The Rise & Demise of the Milwaukee Road

Hello Everyone!

A case can be made that March 15, 1980 marked the day Montana lost it’s innocence. That day the last Milwaukee Road train lumbered through the Treasure State.

I was in Harlowton that morning with my Uncle Harry. A small crowd hunkered in the wind to witness the train’s mostly symbolic final trek.

An assemblage of a handful of old boxcars and a couple of flat decks carrying some left-over railroad machinery had left Miles City early that morning, pulled by a small, greasy diesel locomotive.

The Milwaukee didn’t make it’s morning stop at the Harlow station though. The first time since it’s maiden trip through the central Montana town in 1908 the train just clickety-clacked past....

There were no cheers, there was no ceremony; not even much talk—just the dour faces of a few local farmers, ranchers and business people—and onlookers like Uncle Harry and me.

By sundown the pitiful little train had passed over the Rockies and into Idaho. There was a collective sense that the end of the Milwaukee Road was a harbinger of things to come...

Montana had come of age.

The dominos were actually set up in March 1970 when the Burlington Northern Railroad was assembled—merging several regional railroads into a national behemoth.

By the mid-1970s scores of branch lines and spurs linking the state’s small communities had already toppled into oblivion. Grain elevators, stockyards, log yards, feed mills and local freight and passenger stations had been abandoned.

Like it’s Interstate Highway System counterpart, BN’s massive “unit” trains blew past countless Montana towns. Change was swirling around the already transportation-starved state of Montana.

Bad or good our rural economy and agrarian culture was at a tipping point.

It had always been an uphill battle for Western railroading’s poor stepsister. But time finally caught up with the Milwaukee Road. In 1980 it’s last gasp left a vacuum we couldn’t measure—an abyss we could only feel.

See you next week!

Charley Pike

PS: My Grandad worked as a mechanic at the Milwaukee’s Harlowton roundhouse in the late 1930s—and occasionally accompanied the train on it’s “electric” run between Harlo and Avery, Idaho.

There’s no getting around the fact that railroads have played a huge role in Montana’s history and culture.

Railroads, standing alone, were neck and neck with the rest of the economy in carrying Montana out of the frontier.

But railroads by their very nature never stood alone. They necessarily co-existed with farming, ranching, mining and logging; and buoyed human migration. While it’s argued that the railroads ran rough-shod over other sectors of the economy, there was symbiosis.

For nearly 100 years nearly all of Montana’s other economic drivers had to intertwine with, kowtow to, and otherwise depend on the railroads.

Sandwiched between the Great Northern that ran along Montana’s northern border and the Northern Pacific to the south was the Milwaukee Road. Going though generally the center of the state, it linked lower Midwest river ports with the Pacific Northwest.

The Milwaukee was an afterthought to the railroading game though, and never benefitted from the extensive Federal Land Grants afforded it’s counterparts. The Milwaukee had to either buy it’s rights-of-way or acquire smaller railroads along it’s path.

Therefore the Milwaukee Road was always a day late as well as a dollar short.

One rail line it notably acquired was the “Jawbone” running along the Musselshell River in central Montana. The Jawbone was the vision of Richard Harlow, an Eastern lawyer who came to Montana seeking a fortune in mining.

Harlow wanted a railroad servicing the mining town of Castle and connecting with points east and west. But by the early 1900s the Castle mines had played out. Cash-strapped, Harlow sold a 60-some mile stretch of the Jawbone line to the Milwaukee in 1908.

For his efforts, Harlow got a town named after him.

Perhaps the most memorable aspect of the Milwaukee Road was it’s electrified stretch from Harlowton to Avery, Idaho. The idea of an electric line came party because of one man’s effort—John D. Ryan, president of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company and board member of the Milwaukee Road.

In 1912 Ryan had also bought several small hydro-electric power companies and formed the Montana Power Company. He soon began supplying electricity to the copper giant’s mines and smelters.

Ryan arranged for the Milwaukee Road to become a major customer of Montana Power.

Electrification also meant great amounts of copper were needed for the 438 miles of overhead trolleys from Harlowton to Avery. The line’s substations built to transform alternating current (AC) to direct current (DC) also consumed vast amounts of copper wire.

The transformer stations were built roughly 35 miles apart along the electrified reach of the rail line.

Less insidiously than Ryan’s plan, electric powered locomotives performed more efficiently in cold weather versus coal-fired steam engines. The railroad also saved money by reducing the need to build and maintain “water stops” along its route.

On downhill grades, the electric motors were reversed and acted as brakes—spinning the dynamos and returning power to the lines.

The Montana leg of electrification was successful from an engineering and operational standpoint. But the cost of building the Puget Sound Extension soared over budget.

In 1925 the Milwaukee filed for bankruptcy and was just getting on its feet again when the Great Depression hit in 1929.

Relative prosperity followed through World War II. But following a series of bad management decisions the electrified segments were swapped for diesel systems in the early 1970s—just in time for the 1973 oil crisis.

On June 15, 1974 when the last electric run was made, diesels cost twice as much to operate as the electrics.

The Milwaukee Road was already gasping for air by the time the Burlington Northern Railroad was formed in 1970.

Crumbling infrastructure and deteriorating trackage was slowing the Milwaukee trains down to an average of 20 miles-per-hour. Aging rolling stock failed to compete with the BN’s shiny new fleet.

The downward spiral continued with the Milwaukee filing for bankruptcy for the third time in December 1977. Bankruptcy prompted the Milwaukee to abandon the Pacific Extension in 1980—including the entire Montana reach.

The last Milwaukee train rolled through Montana March 15, 1980.

In 1985 the remnants of the Milwaukee restructured as a small regional line, which was eventually taken over by the Soo Line Railroad.

Ironically U.S. Commerce Department auditors discovered that the Pacific Extension wasn’t the unprofitable boat-anchor as believed. They found too late that the Milwaukee’s Pacific Extension's expenses had been double-entered during most of the 1970s.

So ends the strange history of the Milwaukee Road. A history that began in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1848 and ended in a final whimper on January 1,1986.

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