Funding has been provided by the State of Minnesota's Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund as part of the Clean Water Land and Legacy Amendment.

In many ways, the story of the Northern Pacific Railway is the story of America.

In the 19th century, America was the land of limitless opportunity.

It was boundless, sometimes foolish optimism, innovation, bravado, ignorance, greed, corruption, racism, boom and bust.

The story of the NP includes Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, Jay Cooke, James J. Hill, General George Custer, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, JP Morgan, and one great big baked potato.

The story of the NP starts with Thomas Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

Jefferson sent the Corps of Discovery, led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, into the wilderness.

They were to explore the Northwest from the Missouri River west to the Pacific Ocean.

Lewis and Clark were to establish an American presence and to study the area's plants and animal life and geography, as well as establish trade with the Native Americans.

Explorers as far back as Columbus had been searching for a navigable trade route between Europe and Asia.

Jefferson hoped the Corps was to discover the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent for the purpose of commerce.

Abraham Lincoln understood a transcontinental railroad was necessary for settlement of the West and would bring the country together.

He said railroad building was a link in a great chain of railroad communication which shall unite Boston and New York with the Mississippi.

He declared that a railroad to the Pacific Ocean is imperatively demanded by the interest of the whole country, that the federal government ought to render immediate and effective aid in its construction.

Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, which chartered the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads.

The act was amended in 1864, chartering the Northern Pacific.

With subsidies, loans, and grants from Congress, the US railroad system expanded nearly 1,000% from 1850 to 1885 from just 9,000 miles to 87,000 miles in 35 years.

By 1900, railroads were one of the largest employers in the country after agriculture.

The act provided grants of land to the railroads.

The railroads chose the best routes they could and were granted ownership of land 100 ft on either side of the right of way.

And they were also given 10 square miles of land for every mile of track laid.

The act specified five alternative sections per mile on each side of said railroad on the line thereof and within the limits of 10 miles on each side.

This provided the companies with a total of 6,400 acres for each mile of railroad built.

The land was to be sold by the railroads to homesteaders, thus providing business for the railroad, equipment, and people moving west and farm commodities back to the east.

The NP was granted about 62,000 square miles or about 40 million acres of land which was used for right of way and sold to homesteaders.

The land also provided resources such as timber and coal.

The NP land held significant coal reserves in what would become North Dakota and Montana.

The coal was not the best for locomotives as it did not burn as hot as other coal.

This fact was significant in the development of steam power for the NP.

To qualify for the subsidies, a company had to agree to actually build track or forfeit the grant.

They also had to carry mail and government passengers and freight at reduced rates.

In addition, the land grant railroads were required to build an accompanying telegraph line.

The requirement for carrying government freight would become an important factor for the NP in the 20th century.

The US Canadian border was in dispute for the first half of the 19th century.

Russia, Mexico, Spain, and Great Britain all wanted to draw the border.

Eventually, Russia and Spain relinquished their claims and the US found itself negotiating with the British Empire.

It was known as the Oregon Question or the Oregon Boundary Dispute.

Britain wanted the Northwest border to follow the Colombia River west of the Continental Divide.

Many in the US called for annexing territory as far north as the 54th parallel, with the fever of manifest destiny and the slogan 5440 or fight.

The US annexed Texas from Mexico in 1845 and with the northern border in dispute, the US was looking at a potential of two wars.

The Oregon Question was eventually settled in 1846 with the signing of the Oregon Treaty, which set the border between British North America and the United States along the 49th parallel.

But a treaty is only a piece of paper.

The US needed a railroad to establish a presence in the Pacific Northwest.

The army pushed for a railroad so they could defend the territory.

The Northern Pacific started with several disadvantages that would plague it for years.

The NP was created by an act of Congress, but even an act of Congress doesn't change geography, politics, or economics.

When the Union Pacific and Central Pacific built the first transcontinental railroad from Omaha to Sacramento, there were an estimated 800,000 people living within 100 miles on either side of the right of way.

When the NP began construction, there were an estimated 100,000 people within 100 miles of the main line, and most of them had no interest in a railroad passing through their land.

One of the first railroads in Minnesota was the Lake Superior and Mississippi.

The LS&M was built by Jay Cooke.

The LS&M was a so-called portage railroad because it moved freight between Lake Superior in Duluth and the Mississippi River in St.

Paul.

The NP started at what was called the junction, literally a switch built into the LS&M's track at what became Carlton, Minnesota.

The first president of the NP was Josiah Perham, who served only for one year.

He was succeeded by John Gregory Smith in 1865.

Smith was a former governor of Vermont.

His father, John Senior, was a pioneer railroad builder, and John Gregory succeeded his father as trustee of the Vermont and Canada Railroad upon his death in 1858.

Smith selected what is now Brainerd, Minnesota as the place to cross the Mississippi River.

At the time, it was simply known as the crossing.

Smith was married to Anne Eliza Brainerd, daughter of US Senator Lawrence Brainerd.

And after the death of her father, Jay Gregory Smith named Brainerd, Minnesota in honor of his wife's family.

Smith made several missteps.

He attempted to manage the NP from Vermont and made some poor choices in hiring managers.

Selecting the best route across eastern Minnesota seemed literally straightforward.

The land is flat and required few curves, which is what railroaders like.

Yet, the chosen route challenged the newborn NP to its limits.

It was a railroad built from nowhere to nowhere.

And that really was the biggest issues that it faced when it was constructed initially in the first you know two or three decades of its existence was simply that.

It needed to build not just the railroad but the towns and bring in the people and create its own demand by doing so.

So really there was nothing initially except the only freight being shipped initially was its own construction material, ties, rails, men, the resources to build this railroad in a wilderness in Minnesota initially and then out into the plains of North Dakota.

And each time the rail or it got to the rail head, a new town was usually built at that location.

Just west of Brainerd a short-lived but very thriving lumber town called Gull River Village was founded in 1880 and in a period of about a dozen years they shipped millions and millions of feet of sod, timber and lumber out to these retail outlets within the Dakotas and many, many of the early structures in these early towns were built out of lumber that were shipped on the Northern Pacific west of Brainerd.

There was no timber in North Dakota.

Even wood for fuel, you know, for early stoves or even the locomotives, it all came from Minnesota.

There was no timber resources in North Dakota.

And so you have those logistics issues where you have to bring the wood into North Dakota by railroad to build the town.

So, one of the earliest freight revenue was lumber shipped from Minnesota to the West.

Literally the day the Lake Superior and Mississippi Railroad was completed, several thousand men immediately transferred over to the Northern Pacific to begin construction in August of 1870.

And, you know, obviously it was going to take several months to get this first 100 miles of rail done.

So they ended up working through the winter, that first winter, non-stop, even in the worst conditions, building the grades, building grades and track over swamps and lowlands.

And really the first 100 miles of the railroad is land and terrain that had no business having a class A railroad built over it.

It was about a 100 miles to Brainerd.

And it was in the summer of 1870 they actually selected the river crossing of the Mississippi River where that was going to be.

And that location they planned a town which was planned to be the headquarters of the Northern Pacific which later became Brainerd.

The land between the junction and Brainerd was dozens and dozens of miles of swamps and lowlands.

And the next spring, all the grades they built over those swamps, all the track in some cases sank out of sight.

And it took them years and even decades of reconstruction before they finally got that solidified so it wasn't operationally interrupted every spring or during heavy rains or just random washouts.

It occurred quite often.

The bottomless pit on the NP Railroad a few miles west of the junction has been on another bender recently.

For two or three days and nights, the superintendent, with a large crew of men, labored unceasingly to appease the appetite of the sink for gravel and things, but it seemed much like trying to intoxicate a rat hole by pouring in whiskey.

Hundreds of tons of gravel and logs were put in and finally the bottom was reached at a depth of from 30 to 40 feet.

Brainerd Tribune, May 18, 1872.

The NP was continually repairing and rerouting the line between Carlton and Brainerd well into the 20th century.

The grade gave way beneath this train at Cedar Lake east of Brainerd in 1905.

Jay Cooke failed partially in 1872 and 73 because of the exorbitant costs of continually rebuilding the railroad between the junction and Brainerd.

And then you also had operational interruptions where you're not shipping freight or paid freight or paid passenger service over that line sometimes for days or even longer.

You just couldn't run a train over that track.

Jay Gregory Smith was not based in Minnesota.

He was rarely in Minnesota.

So he hired people to run this, but in many times it wasn't the right people perhaps.

And you had obviously a lot of corruption, a lot of contracts that were bloated maybe to individuals.

The corruption was a big factor in the failure of Jay Cooke.

There was no checks and balances per se as much as there could have been or should have been had you had upper management in Minnesota.

The Northern Pacific Railway started right outside of Duluth and Carlton and on its westward journey and that was after the Lake Superior Mississippi was incorporated into what would become the NP.

Because of its proximity to Duluth and that starting point and the fact that there was a major complex of round houses and engine houses and car shops here in Duluth, a lot of Northern Pacific stuff hung around and we've got some great pieces in the collection.

I'm sitting on the Minnetonka, which if you imagine back in the day, this was a pickup truck, and that was what they used to build the railroad.

They had several of these tank engines that they bought from Porter.

They were brought into Duluth by boat and then put on the rails.

And this one made it all the way across the United States building the Northern Pacific Railway as it went.

And it was brought back by the railroad and it's on loan to the Lake Superior Railroad Museum by Burlington Northern Santa Fe.

The Northern Pacific is an inanimate thing.

It's a corporation.

It's a railroad.

It's the people that have the stories that bring that to life.

And the first story I thought of was obviously Jay Cooke, the financier and owner of the Northern Pacific Railway that started its westward journey.

And he is a very interesting man.

He was the man along with a few others who financed the Grand Old Army of the Republic.

At the start of the Civil War, the United States Treasury had about a million dollars in it.

By the end of the Civil War, the fighting was costing a million dollars a day.

The person that raised all that money was Jay Cooke, and he was excellent at it.

At one time, he had about 2,000 salespeople out selling war bonds to finance the Civil War.

Now, the South financed their Civil War by printing money because their money had no standard.

Inflation wasn't a problem because it's whatever you buy with it.

But in the north, you couldn't just print that money because that would have led to incredible inflation.

So they had to sell the bonds.

Jay Cooke did everything.

He had 2,000 of these salespeople fanned out across the country.

They would follow the troops into battle so that on payday where these troops had all this money in cash and no place to spend it, they would buy war bonds.

And at the end of the war, when those war bonds got paid off, Jay Cooke made a fortune.

It's an end of the Civil War.

The House of Cook has got money piled up and no place to spend it.

And he sees the success of the first transcontinental railway built during the Civil War.

And he decides that he will go and get the second transcontinental railway.

And he goes to President Lincoln, who owed him a major, major favor.

Even though Lincoln couldn't stand him.

He thought he was way too pushy, way too brash, and didn't trust him, but he owed him.

So Lincoln of course signs the Northern Pacific land grant for the second transcontinental railway and Jay Cook gets it and he starts investing in the Northern Pacific by first buying the Lake Superior and Mississippi.

In the West, construction started at what is now known as the town of Kalama, Washington in May of 1870.

The town motto became rail meets sale.

Scheduled service between Kalama and Tacoma began in January of 1874.

The railroad recruited Chinese workers from San Francisco, some of whom moved to Kalama.

And today, part of Kalama is known as China Gardens.

The population peaked at 5,000 in 1874, but headquarters of the NP's Pacific Division was moved to Tacoma, and the population dropped to only 700 in 3 years.

Both the Great Northern and Northern Pacific were aggressively marketing their land to prospective settlers.

The NP had sales offices in Germany and Scandinavia.

They attracted settlers with packages of cheap transportation and purchase deals.

Their offer of abundant and cheap land, particularly suited for growing wheat and other crops, helped settle the Red River Valley of Minnesota and North Dakota, as well as lands to the west.

The government negotiated a treaty with Native Americans in 1868 called the Fort Laramie Treaty.

The treaty set aside a large reservation centered on South Dakota's Black Hills and the Badlands of southwestern North Dakota.

However, almost immediately after signing the treaty, gold was discovered and the government did not defend the treaty.

The NP reached Bismarck, North Dakota in 1873, and crews immediately began surveying the land from Bismarck to Bozeman, Montana.

The army needed a railroad to the northwest to defend the territory and traveled with the surveyors as they plotted the route across the plains.

The surveyors were protected by General George Custer, leading the largest military assembly since the Civil War.

The 1,500 infantry and 350 cavalry men were supported by 300 wagons, each pulled by six mules.

There were 700 head of cattle.

Scouts and bridge builders along with some infantrymen traveled ahead of the main force.

Native Americans were justly angry that the Fort Laramie Treaty was being violated.

A small band attacked a survey crew near the Yellowstone River in October of 1873 and an infantry man was killed.

A New York Times reporter was traveling with Custer and when the story broke back East, investors panicked.

Native Americans were not the only ones who opposed construction.

There was political opposition as well.

There were essentially no towns between Omaha and California, and there were no towns between Duluth and Tacoma.

Why would anyone build infrastructure where there was no demand for service?

Critics saw the Pacific Railroad Acts as a blatant fraud by Gilded Age capitalists to build a railroad to nowhere and have the government cover the costs.

Then came the panic of 1873.

Questions regarding the viability of the NP and other railroads along with war in Europe, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and the Great Boston Fire of 1872, disruptions in the silver market along with the Credit Mobilier scandal involving the Union Pacific and the tremendously underestimated costs of building the NP brought down the House of Cook in 1873.

NP President George Washington Cass forestalled bankruptcy as long as possible, but was forced to do so in 1875.

Henry Villard, with strong backing from investors in Europe, built a transportation empire in the Northwest.

The Oregon Transcontinental Company, which owned the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company, connected with the Union Pacific near Wallula, Washington.

His main competitor in the Northwest was the Northern Pacific.

With $8 million from his European investors, he purchased control of the NP and was elected president in 1881.

Under Villard, the NP reached Livingston, Montana from the east in 1883 where they built shops for heavy repairs similar to operations in Brainerd, Minnesota in the east and Tacoma, Washington in the west.

Livingston, at the base of Bozeman Pass, marked the East/West division of the Northern Pacific.

NP immediately built a line from Livingston south to Yellowstone National Park.

Jay Cooke had lobbied for Yellowstone to be designated a park and President Grant signed the Yellowstone Park Protection Act in 1872.

The NP was now the Yellowstone Park Line.

Villard staged an elaborate golden spike ceremony near Gold Creek in western Montana.

Four trains filled with dignitaries, including Ulysses S. Grant came from the East for the festivities.

Villard and his group learned the same hard lesson as Jay Cooke, that optimism doesn't build a railroad.

The Wall Street bears attacked the stock.

Villard suffered a nervous breakdown shortly after the Golden Spike ceremony.

Robert Harris, former head of the Chicago Burlington and Quincy Railroad, assumed the presidency.

Harris pushed to complete the NP.

Rather than the indirect route to Puget Sound following the Columbia River, a more direct route across the Cascade Mountains over Stampede Pass was chosen.

A temporary switchback was used until the Stampede Tunnel was completed in 1888.

This marked the actual completion of the transcontinental Northern Pacific Railway.

Another economic panic hit in 1884.

Many railroads were now overbuilt and waiting for business and profitability.

The NP was no exception.

And for the first time, the NP encountered competition from James J. Hill's Great Northern Railway.

This led to the second bankruptcy of the Northern Pacific in 1893.

Eventually, the reorganization of the NP was turned over to JP Morgan.

Charles Mellon became president.

The NP emerged from bankruptcy in 1896 with a new name.

Instead of the Northern Pacific Railroad, it was now the Northern Pacific Railway.

James J. Hill was born in Ontario, Canada in 1838.

He moved to St.

Paul, Minnesota in 1856.

He learned transportation, bookkeeping, surveying, and banking.

He built a steamboat business that operated between St.

Paul and Winnipeg, Manitoba.

He was successful in the coal business and served on the board of several banks.

The panic of 1873 sent many railroads into bankruptcy, including the St.

Paul and Pacific.

And even though one reporter noted that the St.

Paul and Pacific was little more than two streaks of rust across the prairie, Hill and his partners saw an opportunity and they purchased the St.

Paul and Pacific Railroad.

In 1879, Hill and his partners formed the St.

Paul, Minneapolis, and Manitoba Railroad with Hill as the general manager.

The old St.

Paul and Pacific and now the St.

Paul, Minneapolis, and Manitoba and later the Great Northern had important trackage rights with the Northern Pacific.

Hill invested in the Northern Pacific during the panic of 1883 when JP Morgan was in control.

By the turn of the 20th century, Hill had significant interest in the Northern Pacific and controlling interest in the Great Northern.

What neither railroad had, and both needed desperately, was a line into Chicago.

During the Villard leadership, the NP had leased lines from the Wisconsin Central, but the lease was very expensive and largely benefited Villard's associates who controlled the line.

This arrangement was untangled in the NP's second bankruptcy.

One railroad that did have access to Chicago was the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy.

The CB&Q was also known as the Burlington, the Burlington route, or simply the Q. The Union Pacific was also vying for control of the CB&Q.

The UP ran from Omaha to San Francisco and had to connect to Chicago.

Charles Perkins, head of the CB&Q, was willing to sell, but he wanted $200 a share.

EH Harriman, head of the Union Pacific, declined to pay that high price.

But James J. Hill, the Empire Builder, said yes.

But Harriman wasn't finished.

Since control of the CB&Q was now held by the Northern Pacific, if he bought control of the NP, he would have control of the CB&Q and that all important access to Chicago.

NP stock went from $150 a share to over $1,000 a share.

It was a wild ride on Wall Street.

The NP, of course, benefits because now they can get into Chicago, too.

And Hill has an interest in the NP, but not a controlling interest in the NP.

And Harriman figures this out.

And Harriman goes, if I buy the NP, I'll own the CB&Q as a result and then I can get into Chicago and I can keep Hill and the Northern Pacific out.

So that was the motivation.

And so secretly he calls up some of his other investors and they form this syndicate.

And he doesn't tell the other investors what they're buying.

He just says, "I got a plan.

I got some money.

I need some more money and you can be in the plan and I guarantee you this is what you'll make."

So they send him all his money and he starts buying up the stock and he starts buying it in little pieces, little pieces, little pieces.

He has other people buy it and then sell it to him off record.

And so now he's starting to acquire this controlling interest in the NP.

Hill's out on the west coast with his son Louie and they get wind of this.

They're seeing that the stock is starting to go up and they're getting nervous.

They need to find out what's going on.

Well, what's going on is in New York City and Hill's got to be there.

So, he takes his private train and he says, "Everything off the tracks, no traffic until my train goes by.

Then you can put stuff back on the tracks behind me.

Gets to the Twin Cities, another railroad, gets out to New York, makes the journey in about half the time that it would take if you were just going to buy a ticket on trains to get you from the West Coast to New York City.

He makes it in about half the time.

And that's when he finds out that Harriman's trying to corner the market.

Ultimately, the two men and their associates agreed to settle their differences and avoid disastrous competition.

Hill formed Northern Securities Company, which would hold and control the stock of all his railroad properties.

Some of Harriman's people were appointed as representatives for his holdings in the Northern Pacific, and this arrangement averted a potentially disastrous panic.

Hill had won the battle, but a larger war was now begun by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The public outcry led to the Justice Department filing suit under the Sherman Antitrust Act.

And in 1904, the Supreme Court dissolved the Northern Securities Company.

The railroads would now have to operate as separate entities.

Eventually, Harriman was forced to divest holdings in the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific.

However, in 1955, talk of merger began again, and eventually the Supreme Court approved the merger of the Northern Pacific, Great Northern, Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy, and the Spokane, Portland, and Seattle Railroads.

The new railroad known as the Burlington Northern began operations on March 2nd, 1970.

The first half of the 19th century saw the beginning of railroading and the second half was for building and figuring how it would work as a business.

In the 20th century, even with wars and depressions, some railroads faltered, but the NP, now with stable, competent management, did fairly well.

The partnership with the CB&Q brought direct access to Chicago and also parts of Texas.

The Spokane, Portland, and Seattle Railroad was chartered by Hill in 1905 and had significant trackage in eastern and southern Washington.

The NP built east as far as Ashland, Wisconsin, and north to Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Automatic block signaling was installed along the entire main line and double trackage was added in many key areas.

At the peak, the NP had nearly 7,000 miles of track.

The 20th century brought other new challenges.

Orville and Wilbur Wright were changing the world.

Henry Ford was beginning to mass-produce cars and trucks.

Airlines, inter-city buses, the personal automobile, heavy trucks, and later the interstate highway system would force even more changes in the railroad industry.

At the turn of the 20th century, the railroads competed for the fastest and most luxurious passenger service.

New York Central boasted that its 20th Century Limited was the most famous train in the world.

It made the run from New York to Chicago in 20 hours and eventually 16 hours in the 1930s.

The train offered red carpet treatment and even had a barber shop and secretarial service.

The best chefs were hired and fresh food was served on white linen.

In the 1950s, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe offered what it called the Turquoise Room and billed it as the only private dining room on rails.

It could accommodate up to 12 people and could be reserved for parties.

Hazen Titus was the head of dining cars for the NP.

He was at the western end of the line sourcing locally grown foods to add to the menu of the North Coast Limited.

He asked some local farmers what they had to offer.

When Titus came around, he said, "What can be grown around here?"

And his answer, one of the things was they grow this giant russet potato, a variety of russet potato that weighed around 2 lbs that they used for cattle feed.

He said they could be cut up and cooked, but they had a hard time cooking them because they're so big, by the time you got the center warm and cooked, the outer skin was overdone.

And anyway, Titus took a sack of potatoes or a couple sacks of potatoes back to St.

Paul and went to work on trying to cook them and figured out a way of cooking them at a lower temperature for a while and only turning up the heat for the last little bit and it became a great hit and one of the biggest advertising promotional things for the Northern Pacific dining.

And sure enough, the NP instituted something that became one of its advertising points for passenger travel, the Route of the Great Big Baked Potato.

So even as late as the 1960s, if you were riding on the North Coast Limited into Seattle, for example, or on the Main Streeter, which was the name of one of their other passenger trains, you would go by the NP's commissary just before you made the stop at King Street Station, and you'd look over there, and on top of the commissary building was this great big giant potato with its potato eyes in it that were illuminated at night and it was quite the sight.

And they even wrote a song about the Great Big Baked Potato.

In going from Seattle, I took the North Coast train.

Because my time was limited, I wish some time to gain.

I crossed the great Columbia where roses were in bud.

Then wandered into dinner and there met Dr.

Spud.

It was lying on a platter.

Sure, something just immense.

Served with a spoon and butter and it only cost 10 cents.

It was split right up the center, filled with butter, and what's better?

It was sweet and hot and mealy.

Was it good?

Well, I should stutter.

Oh, you great big baked potato you are Irish through and through.

You may talk of your lobsters, clams, and oysters too, but just try that potato it's good for you.

If you want a sure thing hunch for your breakfast, dinner, or lunch on the NPRR in the dining car, get a great big baked P-O-tato.

The NP was beat up pretty badly by World War II.

I'm talking about its physical plant.

The tracks, for example, by 1945-46 were in tough shape.

Rail was worn.

Well, why?

Well, because the NP was a land grant railroad, it had to haul an awful lot of tonnage and people, military personnel in particular.

And it had to do so at reduced rates.

That was part of the deal of the land grant deal way back at the beginning.

So, here's the NP.

Its tonnage and its train miles quadrupling between 1941 and 45.

Quadrupling, at least, if not more.

And yet, you know, the revenue takes a hit because of this land grant deal.

And so they come out of the war with track that hasn't been kept up or maintained as well as it would otherwise have been.

They just couldn't do it.

My father worked on the section on the NP back in 1946 just for a brief time and he couldn't believe what he was seeing with the rails.

He described them to me and that's on the main line.

You know, he said they were just they were worn to the point of danger.

President Denny, Charles Eugene Denny was was the NP president at that time, I think did a brilliant thing.

He was he's probably an underrated president of anything.

We don't hear a lot about him.

President Macfarland in later years gets the credit for hiring Loewy and revamping their passenger service.

But it was President Denny who realized that in order to operate the North Coast Limited on that faster schedule, it had to have the physical plant to do it.

It had to have not just better rail, but a better route.

There were at that time an awful lot of 35, 40 mph curves on the NP because it was built so early as compared to say the Great Northern.

It just there were a lot more sharper curves on its route and these required speed reductions, speed restrictions.

Well, wouldn't it be nice to eliminate some of those?

Cut across the inside of the curve.

Build a new line right here.

Move the track over here.

Out at New Salem, North Dakota, for example.

A whole new line.

It was called the New Salem Cutoff was built between New Salem and Glen Ullin, North Dakota.

It reduced railroad mileage by about 9 and a half miles, 9.6 miles, fewer miles.

And it reduced curvature enormously.

The number of degrees of turning angle that were eliminated by that cutoff was a very large number.

Northern Pacific celebrated its 100 year centennial of the signing of the charter in 1864 by President Lincoln by having a record album produced and the name of this album was A Thousand Miles of Mountains and a lot of well-known radio and radio actors appeared on this album.

Thousand miles of mountains that's not really an exaggeration.

The NP is roughly using round figures about 2,000 miles from one end to the other.

And the western half of it is mostly in mountainous territory.

The Northern Pacific being built as early as it was meant that it didn't have the best, they didn't have the knowledge of where the lowest crossing of the Rockies could have been.

So their route was less than ideal.

But because of their route having to contend with so many mountains, major mountain passes, there were three of them, four if you count the fact that there were two lines across central Montana, one via Helena and one via Butte.

So what this meant was that the Northern Pacific had to find ways to haul freight tonnage and passenger trains over these mountains as efficiently as possible.

This required locomotive technology to be developed and I think in a lot of ways the NP was at the cutting edge of that especially in the steam locomotive era and because of their thousand miles of mountains the Northern Pacific developed the Yellowstone Locomotive which at the time 1928 the first Yellowstone was built that was the largest steam locomotive in the world and it held that title until the Union Pacific's Big Boy came out in 1941, which really wasn't much bigger than the Yellowstone at all, just a few inches longer, about the same weight.

So, if you look at them side by side, they're about the same.

The NP also had to develop a type of steam locomotive that became known initially as the Northern Pacific type.

That type was named after the NP, but other railroads which would use the same type eventually dropped the Pacific and most of them referred to it as the Northern, the 484 Northern.

And some of the other railroads yet used other names for that same type.

But the NP really was a developer of modern quote-unquote modern steam locomotive power.

And initially they crossed Stampede Pass with a series of switchbacks and very steep grades, very limited in their capacity.

Only a five car train with an engine at each end of the train could get over the switchbacks.

It was a real precarious operation and it was meant to be temporary.

So during the operation of the switchbacks, they dug a tunnel, Stampede Tunnel, and actually there's more than one tunnel in that area, but the longest one of them known as Tunnel 3 was and is about 2 miles long.

And having been built in the 1880s, it was not designed for the sizes of locomotives and trains that would come in the future.

So by the 1930s and 40s the Northern Pacific had such large steam locomotives on its roster that this posed a problem at Stampede Tunnel.

In fact, the 4664 type locomotive that was really ideally designed for a combination of mountain grade operation and high-speed river grade operation could not safely fit through Stampede Tunnel.

It would physically get through it, but there were only about two or three inches of clearance on each side of this big cab and the boiler and so on getting through that tunnel.

And plus plugging the tunnel with a big huge locomotive like that meant smoke accumulation, steam and heat.

And they did run a few test runs of a 4664 type through Stampede Tunnel.

And they found that the temperature in the cab got up over 150 degrees.

It was uninhabitable.

And if they had stalled in there for any reason or had any kind of a malfunction and couldn't get out of the tunnel, it would probably kill the crew.

For a while, the NP seriously considered a specially designed steam locomotive known as the Cab Forward.

The Southern Pacific used them in some of its tunnel operations and the NP considered it.

But about that time, the FT Road diesel locomotive was developed.

This would be in the early 40s and the FT looked very promising to the NP and it convinced railroad officials that the diesel was the way to go rather than a Cab Forward.

So NP's first FT's, they got a total of 11 four unit sets of this type of engine.

When they got them, they were put to work initially, right?

They were sent out to the Stampede Pass line, that's where they worked, because they would fit very nicely through that tunnel and they didn't put out nearly as much smoke as a steam locomotive.

A much safer operation in every way.

The NP had the disadvantage of all these mountains to contend with, but they capitalized on those mountains and on its route.

Sure, it was a less advantageous route operationally, but one of the ways they capitalized on it was to use VistaDome cars in its North Coast Limited.

So by July of 1954, the North Coast Limited was being renamed the VistaDome North Coast Limited.

And eventually by that fall of '54, every North Coast Limited train would have four dome cars in it, two dome coaches and two dome sleepers.

VistaDome, for those who maybe haven't heard this term, it's kind of fallen out of use in recent years, was basically a standard passenger car that had an observation deck on the top of it.

So, you went up a set of steps into this glassed in area.

You had glass above you, behind you, to the side of you.

You basically had 360° vision of the marvelous scenery that cost the NP operationally and in locomotive development, but it was a lot to look at.

28 mountain ranges were visible from a VistaDome seat.

More rivers than you can count were seen, or crossed, followed.

The Yellowstone River, for example, 344 miles following the Yellowstone River from Glendive to Livingston.

Lots of interesting scenery.

Barbara Person was hired as one of the NP's Sue, a Stewardess-Nurse, in 1957.

She was photographed in the North Coast Limited VistaDome.

The photo was used in this ad.

Barbara, now Barbara Hancock, was on a rail fan excursion in 2002 when they reenacted the 1957 photo.

Her Sue uniform still fit 45 years later.

I mentioned Lewis and Clark.

On their journey, they discovered a campsite south of present day Missoula, Montana on a little creek that became known as Lolo Creek.

And they loved that place.

It was their favorite campsite from their entire journey.

And they gave it a name.

They called it Traveller's Rest.

And of course, they misspelled travelers, they put two L's in it.

But the NP, its officers and executives appreciated its history.

And President Macfarland, in the early 1950s, NP president, realized that the NP had a close historical connection with Lewis and Clark.

And so when the Northern Pacific inaugurated a new version of its North Coast Limited, its premier passenger train, now that name is old and what dates back to 1900, but there was a new version of that train that came out in the 50s, new equipment and so on.

One of the cars in that train is known as the Lewis and Clark Traveller's Rest.

And on the outside of the car you will find those words painted there.

Traveler spelled with two L's, intentionally misspelled.

So the NP had done its homework.

A remarkable car.

The inside of that car made you think it was a history book on wheels.

And that's how it was advertised, actually.

The NP commissioned an artist from Chicago named Edgar Miller to turn the walls inside the Traveller's Rest lounge car into a bunch of murals and displays depicting the Lewis and Clark journey.

Scenes of Buffalo and various of the Indian tribes that they encountered.

All kinds of stuff.

A reproduction of a flint lock rifle was mounted on the wall of this lounge car.

So if you traveled on the NP even as late as the 1960s near the end of its corporate life, you'd get a history lesson.

As the NP looked down the tracks after World War II, they saw a Boeing 707.

Their answer to the competition was to upgrade and rebrand the North Coast Limited.

They hired fame designer Raymond Loewy.

You may not know the name, but you know his work.

Raymond Loewy designed logos, locomotives, refrigerators, and automobiles.

In the 1950s, the Northern Pacific hired him to redesign the North Coast Limited.

The two-tone paint scheme chosen by Loewy was inspired by the Montana pines.

Darker green over lighter green separated by a white belt line.

The colors for the modern freight locomotives, black, yellow, and red, probably came from a graphics designer at General Motors.

Although Raymond Loewy designed many logos, he is not responsible for the logo of the Northern Pacific Railway.

That distinction goes to EH McHenry.

McHenry was the chief engineer of the NP.

He attended the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and saw the symbol called the Monad at the Korean exhibit.

He was looking for a unique symbol to represent the NP.

So he brought the idea back to St.

Paul where he showed it to general passenger agent Charles Fee.

Together they designed the distinctive logo of the Northern Pacific Railway.

The symbol has its roots in Chinese philosophy dating back some 4,000 years.

It symbolizes the duality of life, masculine, feminine, light and dark, and so forth.

To some, it's a symbol of good luck.

The NP used it for over 50 years.

It was, they said, a symbol of good railroading.

Runyon Peterson was a young new engineer and his mentor was an old head engineer by the name of Fred Lewis or Fritz Lewis as he was known.

I learned a lot about how to approach my job as an airline pilot from the way from watching Fritz Lewis and the way he approached his job as a locomotive engineer.

He never flew an airplane but his approach to his job I would sum it up with one word.

He was a perfectionist.

He was never satisfied with his own performance.

And people like that are actually kind of rare in any line of work, even on the railroad.

And he was even with 30, 40 years of seniority, he was still perfecting his craft and teaching others to take that same approach like Runyon Peterson.

Runyon fired for Fred Lewis many times and then Runyon himself was promoted to locomotive engineer.

And when he was promoted and started running as an engineer, Fred Lewis would challenge him to tie contests.

Well, what's a tie contest?

Well, their territory went from Dilworth, Minnesota west to Jamestown, North Dakota, about 100 miles.

On a westbound freight train coming into Jamestown.

You start down a hill a few miles east of town and it's a pretty fairly steep descending grade down into the James River Valley into Jamestown, and all westbound freight trains at that time had to stop just short of Pittsburgh Avenue crossing.

There's a grade crossing there just east of the depot.

They would stop there and then they would get a yard track assignment.

There's a telephone booth there.

They could call the yard master, get a yard track assignment, and then go on.

The tie contest was to see who could stop his tonnage freight train the closest to that grade crossing without encroaching on it.

The way they did that, of course, they would never work together if they're both engineers.

They'd be on separate trains.

So, the way they did that is they'd bring their train, each guy would bring his train down that hill and stop.

He'd climb down, take a piece of chalk, and put his initials and the date and the engine number that he was running on the tie, the cross tie directly under the front coupler of the locomotive.

And these two guys had tie contests for years.

And Runyon told me, he said, "You know, if it wasn't for that, uh, I don't know where I'd be today.

Because that taught me the importance of trying to perfect your craft."

Perfection, you never achieve it.

And they knew that.

They knew they never would, but nothing less than perfection would satisfy them.

And this really impressed me as a kid.

I took that lesson with me into my career.

After over 150 years of mergers and consolidations, the family tree of the BNSF now includes some 400 railroads.

Of course, our favorite will always be the Main Street of the Northwest, the Northern Pacific.

Northern Pacific Streamline North Coast Limited leaving for Yakima, Cocolalla, Jahamish, Snohomish, Walla-Walla.

Hey Johnny, how did you like it?

Terrific.

It's Northern Pacific.

Moving mountains, mountains of lumber from the Pacific Northwest, fruit from the Yakima Valley, wheat from the Pacific Northwest and Northern Great Plains, seafood from the Pacific, meat from the whole Northwest.

All aboard for the Northern Pacific.

The Main Street Route through the great Northwest.

But ere he can to serve you well and promptly all regardless of expense.

A great big baked PO-tato that only cost 10 cents.

Oh, you great big baked potato you are Irish through and through.

You may talk of your lobsters, clams, and oyster stew, but just try that potato.

It's good for you.

If you want a sure thing hunch for your breakfast, dinner, or lunch on the NPRR in the dining car, get a Great Big Baked PO-tato.

Funding has been provided by the state of Minnesota's Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund as part of the Clean Water Land and Legacy Amendment.