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 U.S 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.

I think the Northern Pacific's history has its roots really in Lewis and Clark.

The Lewis and Clark expedition that Thomas Jefferson commissioned was an astonishing feat.

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, with their group going west, not knowing what's out there and not having the benefit of maps-- they certainly didn't have anything like GPS-- and off they go.

And they come over one mountain range out in Montana only to discover that there's not an ocean on the other side of that mountain range, but there's yet more territory and another mountain range beyond that.

What a daunting task.

But as it turns out, their route of exploration, much of it was later used by the Northern Pacific Railway.

The Northern Pacific railroad began officially on July 2nd, 1864 when an Act of Congress was signed by President Abraham Lincoln, and this Act said that the Northern Pacific Railroad would construct itself and it would be a railroad and telegraph line from Lake Superior to Puget Sound.

And so that was their charter and the government granted enough land to the NP to accomplish this construction.

And of course they use the land grant to help raise the money that it would require to construct the railroad and so on.

So that was in 1864, but the first shovel full of dirt wasn't turned until a frosty February morning in 1870 near the present town of Carlton, Minnesota.

That's where the NP's construction actually began.

So there were 6 years of organizing and reorganizing and raising of money to get things started.

But then construction started in 1870, across Minnesota in '70 and 1871, reaching the Red River in late 1871, and that's where eventually the town of Fargo, North Dakota, well Dakota Territory at that time, and Moorhead, Minnesota - it's a sister city just across the Red River - would eventually be formed there and on and on.

The NP was constructed to the west and, of course, there was construction going on at the west end towards the east.

And it wouldn't be until September of 1883 that these 2 construction teams would meet at a place called Gold Creek, Montana, where there was held the final spike ceremony.

Ulysses S. Grant was there and a bunch of dignitaries, Henry Villard, the president of the Northern Pacific.

Well don't tell anybody, but that actually wasn't the last spike of the Northern Pacific, but in order to meet the requirements of their charter they had to build across the Cascades and that hadn't been done yet.

So we, really, we NP historians, will tell you that the NP was really completed in May of 1888, a few years later when Stampede Tunnel was opened out in Washington state and that completed their line across the Cascades.

The Act provided grants of land to the railroads.

The railroads chose the best routes they could and were granted ownership of land 100 feet 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 5 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 U.S 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 U.S 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 Columbia River west of the Continental Divide.

Many in the U.S called for annexing territory as far north as the 54th parallel.

With the fever of Manifest Destiny and the slogan 54-40 or Fight, the U.S annexed Texas from Mexico in 1845, and with the northern border in dispute the U.S 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 U.S 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 a hundred 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 and Duluth and the Mississippi River in Saint 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, and his father, John Sr., 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 U.S senator Lawrence Brainerd, and after the death of her father, J 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.

There 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, 2 or 3 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 for 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 they got to the railhead, 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 are 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 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 a 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 the 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 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 the 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 2 or 3 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 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 the 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 in 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, major, major complex of round houses and engine houses and car shop 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 sales people 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 the end of the Civil War.

The house of Cooke has got money piled up and no place to spend it, and he sees the success of the 1st transcontinental railway built during the Civil War, and he decides that he will go and get the 2nd 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 Cooke 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 Sail."

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 Native Americans negotiated a treaty with the U.S government, in 1868, called the Fort Laramie Treaty, that was to set aside a large reservation centered on the Black Hills and the Badlands in southwestern North Dakota.

That was to be set aside, no development, the Europeans were supposed to stay out of there.

Basically it would be a preserve for the Native Americans.

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

So that the Native Americans were very, very upset about their lack of-- that the government did not defend the treaty.

So when the Northern Pacific reached Bismarck, North Dakota in 1873, and were getting ready to survey the land from on the other side from Mandan to Bozeman, Montana, the Native Americans wanted a railroad to go on the north or west side because of the Yellowstone River.

That was a much more rocky road, rocky area.

So when the surveyors started to look at that area they immediately said well the east or south side of the river, depending on where you were on the river, was much preferred because it was just basically flat land.

There's also the main hunting ground for the buffalo and, you know, for the game that really was so essential to the Native Americans.

So the Native Americans presented some resistance.

In fact, they amassed about 2,000 troops and really were threatening the survey party.

Now this survey party was fairly colossal.

It was the largest military assembly since the Civil War.

It was 1500 infantry and cavalry and the cavalry amounted to about 350 cavalry and horses and that was led by the notorious George Custer.

They took off from near, they were at a fort right near Bismarck, and started this whole group of surveyors and the protecting army, which, by the way, had 700 cattle on the hoof and 300 wagons each pulled by 6 mules, a fairly massive force.

They had bridge builders in front of the group to essentially move the whole group across and they were following the surveyors and basically protecting them.

That worked well until the Native Americans decided that these guys were going the wrong way and so the Native Americans had a small band attack the the army of some of the stragglers who were out doing, hunting game to help feed the troops and all and the whole survey team.

They attacked a few stragglers and killed one of the infantrymen and kind of started off an attack, an avalanche, that ended up being the depression of 1873 that crashed the stock market.

And how they crashed the stock market was the fact that so many people had invested in building the Northern Pacific that the embedded newspaper reporters--from, by the way, the New York Times--they ran a big story on this Native American attack, and actually everybody started selling their Northern Pacific stock and it crashed both the stock market, and it collapsed the bank that Jay Cooke, the financier of the Northern Pacific, owned and ran.

They shut down any further construction on the Northern Pacific until 1878, before they could start to reassemble.

Then there was a later attack that drove, essentially, where some of the Native Americans were killed.

And additional troops were engaged in a much bigger battle, Sitting Bull.

After some of the defeats that happened in 1873, they pulled back, basically relinquishing the land to the railroad and they went ahead and completed the survey that year.

So the Army basically was doing all the protection, and I will briefly step away from 1873, because in '76 the famous Custer's Last Stand, which really wasn't Custer's Last Stand in a sense where it was a focus on Custer.

The Sioux tribes and all of these tribes of the plains gathered six 6,000 troops in 1876 to really stop the building of the railroad because the survey was done, but they wanted to stop the building.

They hadn't been able to stop the survey, but they did think they could stop the building of the railroad and convince the Northern Pacific to go the way they were supposed to go, not across their hunting grounds.

And that was really the whole reason for Custer's Last Stand was to protect the railroad.

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 Cooke 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 dollars 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 partner 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 J.P 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.

E.H. 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 a $1000 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 the 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 the 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 Louis 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 2 men and their associates agree 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 a 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, begins operations on March 2nd, 1970.

The 1st half of the 19th century saw the beginning of railroading and the 2nd 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, intercity 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 1950's, 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 growing around here?

And his answer, one of the things was they grow this giant Russet potato, a variety of Russet potato that weighed around two pounds that they'd use 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 stuff 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 turned 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 thing.

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 1960's, 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 wished some time to gain.

I crossed the great Columbia where roses were in bud, then wandered into dinner, and there met Dr Spud.

'Twas lying on a platter, sure something just immense, served with a spoon and butter, and it only cost ten 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-TA-TO.

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, it's tonnage, and it's train miles quadrupling between 1941 and '45.

Quadrupling, at least, if not more.

And yet not, 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.

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 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 Macfarlane in later years gets the credit for hiring Loewe 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, and had to have not just better rail, but a better route.

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

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 fewer miles.

And it reduced curvature enormously.

The number of degrees of turning angle that were eliminated by that cut off 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 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 Pacifc 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, 3 of them, 4 if you count the fact that there were 2 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 that was built 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 drop the Pacific and most of them referred to it as the Northern.

The 484 Northern and some 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.

One of the advantages the NP had was the fact that being a land-grant railroad it essentially had free locomotive fuel in the form of coal, coal deposits, on its property.

There were several of them in western North Dakota and in eastern Montana at a place called Coal Strip.

And this coal, though it was free and it was on their property, it had a relatively low heating value, low BTU value.

It wasn't really the best coal in the world.

Anthracite was a far superior coal, but the NP didn't have any of that, so what this meant was burning less than ideal coal required very, very large fire boxes on its steam locomotive to make up for the heat transfer that would be required to boil off that water for steam.

All those large fire boxes required more wheels and axles under them to support the weight so these are the kinds of things that led to the development of the Yellowstone and the Northern and so on.

It also meant that the NP was relatively slow to dieselize.

The other railroads, such as the Great Northern, ended up being fully dieselized a little bit earlier than the NP did.

I mean it kind of makes sense.

They had free fuel and plus railroad management was at that time skeptical that the diesel electric locomotive was really a viable option that would work.

There was some skepticism on all the railroads about that initially, so for one reason or the other the NP kept its steam power in use all the way up to January of 1958.

That was the last month where a revenue operation took place with a steam locomotive.

Diesels were sort of a cookie cutter type of thing.

They all looked similar and they operated similarly and they were relatively simple to operate as compared to a steam locomotive.

Steam locomotives were very, very labor intensive.

But even equally interesting is the fact that they were, almost all of them was a custom design.

So you could look at a steam locomotive and, if you knew something about American railroads, you could probably, just by looking at it, without even seeing the railroad name on it, figure out what railroad operated it and where on that railroad it was operated, by virtue of its design.

Because steam locomotives, they were peculiar machines, they had to be designed for a particular type of service in a particular geographical area under particular operating conditions, there was an engine known as the Yellowstone type.

It was, the NP referred to it as a class Z5.

Z as in zebra, 5.

It was a 2884 huge locomotive.

In fact it was the largest steam locomotive in the world when it was first debuted in 1929, and the NP eventually had 12 of them and all 12 of them were designed to operate specifically between Mandan, North Dakota and Glendive, Montana.

Well, why that territory?

Well that territory was very challenging for freight train operation because it was very undulating type of track.

There was a lot of ups and downs and the ups and downs were relatively short in distance as compared to say mountainous territory out in western Montana.

So between Mandan and Glendive you might go up a grade, say maybe a one percent grade or so for a few miles, and then you're going down a one percent grade for a few miles.

And that sort of thing, so if you have a very long freight train, part of your train in most cases in that territory is going uphill and part of it is going downhill.

So to handle freight trains over that territory prior to the Yellowstone, the NP found that it had to cut its trains in two pieces.

They could get it all away from the west coast to Glendive eastbound, a 4,000 ton train, 100 cars typically, and now they've got to cut it into two pieces and haul each piece with a class W type engine, which is what they had at that time.

Well that's double the number of crews, number of operations, number of trains on the line that the dispatcher has to take care of and dispatch.

So along comes the Yellowstone.

Now the NP wanted this engine, the Yellowstone, to be able to handle a 4,000 ton standard freight train of the day - you know 100 some cars - all the way from Glendive to Mandan with no problem and to be able to maintain a decent speed doing it.

While you look at a Yellowstone, and that's what you see if you know, if you realize what you're looking at.

It's a 2884, so it had two leading truck wheels and then 2 sets of 8 drive wheels and each set being powered by its own set of cylinders and valves and so on.

Now those drivers, or the drive wheels, are 63 inches in diameter.

Now that's kind of a magic number because the diameter of a drive wheel and a steam locomotive determines what kind of performance it can give.

The smaller the diameter, the more power it can apply to the rail when starting a train, but it can't go as fast once it gets up to speed, so it's speed limited.

So a locomotive designed for passenger train service would have much larger drivers than that.

They might have 77-inch drivers.

They can go 80 plus miles an hour, but they can't develop as much power to the rail when they're first starting a train.

Well the Yellowstone represented sort of a balance or a compromise of that trade-off with those 63-inch drivers.

And all that weight, I mean, the locomotive weighed 500 and I believe it was about 563 tons.

It was enormously heavy, so that's a lot of traction.

And with those drive wheels it could start a 4,000 ton train even on an ascending grade.

Now it would have to work to do it, but it could do it, and yet they were large enough, just large enough, where they could develop some speed when conditions permitted that.

So they could go as much as 45 or 50 miles an hour and that's about it.

But that's really all they needed to go with a freight train in those days.

So again, when you look at a Yellowstone, you're looking at an engine that is specifically designed for basically a 206 mile segment of the Northern Pacific Railway and that's where they were used for many, many years.

And then, of course, in later years, when the NP started getting diesels they were able to shuffle power around and use it in different ways.

But initially that's how the Yellowstones were used.

Now we compare the Yellowstone to the, what is known as the class Z6, and then they improved that and came out with a class Z7 and class Z8.

Now those were 4664 type locomotives and you look at one of those and at first glance it looks kind of like a Yellowstone.

It's got the 2 sets of drivers under it, but you see some differences.

It's got 4 leading truck wheels and then the 2 sets of drivers, but only 6 drive wheels on each set and then the 4 trailing truck wheels.

Well and then you'll notice too that the drivers are much larger in diameter than the ones on the Yellowstone.

The 4664 drivers were 69-inch drivers on the Z6's and 70 inches on the Z7's and eights.

Well, why is that?

Well these engines were designed for use in Montana and basically in territory between Glendive, Montana and Spokane, Washington.

That's where they were primarily used.

Well consider the kind of territory that the NP operated over between those two points from Glendive to Livingston.

You basically follow the Yellowstone River, so most of it is a Yellowstone is a river-grade operation, very gentle grades, no mountain territory to speak of, and so you could benefit from some high-speed operation along there.

Well that's what a 69 or 70-inch driver will be able to give you.

Those engines could go at least 60 miles an hour with a freight train, and if the engineer had the intestinal fortitude he could go faster than that 65 or 70 no problem.

Both the 4664 and the Yellowstone 2884's had very large fire boxes, so there is a clue right there that they were built for the Northern Pacific.

Why?

Well because the NP had its own coal it was a land-grant railroad and there was territory on the Northern Pacific that had coal.

Lignite Coal.

It was a low-grade coal, it was low BTU value, so it took a lot of the coal to produce the heat necessary to boil water in a locomotive that requires a very large firebox.

So these Yellowstones had fire boxes that were just enormous.

The firebox of the Union Pacific's number 844, shown here, was certainly large.

It was 12 and a half feet long and over 8 feet wide.

But the firebox of the Northern Pacific Northern Class locomotives was even bigger - a full foot longer and a half foot wider.

The grate was 115 square feet.

The firebox of the NP's Yellowstone class locomotives was the largest of all at 182 square feet.

In fact, as a publicity stunt, the first Yellowstone was built by the American locomotive company, and they held a banquet for company officials inside the firebox before it came out of the factory.

And initially they crossed Stampede Pass with a series of switchbacks, very steep grades, very limited in their capacity, only a 5-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 two 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, 4-unit sets of this type of engine, when they got them they were put to work initially, right they were sent out 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 Vista-Dome cars in its North Coast Limited.

So by July of 1954, the North Coast Limited was being renamed the Vista-Dome 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.

Vista-Dome, 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 degree 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 Vista-Dome seat.

More rivers than you can count were seen or crossed following 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 MP's Sue - a stewardess/nurse.

In 1957 she was photographed in the North Coast Limited Vista-Dome.

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 a while ago.

They really, I think 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 Macfarlane, 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 50's, new equipment and so on.

One of the cars in that train is known as the Lewis and Clark Travellers Rest.

And on the outside of the car you will find those words painted there--travelers 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 Traveler's Rest Lounge car into a bunch of murals and displays depicting the Lewis and Clark journey.

Scenes of buffalo and and various of the Indian tribes that they encountered, all kinds of stuff.

A reproduction of a flintlock 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 famed designer Raymond Loewe.

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

Raymond Loewe designed logos- locomotives, refrigerators and automobiles.

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

The 2-tone paint scheme chosen by Loewe 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 Loewe designed many logos, he is not responsible for the logo of the Northern Pacific Railway.

That distinction goes to E.H. 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 Saint 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.

The NP left us a legacy.

There are towns, cities, counties and states that are put on the map because of the NP, quite a legacy.

North Dakota, for example, became a state November 2nd, 1889.

Montana becomes a state in November of 1889 also, six days after North Dakota did.

And then about 7 or 8 months later, July of 1890, the state of Idaho achieves statehood.

Well, in large part, the NP helped make this happen.

So the NP has left a very big legacy in this part of the world, the Pacific Northwest.

Let's think about some of the towns and cities that are named after NP people.

Perham, Minnesota, small town east of Detroit Lakes named after Josiah Perham, the 1st president of the railroad.

Fargo and Moorhead.

Fargo, North Dakota named after William G Fargo.

Moorhead after William G Moorhead.

Same first name, middle initials.

They were directors for the Northern Pacific Railroad at that time.

Well then there's Cass County, North Dakota, which Fargo is located in.

That's named after George Washington Cass who was the NP's 3rd president.

We have a town about 20 miles west of Fargo called Castleton, also named after NP President George Cass.

Then there's Oaks, North Dakota named after the NP's 8th president, Thomas Fletcher Oaks.

What about Hannaford, North Dakota, named after NP's 14th president, Joel Hannaford.

And then there's Billings, Montana.

Frederick Billings was the 5th president of the Northern Pacific.

The Northern Pacific has its fingerprints all over the region.

Runyan 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 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, 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 I don't know where I'd be today because that taught me the importance of 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 him and this really impressed me as a kid.

I took that lesson with me into my career.

First of all, if you were going to go into engine service on the railroad, then you hired out normally as a fireman.

Sometimes you might hire out as a hustler, it's a guy who works at the roundhouse and moves engines in and out of the roundhouse, prepares them for trips, things like that.

But, at any rate you eventually you become a fireman or you hire as one and when you make your first paid trip as a fireman, you know your student trips aren't paid, there's 3 of those, but then when you make your first paid trip, that establishes your seniority date as a fireman and that date goes with you for the rest of your career and it is that date that determines when you are eligible for promotion to engineer and, of course, that's based on the need of the railroad.

How many vacancies they have for the job and so on.

When a fireman knows that he's getting fairly close to promotion based on his seniority and on the movement of personnel, he starts preparing for that promotion, usually months in advance, and he's doing this on his own time.

So there's a number of ways they could do this, but the first thing they did was they would gather materials, they would gather books that they studied from.

There would be books that would talk about the mechanical aspect of steam locomotive operation.

Then there would be books that would talk about the air brake system.

Then when it finally came time for promotion, there were some classrooms that were done locally right there at their engine terminal, and the instructor in those would normally be the road foreman of engines, sometimes referred to as just the road foreman.

He was in charge of all of the firemen and engineers in that district.

He was in charge of their training, their performance, all of it, and also he was the guy who would qualify them in different types of service.

So he would teach classes on air breaks.

He would teach classes on the mechanical side of things.

In addition to all the prep that the firemen was doing, then came the week of promotion.

It was four days.

Actually these are exams, the mechanical exam back in the steam era, took about a day and a half.

Now this could vary from one division to another.

They weren't necessarily all exactly the same one operating division.

But what I'm giving you is a good sample.

So the mechanical exam would be a day and a half.

It was all written, and it wasn't multiple choice, it was short answers or essays and the questions were like most of them were troubleshooting questions: you're out on the road and this is the symptom that happens, your engine starts doing this what are you going to do.

Because if you think about it, if you get stranded it's not like a truck you can pull over to the shoulder with a truck, or go off on a side road, you can't do that with a train.

And if you get stranded, you've tied up the railroad.

So it's very important for the locomotive engineer to know how to troubleshoot things and at least get his engine moving well enough to clear the line, if nothing else.

Hence these these written exams where you have to explain yourself and you'd write out in this big paragraph how you would handle that problem.

5 points maximum for each question and they would grade it 0 to 5 and the overall exam passing was I think was 80%, and the typical score was in the mid 80's.

Nobody got 100.

These were not simple exams.

If you got anywhere in the 90's, you were considered to be pretty sharp.

Then came a whole day just for the air brake exam.

Again this exam, the air break exam, was written.

You had to explain things and it was pass/fail and then, of course, another day was devoted to a rules exam.

That's an exam on on the operating rules, and the guys being promoted would be sitting around a table and a rules examiner would come in to give that exam and it was done orally and he would just go around the table and ask each guy a question and there were certain questions.

A question, any questions having to do with train orders.

This is a train order and these are peculiar messages written in kind of a language of their own that were used to control trains and to keep them from colliding.

All right, so in the rules exam, if you missed a question on train orders, if you messed one of those up, you failed the whole exam.

That was you're done and you had to retake it.

If you failed to make it through promotion week, if you failed any one exam, you were sent back to the next promotion class.

When would that be?

Well that could be, you know, during World War II, it might be 3 weeks later.

But in the 1930's it might be 4 years later, and if you failed a 2nd time in most operating divisions you were made a permanent fireman and you lost I think it was 11 seniority numbers.

11 guys that were behind you are now ahead of you.

So the pressure was on to make promotion and this was tough stuff.

I was very privileged to become close friends as a young lad with people who were working on the railroad, in all crafts.

I had one of our neighbors who was a conductor and a brakeman for the Northern Pacific at Fargo.

Locomotive engineers, track workers, and eventually the president of what would be the Burlington Northern, and he was the Vice President of Operations of the Northern Pacific.

He started as a track man swinging a spike maul near Horace, North Dakota.

I knew him.

So these people working on the NP were fascinating people, every one of them was a walking history textbook.

If only I would just read it, if one would read it.

And I availed myself of their friendship and input, and they, I can tell you this, they absolutely loved their work.

They were loyal to the NP.

They were loyal to their location.

People weren't mobile back in those days like we are now.

A typical Northern Pacific railroader, especially if he was in the operating side of things as an engine crewman or something, he worked where he grew up or where he was born.

In fact their seniority only applied in their region or in their district.

So if a locomotive engineer moved from Dilworth clear out to Missoula, even though it's on the NP and he might be working for the NP in Missoula, he had to start over with seniority.

His seniority only applied in his home district and their careers typically spanned at least 35 to 40 years and quite often more than 50 years.

It was very common for a retiring engineer or conductor or a dispatcher to have 50 years or more on the railroad.

That did happen.

48 was a frequent number I've seen, and they loved the NP.

You know the NP was, for as large as it was, it's remarkable that the employees that worked there were more or less like a family and they've said this.

This is how they view it.

They've told me this.

We were like a family back then.

They've even joked about it.

You really had to mess up pretty bad to get fired, you know, they they kept their jobs, you know.

That's actually true.

There was a terrible, terrible derailment of the North Coast Limited in 1962.

And one employee, who was actually an officer, it looked like they were trying to pin the blame of this accident on him, and that wasn't right.

He didn't deserve that blame, and he stood up for himself and they listened, the top brass listened, and he kept his job.

In fact, he wasn't demoted or anything.

That's brilliant.

That's brilliant because instead of firing everybody and starting from scratch and having to reinvent the wheel and retrain people, instead they opted to learn from the mistakes that were made that led to that accident and it was a better railroad.

Different culture.

What a privilege it's been to know these kinds of employees.

To some you were and promptly are regardless of expense, a Great Big Baked Potato 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 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-TA-TO 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.