CNW built a line in the late 1880’s, presumeably as part of a westward expansion of it’s market, into southwestern Wyoming. And then…it stopped. To be sure, the reason they probably stopped, was because of the Rocky Mountains looming in the distance.
Was there ever a real plan to extend CNW to the West Coast?
In the long run, did the lack of a transcontinental line cause the eventual demise of nearly all of the “also ran” western railroads? (As in west of Chicago/St. Louis/Memphis/New Orleans.)
Plans were drafted and dropped, redrafted and reshelved, but so were similar plans at
many roads; in itself the mere existence of plans means little. The North Western entertained notions of a line to Salt Lake City and projected myriad cursory surveys to San Francisco and Los Angeles as did the Burlington. In the meantime it built to the cheapest of standards, occupying the route at the least possible cost. The North Western management recognized it was building into extremely thin territory west of the dry line in eastern Nebraska with no local support (i.e., no local traffic) and in such cases a line may only come into value if completed through to some west coast port or center of articulation. If the former it would parallel another road and necessarily share the traffic and engage in ruinous rate wars; if the latter it would have to reach a traffic sharing arrangement with some other western road willing to offer competitive through rates.
And which western road would it work with? By 1903 Harriman had combined the UP, SP, and through heavy stock purchases the Santa Fe into a community of interest with explicit traffic-sharing, trackage-sharing, and territory-sharing agreements, avoiding duplication and rate wars. Along came W.A. Clark with an immense fortune and larger ego and began building the SPLA&SL, a road into yet more territory offering no local support and when complete a geographic link of meager value down to the present. Clark nosed around at both North Western and Burlington, as well as with the Denver & Rio Grande and David Moffat, in search of a traffic arrangement that might generate some through traffic for his railroad, the Harriman roads having no interest in short-hauling themselves and only entertaining offers for feeder-line traffic from Clark’s road. Harriman, we can imagine with a heavy sigh and grinding of the teeth, thought it better to not encourage this fool’s errand any further, calculating tha
Adding to RWM’s comments:
The serial case files of the GLO/BLM are full of “broken dreams” filing maps for railroads never built.
If the silver panic of 1883 had not happened, the CB&Q would have been from Denver to SLC via Glenwood Canyon and D&RG would have been something else (and the Moffat Road most likely never would have happened.)
CRIP was looking at entry into the Rocky Mountains via Trinidad, CO and the San Luis Valley as late as 1919.
(UP would look different in Colorado, CB&Q would have reached Colorado Springs, Santa Fe would have had a Colmor Cutoff, Katy (got to Keyes, OK in the Panhandle) and Frisco (Atlantic & Pacific) would be in NM and CO…and so on…
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?
What is/was SPLA&SL? I read through some sources online. From the name, it sounds like it should go from Salt Lake to Los Angelos. Then there is mention of a Montana senator, and the Oregon Short Line (?). Then, E.H. Harriman bought 50%, and I got really lost. Can you enlighten me.
I have it on very good authority the SPLA&SL was the San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad. Completed in 1905, it still runs through desert lands where there are “not enough people…to fill a good sized house”.
SPLA&SL = San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake. San Pedro is the harbor of Los Angeles (which is divided politically into the harbors of L.A. and Long Beach). William A. Clark was one of the three copper barons of Butte, the others being Marcus Daly and F. Augustus Heinze. The name was soon shortened to just LA&SL. Clark sold his half of the 50-50 Clark-Harriman joint venture to UP in 1923 and until 1988 the LA&SL, OSL, and O-WR&N were leased to and wholly owned by the UP. The Oregon Short Line was the quasi-independent Union Pacific creation that built westward from Granger, Wyoming, to a meeting with the Oregon-Washington Railway & Navigation Company building east from Portland, Oregon, at Huntington, Oregon. The OSL was pulled firmly back into the UP camp by Harriman after he purchased UP at bankruptcy.
So you ask, what were they thinking? They were thinking there was potentially a bonanza just over the horizon if the cards played right. Railroad builders were not mostly stupid. They appreciated the economics of railway location, knew where they stood in the competitive milieu, and had a better handle on the development potential of the territory than anyone. They did not know, nor could they, what technological innovations might occur, or whether those innovations might be in service to the railroad (hybrid winter wheat) or not (the motor vehicle). Various unscrupulous schemers as well as principled but unrealistic dreamers also launched plans, but for the most part those schemes came to nothing as investors were by and large sophisticated or soon made that way.
If you look closely at the example that piqued your interest, the North Western’s tentative and tenous trail across northern Nebraska and into central Wyoming, you see a line on which the North Western favored only the least possible money, extended at an almost desultory pace with the rudest possible construction. It was a fly
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?
In about 1973, we went to visit my cousins in Shoshoni, Wyoming, which had to be just about the end of the line for CNW in Wyoming. Even then, I thought “Why in the world is there a railroad here, when there is miles and miles of nothing?”
Have you ever ridden the Union Pacific through southern Wyoming?
Or the CBQ through Wyoming?
For that matter, any Western transcon? The NP was about the only one that could follow a route that appeared consistently “productive” from the standpoint of looking out the window.
And as a railroad, it was the least profitable of them all.
From the standpoint of what you “see” in Wyoming, it’s almost always “not much.” Mostly underground somewhere. Or, in between somewhere and somewhere else.
As Darius Ogden Mills was said to have remarked upon arriving at the end-of-track of the Carson & Colorado Railroad, in the dusty Owens Valley of Eastern California on July 12, 1883, “Either we built this railroad 300 miles too long or 300 years too soon.”
The UP main line in contrast was literally at the portal of lucrative coal mines in Rock Springs, a stone’s throw from mines in Hanna and Carbon, and could use ties hacked from the forests of the Snowy Range, Wasatch Range, and Elk Mountain, floated downstream to trackside in the spring freshet.
RWM
Could the “Cowboy Line” been profitable in moving PRB coal? Just looking out the car window, the terrain looks the same on that line as it does the BNSF line between Alliance and Grand Island.
Yes, but not nearly as profitable as the route chosen. I am speaking from memory because the track charts are at the office and it’s been several years since I glanced at the Cowboy track chart, but as I recall the Cowboy had an up-and-down profile much inferior to CB&Q’s Lincoln-Ravenna-Alliance line (even with its inclusion of Crawford Hill). The track structure would have been a 100% throwaway from the subgrade up with softened curves all the way to Fremont, a much more expensive proposition than dropping down the North Platte Branch to the UP main at O’Fallons.
RWM
Mudchicken, Your reply on the CB&Q reaching SLC via Glenwood Canyon interests me greatly. I have a model RR I try to base on the CB&Q and am trying to figgure a logical extension west of Denver to SLC by looking at Maps. So far I’ve only come up with a route going west of Casper WY over South Pass and into eastern Idaho or Utah and I’m not even sure this would be feasable. If the Burlington actually did surveys and the route could be made without killer grades and curvature, I would love to do some reading on the subject.
I wonder if that may have been the deal killer?
If then president of the CNW larry Provo had his way the cowboy line would have been rebuilt and the connection with the Union Pacific would have never taken place It would be a different world to say the least. There were plans in place to rebuld the line from the BN connection to fremont but Mr Provo passed away and the board decided against it and went with the U.P. instead Read the bopok My 12,000 days on the Northwestern It really tells the tale Larry
CB&Q actually did the surveys under the aegis of the Colorado Railway from 1881 to 1885. One of CB&Q’s Location Engineers was a certain Horace Sumner, later of EP&NE and DNW&P(D&SL/Moffat) fame.
The Moffat DNW&P actually used the CB&Q / Colorado Ry. alignment from Kremmling to Bond to thwart UP during the Gore Canyon War of 1904-05 after buying the survey and rights from CB&Q (quite a story behind that adventure, even involves Teddy Roosevelt)…Ironically, UP was saved by that fact in 2005 in a lawsuit at State Bridge, CO after the facts got blurred by time and a real estate lawyer tried to pull a fast one for an equally greedy landowner/developer. (UP almost lost at least 2 x 50 ft x 12 miles of its railroad R/W = 143.5 Ac and a portage site for rafts & canoes on the Eagle/Colorado river would have been lost)
D&RG bought Colorado Railway’s filing through Glenwood Canyon to keep their Blue River Extension from being crowded out of a canyon that could barely accomodate one rail line in their race to Aspen and Grand Junction in 1886-87.
These facts just barely appear on Overton’s book on CB&Q and Griswold’s DNWP/D&SL books along with “Rails That Climb”. You have to read carefully.
CB&Q got horribly over-extended in the 1880’s and the Silver Panics pretty well killed off their extension plans west of the front range in Colorado. They needed the monie$ they had to complete more lucarative projects that had a faster return on other parts of their system. They recovered well enough to control DU&P,DW&P and the Colorado & Southern.
If you ever get to Golden, CO and the Colorado Railroad Museum, ask the archivist to pull the complete set of Colorado Railway Filing Maps from the “Green File” (Flat file storage case #20 or #21 in the basement of the Richardson library) As stated earlier, not much is written on the subject. Their plan had them going over Rollins Pass slightly north of where the Moffat Tunnel Line is now. (I don’t model - I have enough fun just piecing together the original intent of my mudchicken predecessors for present day railroads and surveyors)
Mud:
It shows how nothing changes: Yesterday’s Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890 is today’s Ethanol Subsidy Act (more loftily, the Energy Independence & Security Act) of 2007. Repeal of the Sherman Act killed the western mining industry and for almost a decade stopped railway expansion dead in its tracks. Today there’s some good business for us as long as this subsidy remains in force but it’s anyone’s guess how long it will be.
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
The Burlington did perform surveys, and to answer the specific question, the grades and curvature were no better than achieved later by the Moffat Route. The problem is that the edge of the plains is at an elevation of 5,300 feet, the ridge line of the Front Range 40 miles distant is at an elevation of 11,000 feet, and the base of the final ridge is at an elevation of around 9,300 feet. Absent magic those numbers are irreducible. The average grade between the top of the plains and the base of the last ridge is 4000 feet rise in 211,200 feet run or 1.9%. There’s no secret pass everyone overlooked. To improve on the curvature-restricted speed of 25 MPH the construction cost would at least quadruple (it would require extensive tunneling and bridging). To improve on the 2.0% ruling grade that Moffat accepted you’d have to either start tunneling at Golden and emerge 60 miles later at Granby, or find a way to increase the length of the run, e.g., some sort of Spiral Tunnel arrangement except this time about 20-30 miles of it in tunnel instead of 10,000 feet in tunnel.
Or you could just do the obvious, the inexpensive, and the easy, and build around the Front Range via Wyoming, which of course is what the UP chose to do.<
One other thing that may have killed this effort at reconstruction of the “Cowboy Line” of the CNW, would have been the sheer cost of having to upgrade 519 miles of sharp curves, “steep” grades, lightly built trestles and ties, and jointed rail, to standards that would have permitted heavy coal trains operating on headway. On quote that stands out from Roger Grant’s history of the North Western, on page 226, is " I think we’ll get one across. But I guarantee we’ll never get two." That was the reply to Larry Provo from a subordinate when Mr. Provo inquired if the railroad could operate a unit coal train between Douglas, WY and Fremont, NE.
A second issue that forced things away from reconstruction of the “Cowboy Line” was the difficulty that the CNW encountered in getting loans for line rehabilitation. At the start of the 1970s the CNW’s finances were not looking good. Recall that other Granger railroads such as the CRIP and MILW were in dire financial straits. The CNW was not that far behind either of them financially (at least, that’s the impression that I receive when reading Grant). The CNW looked at getting loans from the Federal Government under the auspices of the 4R Act, but even then, CNW officials suspected that the Feds were going to refuse to loan the CNW enough to get the 519+ miles of track out of the weeds. At one point, the price tag of track rehabilitation for the “Cowboy Line” reached in excess of $ 530 million. So, between the BN giving the CNW a hard time over the coal, and the CNW’s own financial picture, the CNW had to reach an agreement with the UP.
I wonder if they ever considered building a connection between the coal fields and an extension of the South Dakota line. I wonder what sort of considerations would have to be taken ion order to use that route instead of either the “Cowboy” or the UP.