquire the railroad from its creditors.
Hill's strategy was unlike anything American railroading had seen.
Rather than racing to lay track across the continent as fast as possible—the approach that had built the first transcontinental railroad with its famous golden spike ceremony—Hill moved deliberately. He built profitable lines first, making sure each segment of railroad could sustain itself before pushing further into undeveloped western territories. It was the railroad equivalent of making sure your foundation is solid before adding another floor to your house.
Selling the Dream
A railroad through empty prairie is a railroad with no customers. Hill understood this fundamental truth and set about solving it with one of the earliest public relations campaigns in American corporate history.
The Great Northern established agencies in Germany and Scandinavia, actively recruiting immigrant families to settle along its lines. The railroad offered low-cost passage to America and built special "colonist cars" to transport these families and their belongings to the northern plains. A man named Fred J. Adams handled much of this promotional work, offering incentives like free seed and feed to help farmers get started in the harsh but fertile lands of North Dakota and Montana.
The railroad ran contests promoting everything from the largest farm animals to the biggest freight loads. Germans and Scandinavians—peoples already accustomed to cold winters and hard soil—flooded into the region. The Red River Valley along the Minnesota-North Dakota border became a showcase of "bonanza farming," with enormous wheat operations that demonstrated what industrial-scale agriculture could achieve on the American prairie.
In this way, Hill didn't just build a railroad. He built the communities that would need one.
Finding a Path Through Mountains
The great challenge of any transcontinental railroad is the mountains. The Rockies and the Cascades stood as massive barriers between the plains and the Pacific, and finding routes through them could make or break a railroad's profitability. Every extra foot of elevation a train has to climb costs money in fuel and time.
The Great Northern's chief engineer, John Frank Stevens, became legendary for his mountain work. In 1889, Stevens explored Marias Pass in Montana and confirmed what local Blackfoot Indians had known for centuries: this was the lowest crossing of the Rocky Mountains south of the Canadian border. At just over five thousand feet, Marias Pass offered a route through the Rockies that was hundreds of feet lower than the alternatives used by competing railroads.
Stevens wasn't finished. He also discovered the pass through the Cascade Mountains that would bear his name—Stevens Pass—giving the Great Northern its route to Puget Sound. His career after leaving the railroad proved equally impressive: he went on to become chief engineer of the Panama Canal, applying the same surveying genius to one of history's greatest engineering projects.
A Goat Named Rocky
Every great railroad needs a logo, and the Great Northern's was unusual: a Rocky Mountain goat, that sure-footed creature of high places perfectly suited to represent a railroad that conquered mountain passes. The origin story is charming. William Kenney, who would eventually become one of the railroad's presidents, had used a goat to haul newspapers as a boy. When the railroad needed a symbol, he remembered his childhood helper.
That goat—affectionately called Rocky—appeared on locomotives and passenger cars for decades, through numerous paint scheme variations and color changes. It became one of the most recognizable railroad logos in America, a white goat against a circular background, representing a railroad that went where others couldn't.
The Iron Range Connection
While passenger travel captured public imagination, the real money in railroading came from freight. And in the upper Midwest, no freight was more valuable than iron ore.
In 1898, Hill purchased control of large portions of the Mesabi Iron Range in Minnesota. The Mesabi—the name comes from an Ojibwe word meaning "giant"—contained one of the richest iron ore deposits on Earth. The ore lay close to the surface, easily extracted through open-pit mining, and it was remarkably pure. The steel mills of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago hungered for it.
The Great Northern began shipping ore on a massive scale, connecting the mines of Minnesota to the steel furnaces that were building America's cities, bridges, and eventually its warships. A branch line ran to Superior, Wisconsin, where ore boats could carry their cargo across the Great Lakes, providing a water route that shortened the distance to Eastern markets compared to rail alone.
The railroad also connected to the copper mines of Butte, Montana—at the time, the largest source of copper in the world—giving Hill's empire access to another metal that was reshaping civilization through the spread of electrical wiring.
Tragedy at Wellington
Operating a railroad through mountain terrain is dangerous work, and on March 1, 1910, the Great Northern experienced the deadliest avalanche in American history.
Two trains—a passenger train and a mail train—had been stranded for nearly a week at the small station of Wellington, Washington, near the western portal of the Cascade Tunnel. Snow had been falling for days, making it impossible to move the trains forward or backward. Rotary snowplows, the specialized equipment designed to clear tracks in heavy snow, couldn't keep up with the accumulation.
In the early morning hours, an avalanche swept down Windy Mountain and pushed both trains off the tracks, sending them tumbling into the Tye River canyon below. Ninety-six people died. The disaster led to significant safety improvements, including the renaming of the town (Wellington became Tye, the old name carrying too much tragedy) and eventually the construction of a new, longer tunnel that avoided the most avalanche-prone sections of the route.
Electrifying the Mountains
Steam locomotives were powerful, but they had a significant drawback in tunnels: their exhaust could suffocate train crews. The Great Northern solved this problem by electrifying its route over Stevens Pass, allowing trains to pass through the Cascade Tunnel powered by clean electric motors rather than smoke-belching steam engines.
The railroad also briefly owned the Spokane and Inland Empire Railway, an electric interurban line that provided passenger service in eastern Washington. Interurbans were a fascinating transportation phenomenon of the early twentieth century—electric railways that connected cities and towns too small to justify full railroad service but too far apart for people to walk. They represented a middle ground between city streetcars and mainline railroads, and for a few decades they flourished across America before automobiles rendered most of them obsolete.
Building Across Borders
Although the Great Northern was an American railroad, a significant portion of its network extended into Canada. Between 1891 and 1917, the railroad built multiple branch lines across the border, providing service to Vancouver, New Westminster, and Victoria (the latter via ferry connection from the mainland).
The Vancouver operations were particularly ambitious. Between 1910 and 1913, the railroad excavated what became known as the Grandview Cut, a massive trench carved through Vancouver's east side to give trains access to False Creek. The dirt removed from this excavation was used to fill in the eastern end of False Creek itself, creating new land on which the railroad built its Vancouver terminus, Union Station, which opened in 1915.
This represented urban engineering on a dramatic scale: cutting through a hill on one side of the city while filling in a body of water on the other, all to create a railroad right-of-way. The Grandview Cut remains a distinctive feature of Vancouver's geography today, though it now carries a different railroad's trains.
The Inside Gateway
In 1931, the Great Northern developed an alternative route to California that challenged the dominance of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Called the "Inside Gateway," this route ran south from the Columbia River in Oregon to Bieber, California, where it connected with the Western Pacific Railroad. The Western Pacific, in turn, connected with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe at Stockton.
This three-railroad partnership—Great Northern, Western Pacific, and Santa Fe—created a competitive alternative for freight moving between the Pacific Northwest and California. The Inside Gateway route was further inland than the Southern Pacific's coastal line, offering shippers a choice and breaking what had been something close to a monopoly.
Competition between railroads might seem like ancient history, but understanding it helps explain why American freight rail remains privately operated and surprisingly efficient today. These rivalries, playing out across the American West, created redundant routes and competing services that kept shipping costs lower than they might otherwise have been.
Glacier National Park: Tourism as Business Strategy
The Great Northern's mainline crossed the continental divide at Marias Pass, forming the southern border of what would become Glacier National Park. The railroad wasn't content simply to pass through scenic territory—it actively promoted the park as a tourist destination, understanding that passenger traffic could be just as valuable as freight.
The railroad built stations at East Glacier and West Glacier, constructed rustic stone and timber lodges at the park entrances, and financed the construction of other inns and lodges throughout the park. Many of these structures still stand today, listed on the National Register of Historic Places for their unique architecture and their role in the early American conservation movement.
This represented enlightened self-interest. By promoting Glacier National Park, the Great Northern created demand for its passenger trains. Wealthy tourists from Chicago and points east would book passage on the Empire Builder specifically to visit "the American Alps," as the railroad's promotional materials called the park. Conservation and commerce aligned perfectly.
The Empire Builder
Speaking of the Empire Builder: this was the Great Northern's premier passenger train, named in honor of James J. Hill himself, who had earned the nickname "the Empire Builder" for his role in developing the American Northwest.
The train began service in 1929 and quickly became one of the most famous named trains in America. It featured luxurious accommodations, dining cars serving meals prepared to rival fine restaurants, and observation cars with panoramic windows for viewing the mountain scenery along the route.
Remarkably, the Empire Builder still operates today under Amtrak, making it one of the few named passenger trains to survive the collapse of private passenger rail service in America. The current Empire Builder runs from Chicago to Seattle and Portland, following much of the same route that James J. Hill's railroad established more than a century ago. Passengers can still wake up to views of Glacier National Park, just as travelers did in the 1930s.
Serving in Two World Wars
Railroads were essential to the American war effort in both world conflicts. During World War II, the Army moved its Military Railway Service headquarters to Fort Snelling, Minnesota, in Great Northern territory. The railroad sponsored the 704th Grand Railroad Division and the 732nd Railroad Operating Battalion, units staffed largely by Great Northern employees who brought their railroading expertise to the European theater.
The 732nd was one of two "spearhead" railroad operating battalions, meaning it was trained to restore railway service immediately behind advancing combat troops. The unit operated in support of General Patton's 3rd Armored Division as it crossed into Germany. The officers of the 732nd were all previous Great Northern employees, men who had learned to run trains on the prairies of North Dakota and the mountain passes of Montana and Washington.
This was a common pattern during the war: railroad workers brought irreplaceable skills to military logistics, and the major railroads essentially lent their expertise to the armed forces for the duration of the conflict.
Merger and Legacy
By the middle of the twentieth century, the economics of American railroading were changing. Trucks and automobiles had captured most passenger traffic and much short-haul freight. Airlines were beginning to dominate long-distance travel. The remaining profitable railroad business—heavy freight over long distances—favored consolidation.
On March 2, 1970, the Great Northern merged with three other railroads: the Northern Pacific Railway, the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, and the Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway. Together, they formed the Burlington Northern Railroad. It was the end of the Great Northern as an independent company, though its routes and infrastructure lived on under the new corporate umbrella.
In 1996, Burlington Northern merged again, this time with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway—one of the Great Northern's old competitors on the Inside Gateway route. The resulting company, the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway (now simply BNSF), remains one of the largest freight railroads in North America.
BNSF's orange locomotives still roll through Marias Pass. The Cascade Tunnel still carries trains under Stevens Pass. The routes that John Frank Stevens surveyed and James J. Hill financed continue to move freight more than a century later.
Trails Where Trains Once Ran
Not all of the Great Northern's routes survived into the modern era. Some branch lines were abandoned as traffic patterns changed, and several have been converted into recreational trails.
The Stone Arch Bridge in Minneapolis—that massive multi-piered structure just below Saint Anthony Falls that once carried mainline trains across the Mississippi—ceased to be a railroad bridge in 1978. It's now a pedestrian and bicycle crossing, offering excellent views of the falls and the lock system that allows river traffic to bypass them.
In Washington State, the Iron Goat Trail follows the late nineteenth-century route of the Great Northern through the Cascades, getting its name from the railroad's famous logo. Hikers can walk past the ruins of old snowsheds and the abandoned portals of earlier tunnels, tracing the path that trains once took through some of the most avalanche-prone terrain in the country.
The Spokane and Inland Empire Railroad, that electric interurban line that James J. Hill purchased in 1929, has become a bicycle path connecting Spokane, Washington, to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. What was once a railroad corridor is now a recreational greenway, a different kind of connection between communities.
The Dream of Trains
The Great Northern appears in American culture in unexpected places. It is widely believed to have inspired, at least in broad outline, the Taggart Transcontinental railroad in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged—a railroad built by determined individuals rather than government subsidy, crossing challenging terrain through engineering skill and business acumen.
The Grateful Dead mentioned the Great Northern in their song "Jack Straw," written by Bob Weir and Robert Hunter. The Western band Riders in the Sky recorded a song called "Great Northern" describing a journey along the railroad.
These cultural echoes suggest something about what the Great Northern represented in the American imagination: not just a transportation company, but an idea about building things through determination and hard work. James J. Hill was a self-made man in the classic American sense, an immigrant who arrived with nothing and built an empire. His railroad embodied that mythology.
In 1951, near the end of its independent existence, the Great Northern owned 844 locomotives: 568 powered by steam, 261 by diesel-electric motors, and 15 that were fully electric. It operated 822 passenger cars and nearly 44,000 freight cars. It was a complete transportation system, moving people and goods across half a continent.
Today, the diesel locomotives wear BNSF orange instead of Great Northern green, but they still haul freight through the passes that John Frank Stevens found, over the bridges that James J. Hill financed, serving the communities that German and Scandinavian immigrants built along the railroad's path. The company that did it without land grants, that built itself one profitable segment at a time, left infrastructure that still works more than a century later.
Rocky the goat may have retired, but the railroad he represented still runs.