The mainline of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad reached
2200 miles from Chicago to the west coast ports of Seattle and Tacoma.
The Last Spike ceremony took place on May 14, 1909 in Gold Creek, Montana,
marking the official completion of the line.
Although the Milwaukee Road had the shortest route between Chicago and Seattle, it had to cross 5 mountain ranges. These were the Belt, Rocky, Bitterroot, Saddle and Cascade Mountains. The decision was made to electrify the Rocky Mountain and
Coast Divisions, powered by 28 substations. 22 were actually built, of which 7 still exist. The line also required 51 tunnels, more than the competing Great Northern and Northern Pacific routes. This line also had 10 bridges were I consider significant. These crossed the Mississippi River at La Crosse, Hastings and Minneapolis, the Missouri River at Mobridge and
I don’t know what it is about your super long posts, Dale, but every one I try to access leads to trouble. I can scroll down quite a ways into the post, but always end up not being able to scroll to the bottom as it starts a repeating loop of three or four lines at that point. The post does have a scroll bar of its own, which allows me to make it a half dozen or so lines deeper, but that’s it. Is anyone else experiencing this problem?
On this particular thread, I can view all the responses without any problem- it’s just the stuff towards the bottom of your initial post that gets screwed up. It’s almost as if the sheer length of the post makes my browser (Firefox) choke on it. I have noticed that the Iowa’s Counties thread gives me trouble viewing the responses as well. I’ll go back and verify that.
EDIT: OK, went over to that thread and experimented- when I initially opened the first page of the thread, it acted as noted above, except that the responses were all blank. The posts were there and identified who put them there, and the post boxes were the correct size near as I could tell, but there was NOTHING in them. I left the last post on the page showing on the screen and hit Refresh. Voila! Text returns to posts visible on the screen. I scrolled up and discovered that on the eighth post up (which coincidentally was my first post in that thread), text in the posts started getting messed up (overrunning the post windows, repeating lines, overlapping repeating quote boxes). I hit the refresh button again with that post on the screen, after which ALL of the responses appeared to be OK, except for minor screw-ups in the thread title displayed above each post. As soon as I scrolled up to your initial main post, though, I enter stuttering mode again.
EDIT #2: Closed Firefox and accessed this thread using IE. Problem solved.
Opened thread in Firefox 1.5.0.1 [PPC Mac latest version]. Electric substation numbers 15-20 are pink instead of the usual red - they’re pink in Safari 2.0.4 as well. Sounds like a Winderz-Firefox spat. All good on the Mac side - but Mike Y will tell you that is not unusual! Never ask what sort of computer a guy drives. If he’s a Mac user, he’ll tell you. If not, why embarrass him? – Tom Clancy
Holy cow, this is a lot of information for one person to post…let alone digest…would you happen to have or know where I can see picutures of some of the last Milwaukee Road passenger trains in and out of Wausau just before Amtrak?
I wanted to make the substations stand out, and add some color to the post so I made them red. Since 15-20 were not built, I decided to make them orange to sepatate them from real substations. However, I thought the orange was too pale, so I made the planned substations pink.
Jim Scribbins’ book, The Hiawatha Story, should be the best place to look for passenger trains in Wausau.
What were your sources for the milepost numbers?I don’t have any Milwaukee ETT’s to compare,so I’ve looked at the June 1971 Official Guide and followed BNSF’s milepost numbers on their map on their website.I noticed that the Guide listing varies wildly from Just beyond Aberdeen(listed as mile 711) to Tacoma(mile 2221).BNSF map has Aberdeen as 707.9 and some of the listings west of there vary quite a bit.Great Info on the list.I’m just confused by the milepost numbers.
Thanks.Yeah,it would be hard to pin down over several eras.I wonder how close or how many errors crept into the Official Guide.I’ll have to see if I can find a list of Officials,Agents,and Stations for the Milwaukee Road.I have one for the GN dated January 1970 that I have scanned and on CD(if you want a copy,let me know).I’ve seen them for the NP and IC.
Excellent work!! You can still do part of this route, the Amtrak Empire Builder uses the former MILW mainline between St.Paul and Chicago. The miles along the Mississippi are especially scenic.