Grant County 50th Anniversary

From the "Spokesman-Review."

February 21, 1959

Railroads of Grant County 1999-2009

The final decade of railroad history in Grant County’s first 100 years saw some significant changes. The various shortlines were content to maintain their small holdings of branches, while those railroads that had given up those branchlines were still chasing further growth.

In 1999, Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF), which operated Grant County’s only cross-country rail line, and the Canadian National Railway announced their intention to merge and form a new corporation entitled the North American Railways, to be headquartered in Montreal, Canada. The United States' Surface Transportation Board (STB), successor to the old Interstate Commerce Commission, placed a 15-month moratorium on all rail mergers, which thus ended this atttempt. This moratorium was partially based on the effects of this merger on the other major rail lines in North America. No one really wanted to go through the headache of combining large systems, in light of the mess created by the breakup of the Northeastern US-based Conrail by competitors Norfolk Southern and CSX earlier in the year.

The Palouse River & Coulee City (PCC), owned by Watco, a holding company of many shortlines across the country, operated the Central Washington (CW) branch from Cheney to Coulee City and another line running from Marshall to Pullman; Watco was making noises about the lack of financial success in running these lines. Finally, in November 2004, Washington State agreed to buy the line from Marshall to Pullman for $6.5 million dollars, but chose not to purchase the 108-mile CW branch.

Preparations to purchase the branch were finalized in early September 2005, but on September 13, Watco withdrew its offer to sell the CW line to the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT). Watco said it wanted to abandon the line and sell the rails, ties and other materials for scrap value because it could not meet its service commitments in a profitable way. WSDOT had planned to forgive the balance ($442,468) of an existing rehabilitation loan to Watco as partial payment for purchasing the branch, and the state legislature had allocated $1.2 million for the line. Instead, Watco closed the line down with an embargo in November 2005.

BNSF jumped into the fray by issuing a written offer to Watco on the following March 2. It offered to provide haulage on the CW branch for a period of up to five years. BNSF said the offer would remain on the table for 45 days while the two companies worked out a formal agreement. The offer called for haulage trains of no more than 78 car units originating on the PCC between Cheney and Coulee City, with rates of $110 per loaded car. BNSF would provide transportation up to a maximum of 2,025 loaded cars per year; any more than that would be moved at BNSF’s discretion.

In the letter to Watco, BNSF also offered to work with PCC and its customers to develop a shuttle facility at Coulee City. “We believe such a facility may reduce total transportation and handling costs and best serve the shippers and producers in the Coulee City-Almira area for the long term,” the letter said.

The embargo came as a surprise to a shipper on the line, who ordered cars to load, only to find they could not be delivered. The state of Washington got involved and filed a complaint with the STB June 26, 2006, regarding the legality of the embargo. Typically, an embargo is used when a line is rendered unusable due to severe circumstances, such as flooding, not as Watco had done due to lack of profitability, deferred maintenance, and competition. Within three days of the STB ruling on the State’s complaint, Watco cancelled the embargo on July 14, but there was an added catch. Watco added a $472 surcharge per car in addition to its regular shipping rate.

On February 8, 2007, Governor Gregoire and Watco signed a binding memorandum for the State to purchase the entire CW branch. It included provisions for reimbursing Watco some of its operating costs in return for its agreement to operate the CW from June 1, 2006, through May 31, 2007, without substantial shipper surcharges. The State officially purchased the branch on May 11; PCC ended operations on May 31.

WSDOT chose US Rail Partners to operate the CW Branch, who formed the Eastern Washington Gateway (EWG) as the company to actually run the trains. The EWG started operations on June 1, 2007.

In the midst of the fray, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe took steps to move away from its heritage. On January 24, 2005, it chose to formally call itself “BNSF Railway,” using unreferenced letters rather than the initials which represented the full names of its predecessor companies.

Growth on branch line railroads in Grant County is still tied to agriculture, just as it was back in 1909. As long as farmers can make money growing crops, the shortlines will prosper. Mainline railroads still take those loads from shortlines and send them to all points, but their main traffic is now international trade and coal. They are not dependent on those farmers.

One hundred years ago, the towns of what became Grant County already had established rail service, and the people of that time relied on it. Today, towns do not count on rail service, and some see it as a nuisance. It is unlikely that something like Grand Coulee Dam, with a dedicated new railroad to support the construction, could be built today.

As the county moves into its eleventh decade, railroad history will continue to be made. The Port of Moses Lake continues with its project to rehabilitate the former Milwaukee Road branch to the airport, with plans to abandon the tracks through the downtown area, and to potentially rebuild part of the former Northern Pacific/Burlington Northern branch from Wheeler to serve the airport. Another situation to watch is the purchase of BNSF by investor Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway. This move will make BNSF a private company again, which hearkens back to the days of James J. Hill, builder of the Great Northern Railway across the Northern Tier states. A final thing to look for would be the resurrection of the Milwaukee Road across Eastern Washington. Rumors have abounded. Legislation has kept the line available to any railroad who might want to rebuild.

Will it happen? Only the next century will tell.

The Railroads of Grant County 1989-1999

The 1990s were busy for railroads, nationally and in Grant County. Consolidations of large roads continued, as well as continued reduction in miles of track operated by those same large roads.

Railroads look to mergers to help promote their competitive position in relationship to other railroads and trucking companies. As a product of mergers, the Burlington Northern had most of its respective lines put together and was looking around for ways to stay ahead of its closest rival, the Union Pacific. In order to do so, BN looked for another railroad that would compliment its traffic base, and not need too much government interference to make it work.

On June 30, 1994, the Burlington Northern and the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe announced plans to merge; they were respectively the largest and smallest by mileage of the "Super Seven," the largest of the then-twelve U.S. Class I railroads. The two systems complemented each other with little overlap. The BN had a major source of traffic in its coal lines out of Wyoming, and the Santa Fe had the best intermodal program of any line. After much wrangling with the Union Pacific for the Santa Fe, BN bought the Santa Fe, and on September 22, 1995, the railroad’s holding companies merged. On December 31, 1996, the railroads were combined as the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway (BNSF).

Both the Santa Fe and the BN had been ridding themselves of branchlines since 1980, with the Santa Fe side being much more aggressive with their removals. So now the combined road, the BNSF, looked hard at the remaining BN lines.

A few of the remaining unprofitable lines in the Palouse were ripped up in the 1990s, along with the last remnant of the Northern Pacific Wahluke Branch between Mesa and Basin City in 1996. BNSF sold its Central Washington branch, which ran between Cheney and Coulee City, on September 19, 1996. The new shortline railroad which started operations on the line was called the Palouse River and Coulee City Railroad (PCC). The Palouse River part of the name was for another BNSF line that it purchased at the same time.

A section of line that the BN had sold back in 1986 was purchased back by the BNSF, and then turned over to a new shortline. The Washington Central (WCRC), which served the Moses Lake area, also operated a former Northern Pacific/Burlington Northern mainline from Kennewick through Yakima to Cle Elum. BNSF wanted it back, to add capacity to freight being transported from the west side of the state. BNSF bought the WCRC on December 4, 1996. Since the BNSF was not interested in operating the line to Moses Lake, it was turned over to the Columbia Basin Railway (CBRW), also on December 4, 1996, which was owned by the same people who had run the WCRC. No changes were made in day-to-day operations, because the same locomotives were used between the WCRC and CBRW.

The BN had been an industry leader in the number of grain hopper cars it operated in the 1990s, and it looked to any source to increase its fleet. But there were still shortages. The BN/BNSF earned more money hauling grain from the Midwest to ports in the Pacific Northwest than they could through shorter-distance trips within Washington. This reduced the supply of empty grain cars for Eastern Washington grain shippers.

The first “Washington Grain Train” was a joint effort between the Port of Walla Walla and the Washington State Department of Transportation. This train was purchased in 1994 with money Washington State received from the Washington State Energy Office. These federal funds came from money awarded to the government as a result of successful litigation against oil companies, who had overcharged consumers. The first train operated near Walla Walla, and generated enough revenue to pay for another train.

The second train, serving the Moses Lake area, was unveiled in April 2000, and was established as a partnership between the State, the Port of Moses Lake, and wheat farmers in Grant and Adams Counties.

There is now a third train operating in the Whitman County area. These cars are bright yellow in color, and the ones serving the Moses Lake area are lettered for the CBRW, along with the large Grain Train graphics.

As the 1990s closed, major railroads were facing boom times and struggling to handle the traffic, but shortlines were facing a lack of traffic, and their decisions were to initiate major changes in the 2000s.

Railroads of Grant County 1979-1989

The 1980s were a time of great changes in railroading in general, and Grant County in particular. The railroad industry was anticipating the great changes to be brought about by deregulation, which removed a great amount of control from the Interstate Commerce Commission. The Milwaukee Road, in its final bankruptcy, declined then disappeared. The Burlington Northern continued to downsize its holdings and prune many miles out of its tracks in the county.

When Amtrak formed in 1971, it bought the 1950s-era passenger cars and locomotives from other railroads canceling passenger service. By the 1970s, the cars were old, getting more expensive to maintain, and still steam-heated and cooled. When money was made available for Amtrak to acquire new cars soon after, plans were made to acquire bi-level cars based on ones built in 1956 for the Santa Fe Railway (these were purchased by Amtrak when it started up). The initial order of 235 Superliner cars was placed on April 2, 1975, later being increased to 284 cars for $241 million in total. The first coach was delivered in October of 1978, followed by a full complement of coaches which debuted on the Chicago-Milwaukee service on February 26, 1979. It wasn’t until a full eight months later that enough other types of passenger cars had been delivered to make up a long-haul train; the westbound Empire Builder from Chicago to Seattle, via the old Great Northern mainline through the county, carried the first full consist of Superliners in the nation.

When the Milwaukee Road was in its bankruptcy period, traffic on the Moses Lake branch was considered very lucrative and was thought to be an important part of keeping the railroad afloat. In 1979, a potato shipper operating facilities in both Moses Lake and Othello committed to shipping an additional 1,000 refrigerated piggyback trailers long haul to Chicago if the Milwaukee agreed to maintain service; another 1,000 refrigerated long-haul trailer shipments to points east of this were committed by the Pacific Northwest Shipper's Association as part of the reorganization of the Milwaukee. American Potato separately guaranteed 232 carloads long-hauled through Chicago. U&I sugar promised 426 carloads from a place called Scalley (which the locals would eventually call Wheeler) to Minneapolis if equipment was available. This was all long-haul and represented an additional $2-3 million in revenue available to the Milwaukee if it elected to upgrade its tracks and not abandon them.

Milwaukee Road Historian Micheal Sol has this to say about the Milwaukee Bankruptcy:
“It had the lowest-cost operation of its peer railroads, it was the most profitable and fastest-growing part of the Milwaukee System – and yet the abandonment of Lines West was said to be the most important priority when the bankruptcy court Trustee took over the Milwaukee in 1978. After he positioned the line for abandonment by driving off traffic and withdrawing service, his receipt of a consulting report, stating that the only realistic likelihood of a successful reorganization of the Milwaukee Road had to include Lines West, led to his abrupt resignation. Certainly, the large Seattle newspapers saw that Washington State’s governor at the time was entirely reliant on a Burlington Northern vice president for her political position and her opposition to efforts to save the Milwaukee may have proved fatal to the effort. The Seattle P-I remarked in an editorial April 27, 1986: ‘We let rail competition across the Northern Tier states slip away six years ago, thanks to a disinterested Governor Dixie Lee Ray and a less-than-aggressive port. Their lack of action spelled the end of the Milwaukee Road.’"

Milwaukee Road trackage in Grant County that was abandoned outright on March 1, 1980, included the following: the mainline to Warden eastward to Miles City, Montana; from Royal Junction westward to Easton; from Warden to Sieler on the Moses Lake Branch; and from Tiflis to Ruff and beyond on the Marcellus branch. On August, 21, 1980, Burlington Northern bought the section between Warden and Othello, and the remaining branch to Moses Lake, since there was great traffic still to be had in those areas. BN had been providing service over these lines due to a March, 18, 1980, ICC order to continue service. Cash price averaged $52,500 per mile. Up to this time, the BN had crossed over the Milwaukee mainline at Warden on a bridge, but to make a better connection between the two lines, BN created a single-grade connection, getting rid of the expensive-to-maintain bridge. Part of the Moses Lake branch was abandoned between Warden and Seiler, with the spur track from Seiler now connecting to the BN track at Scalley, the old location of the U&I sugar plant. This is the current arrangement today.

The Milwaukee Road depot in Moses Lake was torn down in the fall of 1981, after standing empty for a time, because of the general decline of the railroad.

Not long after all these changes, the major eruption of Mt. St. Helens caused the railroads some measure of grief. The westbound Amtrak Empire Builder, which had been held at Spokane until the next day, picked up over 140 stranded I-90 motorists at Cheney, Ritzville, Lind, and Sprague, and brought them to Seattle. An eastbound train also carried emergency breathing equipment on May 21 to several law enforcement agencies in Eastern Washington. Everything northeast of the Cascade Mountains on the BN was covered with up to six inches of ash as far east as the west side of the Rocky Mountains at Essex, Montana, in Glacier National Park. The Railroad coped with this fallout by changing all locomotive filters daily, and was able to continue limited transcontinental mainline operations under considerable delays. In addition, it was necessary to cancel all train operations for several days on the Portland-Seattle via Tacoma mainline due to flood-threatened bridges over the Cowlitz and Toutle Rivers in the vicinity of Centralia, Kelso and Longview. In an odd twist, the NP (and later the BN), because of its land grant dating back to the 1860s, owned the land that formed the top of Mt. St. Helens. The BN deeded the summit back to the United States, minus the 1,314 feet that had blown away, for inclusion in the Mt. St. Helens National Volcanic Monument in 1982.

On October 14, 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed the “Staggers Rail Act” into law, significantly deregulating the American railroad industry. Among the many changes it allowed, those that affected Grant County the most were the streamlined process allowed for abandoning unprofitable branch lines, and the right given to shippers to make rate increases, rather than the previous across-the-board increase.

The BN acquired the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway on November 21. This merger removed many of the remaining GN and NP people in management, allowing the Frisco to control the newly-enlarged BN.

Closer to home, the Ephrata depot, which had been expanded in 1944 to 41x 204 feet, was now shortened to 48 feet long in 1981; Amtrak didn’t use the building, and the BN didn’t need the full space.

In October of 1981, the Empire Builder returned to the former GN line at the request of the BN, who was trying to close its line over Stampede Pass. The new executives from the Frisco thought that having three railroad lines across the state was one too many, so they chose to close the most expensive to operate the other, the line over Stampede Pass. When Amtrak at its inception took over the Empire Builder, it had chosen to operate the train via Spokane, the Tri-Cities, Yakima, Auburn, to Seattle; now it would operate via Spokane, Wenatchee, to Seattle.

The effects of the Staggers Act finally hit the area hard in 1983 when last of the NP Wahluke branch between Sagehill (near Mattawa) and Basin City was pulled up. Part of the NP Connell Northern branch between Wheeler and Adrian was also let go. Long-standing buildings were closed too. The Krupp/Marlin depot on the old GN was retired in 1984, due to age and consolidation of depot agents in a centralized calling center, instead of in the communities the railroad served.

Grant County was not the only one losing rail during this time period. The Palouse area saw the bulk of its rail let go during this time. Discussion of abandonment of the branch in Douglas County, from Columbia River to Mansfield, caused the Central Washington Grain Growers to expand their facilities in Coulee City to take over grain shipments if the line to Mansfield was abandoned. Construction of a new 210,000-bushel grain storage and speedy grain-car loader was started in 1984 and completed a few months later.

The Mansfield branch was finally closed in 1985. The “Wenatchee World” had this to say about it:
“Central Washington Grain Growers, the primary wheat cooperative in Douglas County, fought for years to keep that line open. Now that the line no longer is in use, most of the grain is being trucked from various locations in the county to Coulee City. It costs about 8 cents per bushel more to ship grain to Coulee City. But with rail charges from there 4 cents per bushel less, growers now pay a total of just 4 cents per bushel more.”

The BN sold a large part of its Grant County operations to the Washington Central Railroad Company (WCRC), which started operations on October 13, 1986. While the bulk of the new WCRC operated in the Yakima area, a busy section was operated out of Warden. One part was the old Connell Northern branch of the NP that ran from Connell to the end of track at Wheeler. There was also the spur track off this line at Bassett Junction to Schrag. It also included parts of the Milwaukee Road that the BN had purchased after the Milwaukee had pulled out; these tracks involved part of the mainline between Warden and Royal Junction, and part of the Moses Lake branch from Seiler. BN was selling off many of its branch lines over its network; the sale of lines to the WCRC allowed the BN to retain the long haul of freight, but disposed of the expensive operation of the branch line. The new short line had lower costs and would help retain freight traffic on the branch.

Derailments at Quincy capped both ends of the decade. While the one in 1979 was pretty small, the 1989 one saw locomotives on their sides, railroad cars accordioned into a pile. The train had hit a car trying to cross the tracks, which was then dragged into a switch in the track. The only fatality was the driver of the car.

The 1980s were one of the biggest eras of change, while the 1990s were to see the era of mega-railroads. Many people were upset by the loss of Milwaukee, but those outside the fracas didn’t seem to notice the railroad’s existence. All railroads were generally considered invisible to all but the interested few by the time the next decade rolled around.

Railroads of Grant County 1969-1979

The 1970s marked the continued decline of the railroad industry, as the chokehold of the Interstate Commerce Commission never let up. Railroad companies tried many ways to stay financially afloat, including merging with rivals or parallel lines. This was done to reduce overhead expenses and redundant tracks. Another tactic was to continue reduction of passenger trains which had previously been mandated to continue by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC); this major effort culminated with the formation of Amtrak to remove passenger train losses from the railroads.

Railroads in the northeast United States were in worse shape. In an ill-fated merger, the New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad were allowed to merge in 1968 as the Penn Central. They were forced by the ICC to take on the bankrupt New Haven railroad as well. The resulting mega-railroad was not successful, as these railroads were in poor shape. Penn Central declared bankruptcy on June 21, 1970. It was the largest corporate bankruptcy in American history up until that time.

Some railroads did not fare well during this decade. The Chicago Rock Island & Pacific (The Rock) was trying to merge with the Union Pacific (UP) starting back in 1964, but the ICC took its time in studying the idea. During this time, the Rock was floundering and was unable to keep up on maintenance. The UP backed out of the deal and the Rock went into bankruptcy. In January 1980, it was determined the Rock could not be successfully reorganized and it was ordered by the bankruptcy court to be liquidated and sold; the resulting action made the Rock the largest bankruptcy liquidation in U.S. history at the time.

All eyes were on the newly-formed Burlington Northern (BN), which was allowed to merge on March 2, 1970; the Great Northern (GN), Northern Pacific (NP), and Chicago Burlington & Quincy were thought to be strong railroads, but they too were in a slow decline. When the government instituted regulations on smog and acid rain, the low-sulfur coals being mined alongside tracks in Wyoming and Montana became of great financial importance to the BN.

The Milwaukee Road benefited from the BN merger since the ICC forced the BN to grant use of its track to key cities such as Portland, Oregon. Changes in the way it was allowed to interchange freight with the BN allowed it to become a formidable competitor to the BN, which had some marketing challenges in its early days. The Milwaukee gained traffic and was able to make more money than it ever had on its line to the Pacific coast.

Previously, the Milwaukee had sought a merger with the Chicago & Northwestern, as both lines had many miles of marginal track in the Midwest, with the hope of making one strong system out of the two. This stemmed from the resignation of the Milwaukee president in 1957, and his replacement by an inexperienced successor, so the board of directors thought the best course was to get rid of the railroad somehow. The ICC had asked for terms that the Northwestern was not able to accept, and so this merger did not happen. Right after the BN merger, the owners of the Northwestern offered to sell their railroad company to the Milwaukee Road, instead of merging. Their offer was rejected, even though the Milwaukee had sought nearly this very same thing over the last decade. Management had decided that a merger with a larger road was their only salvation. Right away, they petitioned for the Milwaukee to be included in the merger with the UP and the Rock.

In 1973, the Milwaukee then sought reopening of the BN merger proceedings, to be included into the railroad that now surrounded it. This was rejected because the ICC felt it had already granted numerous concessions to the Milwaukee in the BN merger to strengthen it. The BN was clear that they had no interest in this petition.

In February 1973, and against the advice of studies conducted by both the railroad and independent groups, the Milwaukee decided to scrap its electrification scheme. The board of directors considered the electrification scheme an impediment to its merger and consolidation plans, and believed that the money required to maintain it would be better spent elsewhere. The high copper prices of the time, and the resulting $10 million the railroad estimated it would get for selling off the copper overhead wire, contributed to the decision.

The surveys found that an investment of $39 million would close the electrification gap between Avery, Idaho, and Othello, and provide the finances to buy new locomotives and upgrade the electrical equipment all along the line. Furthermore, the displaced diesel locomotives could be used elsewhere, reducing the requirement to purchase new, dropping the true cost of the plan to only $18 million. General Electric even proposed underwriting the financing because of the railroad's poor financial position.

Rejecting this, the railroad dismantled its electrification just as the 1973 oil crisis took hold. By 1974, when the electrification was shut down, the electric locomotives operated at half the cost of the diesels that replaced them. Worse, the railroad spent $39 million – as much as the GE-sponsored revitalization plan – to buy more diesel locomotives to replace the electrics, and only received $5 million for the copper scrap because prices had fallen over the course of the year.

Power agreements written when the railroad was young had been very favorable to the Milwaukee, amounting to nearly the free use of electricity to operate its trains. With the discontinuation of electrification, there were no agreements, and the railroad was seen as a regular industrial user of power. The Milwaukee discovered that it now had large electrical bills for the operation of stations, signals and equipment.

The badly-maintained track, which was the part of the system most in need of renewal, was never touched.

Despite slow decisions by the ICC, railroads continued to try to reduce underperforming branch lines. At the time, branches were seen as very important to the survival of any town of significance; now they were seen as a liability to the railroad, because of the lack of traffic and the upkeep of the tracks.

In our area of the country, some railroad expansion was still happening. The laying of track on what would be called the NP’s Wahluke Branch to the Mattawa area began in July of 1969. The first 31 miles of the line were to be finished by year’s end, but soon stopped. The branch was about 55 miles in length, as measured from Mesa, but rails never reached any further than mile 21. Bridges of heavy design were built to the end of the prepared grade. The railroad left the line unfinished because business conditions changed and felt that there wasn’t enough agricultural development in the region to justify completion; it had been anticipated that water from the Bureau of Reclamation would increase productivity of the area.

Railroading changed in Grant County in a big way on March 2, 1970 with the formation of the BN from the GN and the NP. This merger meant that most of the railroad track in the county was now controlled by one railroad. Not much changed operationally, as there was the old GN mainline, plus the NP branch lines.

The formation of Amtrak on May 1, 1971 brought even greater change. While branch line passenger trains in the county were long gone, the GN/BN was operating the Empire Builder and the Western Star, pretty much as it had been running it separately since the 1950s. When Amtrak took over passenger service from the mainline railroads, it used fairly erratic criteria for deciding which lines to service; some routes were chosen based on the need in the area for service, others for their population centers, and others by the influence of congressional members vying for the nostalgic service to continue in their own jurisdictions.

Under this plan, it discontinued the two remaining NP mainline trains, and the GN Western Star. The Empire Builder was to continue to run, but would no longer operate via the old GN line through Grant County, instead being rerouted using the old NP mainline through neighboring Adams county as part of its new route between Spokane and Seattle. This move was seen as a way to tap the larger passenger markets of the Tri-Cities and Yakima versus Wenatchee and the comparatively smaller Grant County towns.

The Grant County Journal lamented in its May 6, 1971 edition, “Amtrak will never hold the adventure and excitement for the youngsters, and it will never replace the memory for the oldsters that was offered by the Western Star and the Empire Builder!”

This prediction wasn’t entirely true. In Coulee City, The News-Standard reported that a late January 1972 trip of cub scouts from Coulee City to Hartline and back was well received. Trips such as this had been arranged from time to time for the scouts, and there never seemed to be any lack of enthusiasm from either the children or their adult chaperones, no matter which line of locomotives they rode.

Not long after this, the BN depot in Coulee City was burgled and a small amount of cash stolen in the few hours the railroad agent was away. Two years later, a car loaded with John Deere drills headed for Jim Jess Implement was found to have defective brakes after it rolled under its own power through Coulee City, stopping 30 feet off the west end of the tracks. While incidents such as these were not too uncommon in railroad history, it was another example of the many frustrations that small-town stations endured during the decline of the railroads.

Another Amtrak casualty was the end of railway post office service on the old GN line. The service had been running from Williston, North Dakota, to Seattle since 1934. Now the mail would either go by truck or by a new train offered by the BN, but no sorting en route would be done. Railway post office service had offered speedy delivery of mail at first-class rates that even express or priority service cannot achieve today.

In 1972, the Milwaukee Road ended electric locomotive service on its Coast Division mainline between Othello and Tacoma. This decision was anticipated, since diesel locomotives had been found to be easier to use on this section of line and faster than the old electric locomotives. The overhead wires were maintained in working order for a time to keep copper thieves at bay.

When the Milwaukee Road began to make noises that they had no desire to operate their own line anymore, and petitioned to reopen the BN merger proceedings from three years earlier, they found hope in the possibility of being included and thus selling off their company. As part of this attempt, BN officials made an inspection trip of that line in 1973. In Moses Lake, they noted:

“The Moses Lake Port District is actively attempting to attract new industries to their facility, which is the former Larson Air Force Base at Moses Lake and is served exclusively by the Milwaukee Road. To date they have not attracted any major accounts; however, they are embarked upon a very extensive campaign and we are hopeful that this will result in a major development that will be mutually beneficial to Moses Lake and our railroad.”

At the Milwaukee station of McDonald, near Moses Lake, the officials were equally positive. “This area has enjoyed a very substantial growth in food processing plants. Major developments of importance have been the location of the American Potato Company’s dried potato plant at McDonald and the continued expansion of Chef Reddy Foods at Othello.”

Further south at Royal City, they found similar patterns of growth and development. “The Milwaukee Road Land Company has an industrial park area located at Royal City which is in the development stages. Several small industries have located in this park and our Industrial Development people and Sales Department are continually working with various parties to attract new industry to this industrial park.”

None of these positive appraisals resulted in BN’s acceptance of the Milwaukee’s proposal, though. Already it was apparent that there were too many repairs to be made on the Milwaukee’s track, and the BN wasn’t interested in the large number of Milwaukee branchlines across the Midwest.

Two years later, in 1975, the Milwaukee Road conducted a traffic study of its light-density lines. It found that the line to Royal City generated over 450 cars of freight, but that it might retain all of it using “substituted service to Smyrna or Othello.” The branch line from Tiflis to Marcellus generated 2326 cars of freight, but it was thought all of this traffic would be lost to the BN if abandoned; however, it was noted that “additional grain possible in the future as improved irrigation is planned for this area with completion of a second Bacon Siphon Tunnel by 1980.”

On the other hand, changes in railroad needs caused the removal of the 1898 Wilson Creek depot in 1975.

At the Air Base Spur to the west near Ephrata, a large scrap yard had been established by the Purdy Company. While a couple of cabooses escaped from there and are in private hands in Grant County, most railcars were scrapped. A brakeman for the GN/BN gave this account of his perspective on operations there:

“The dismantling of freight cars went on for quite some time. I remember working it and the conductor was named Don. I guess the scrap yard operator and Don had words about the way cars were spotted or something like that to make him one mad conductor. When I worked the job west bound, we cut the train off in the bottom of what they call the ‘Soap Lake Sag,’ we would then run light engine [no cars] to the switch and drop the conductor off, then return to train, by this time the swing man had bled the brakes off the cut to be dropped into spur track and was back at the cut. We would couple up, give him the pin [set the couplers for release] and away we would go, wide-open up hill. At around 20 MPH the Engineer would give me the pin, I would pull the cut-lever on the engine [pull the lever to release the pin], and away we went again, wide-open. After the engine passed over the switch, the conductor would line the switch for the spur track [change from the mainline to the spur track]. The cars that we dropped into the spur, went sailing around a curve and they either ran out of track or would hit cars already in the track. The dust cloud that followed was best described as mushroom, going maybe 7 or 8 stories in height. I often wondered if we ever put any workers in danger, but I never questioned the conductor.”

Another piece of railroading disappeared when long-time railroad agent C.W. ‘Skip’ Connor, BN agent for Coulee City, retired June 1, 1977 after 40 years with the railroad. The railroad decided to not replace Connor in Coulee City and the depot closed at the end of the work day.

The Milwaukee Road filed for bankruptcy for the third time on December 19, 1977.
An ICC audit later discovered that, for some reason, the railroad had been double-entering expenses for its line to the Pacific coast during most of the 1970s. Far from the unprofitable boat-anchor the railroad and the bankruptcy trustees said it was, the ICC found that the line had been returning a profit to the railroad even through 1978, at which time traffic was severely down because of the road's decision to not maintain the track and because of claims of damaged shipments due to derailments.

That year also saw the abandonment of the former NP branch from Odair to Adrian, known as the Adrian Cutoff. There had been no shipments on this stretch of track since completion of the Dry Coulee Siphon by the Bureau of Reclamation. The NP had not operated over the line much before that, save for cement shipments for construction of Grand Coulee Dam, handed off by the GN for shipment to the dam in the late 1930s to early 1940s. The BN hardly used the line at all, save for some car storage.

The BN held permission from the ICC to complete the old NP Wahluke branch as late as July 1978. Beyond the mid 1970s, the line was not used beyond Basin City due to a slide in the vicinity of milepost 11 or 12, though the rail was good beyond it.

In 1979, the Coulee City Women’s Club became aware of plans to dismantle the Coulee City train depot and asked the BN for permission to use it as a senior or community center. It was donated to the Women’s Club, who in turn gave it to the Coulee City Senior citizens, provided it be moved to another site. Former resident Tom Price donated land so the depot would be permanently positioned. A total of $2500 was donated by the Coulee City Women’s Club for the move and renovation.

The seventh decade of Grant County’s history was bleak, but a light had begun to grow at the end of the tunnel. Plans were emerging to deregulate the railroad industry and even the Basin saw a bright future.

Railroads of Grant County 1959-1969

The 1960s was a time when the public thought of the railroads, if they thought of them at all, as something relegated to history. People were finding airplanes and automobiles much more to their liking; the new Interstate-5 freeway between Everett and Tacoma, for example, was expected to cut commute times by 50 percent. Seattle’s Boeing was producing its 747 Jumbojet, and working on its prototype for a supersonic civilian transport plane – the earliest precursor to the French-British Concorde. Floating bridges and hydroplanes rounded out the new technology popping up all across the state and country.

The passenger train, though, was in its death throes. The freight side of the business was still somewhat profitable, but it was severely hampered by the Interstate Commerce Commission and its propensity to deny rate increases. The ICC also forced railroads to retain the failing passenger trains, causing a financial strain on rail lines. Many roads were near bankruptcy, such as the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific, which sought a merger with the Union Pacific in an attempt to keeps its lines in the black. The ICC prevented the union for more than ten years, before “The Rock” finally slipped into bankruptcy in the 1970s. The “Standard Railway of the World” – the Pennsylvania Railroad – and its rival New York Central, both having been extremely successful railroads in their own right, were in major financial trouble when they merged in 1968. Their efforts did not succeed either.

The Great Northern and Northern Pacific were doing well enough, especially when the profits of their subsidiary – the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy – were added, but business could have been better. They presented their petition to merge the two companies and their subsidiaries before the ICC. There were four such attempts: in 1896, 1901, 1927, and 1955. This last attempt lasted from 1955 until 1970, and though ultimately successful, it demonstrated the sluggishness of the Commission.

The rest of the world seemed to be moving at a frenzied pace, engaging in public protests, political controversy, and technological advances beyond the imagination of previous generations. The public was enamored with the space race, fueled by the first manned space mission by the Soviets. The world saw the launching of numerous astronauts, cosmonauts, and various models of spacecraft into the heavens, until Grant County’s sixth decade closed with the Apollo 8 mission escaping earth’s gravitational field and orbiting the moon.

Trains as an exciting frontier were relegated to the dusty tomes of history. Now hydroplanes found their way to the Columbia River at the Tri-Cities, military and civilian planes were speeding through the air daily, the microchip had been invented, and Boeing was testing their first Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. Seattle also created the hi-tech Space Needle for its Century 21 World’s Fair in 1962, showing off the great leaps in technology for which the decade was known.

Here in Grant County, though, it was business as usual for the railroad industry. Just days after the county’s fiftieth anniversary, the Great Northern announced plans to remodel the depot at Quincy. Ultimately it was moved slightly east, literally abutting its own foundation, and was extended by 52 feet to more than double its previous size.

The Northern Pacific farther south began planning for its Wahluke Branch that same year. The Wahluke Slope, at the southwest corner of the county, was scheduled to receive its first water from the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project on 125,000 acres of dry desert land. NP agricultural director Ken Cook predicted record yields for the Pacific Northwest in sugar beets, potatoes, dry beans, fruit, mint and grains. At a cost of $6 million, the line was to begin at the mainline in Connell; instead it was constructed from Mesa’s mainline, and stretched almost 55 miles west to Mattawa, without any reason given for the change.

At the same time, the Milwaukee had also submitted an application to the ICC to construct a line to the Wahluke Slope, crossing through the Saddle Mountains from Beverly southward. The company claimed it had been planning this move since 1912, and thus had first right to construct. The ICC again took its own sweet time in responding, leaving the Basin to flourish for eight years before issuing its decision.

Two years later, in May of 1961, the Milwaukee Road’s Olympian was discontinued; the passenger service west of Deer Lodge, Montana, ended, leaving the GN’s Empire Builder and Western Star services as Grant County’s only passenger lines.

At this time, though, it seemed Washington State and the Columbia Basin were opening up to the world. In November, Martin Luther King Jr. visited Seattle as part of a civil rights lecture series there, and all of Seattle was in hot preparation for the world’s fair the next year. President Kennedy had announced plans to attend the fair, but cancelled en route to deal with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Closer to Grant County, the new steel tied-arch bridge across the Columbia River at Vantage opened in 1962; reports claimed it would “open the Columbia Basin.” The fascination with the new bridge improved highway conditions, ultimately contributing to more automobile traffic and less rail riders.

On September 25, 1963, rail service in Grant County suffered another major blow. Food processing was fast becoming the foundation of the economic stability in Grant County, due to the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project; sixty percent of the land in the county was being used for farming. On this particular day, the factory at the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company in Moses Lake exploded, causing seven deaths, numerous injuries, and $5 million in damages to the plant. At a time when the plant was supplying enough sugar to supply the entire state of Washington for a year, the loss in business was felt by both the NP and the Milwaukee.

Then, on November 6 – just two weeks before the assassination of President Kennedy – the GN suffered a devastating accident in Quincy, killing two trainmen and injuring many others. The eastbound local, dubbed the Alcoa Local for the aluminum ingots it carried from the plant at Rock Island, failed to stop at the siding and manually switch tracks. It plowed head-on into the parked mainline train of 144 freight cars, shredding the shell of the cab from its frame and telescoping four of the fourteen cars behind it into both air and soil. The leading locomotives on each train were so tightly twisted together that it was difficult to separate them, said the Grant County Daily Journal.

The accident in Quincy’s business neighborhood also disconnected communication lines alongside the tracks, and blocked north-south traffic in Quincy for at least six hours.

The engineer and fireman on the smaller switcher were both killed, and the engineer of the larger eastbound train was sent to Sacred Heart in Spokane unconscious and in critical condition. Others were released with minor injuries.

The next year, the United States Supreme Court decided that most freight train and yard firemen positions should be eliminated. After rail companies made the switch from steam locomotives to the new, more-efficient diesels, the unions stepped in to retain these positions, though it had already become an obsolete job. The Supreme Court only confirmed what the railroads and the firemen themselves already knew to be the case: the rail industry was changing, and the employees were going to be required to change with it.

Sometimes those changes weren’t instigated by the rail companies, though. In November of 1965, Moses Lake’s Larson Air Force Base finally closed, despite the new war raging in Vietnam. The government had long since discontinued use of the base as such, attempting to convert it into a regional missile base; these plans failed after the construction of three underground missile silos which were literally carved out of the basalt rock beneath the desert floor.

Grant County residents worked tirelessly to convert the base into some kind of appropriate civilian use, finally settling on an airport alongside the new Big Bend Community College. The college began classes in 1962, and the airport opened for business four years later.

This, too, affected business on the railroads. As a military base – and even as a missile base – supplies were shuttled in for both construction and operation, and out for distribution or transport to other bases. Now, business on the Milwaukee spur into the former base slowed to a crawl.

Further north, Coulee City adapted to the changes with high hopes for progress. The Northern Pacific depot was remodeled to accommodate the expected business generated for Grand Coulee Dam by the truck loading facility at Odair. The nondescript white warehouse had been constructed in the 1950s to offload supplies for the dam, from NP trains arriving in Coulee City onto trucks, which would then transport the materials around the now-full Banks Lake irrigation reservoir.

The NP assumed that, due to the upcoming construction of the third powerhouse at the dam, there would be a great deal of paperwork generated by the influx of supplies by rail. The second story of the depot was removed, and the main floor was strengthened and updated, something that had not been done since it was built in the frontier days of the 1890s.

Construction on the depot was expected to be completed about the same time that construction on the powerhouse started, but the latter didn’t happen until the following year.

Coulee City seemed to be the only bright spot in Grant County’s rail future, though. To the west, the Great Northern depot at Crater, just northeast of Trinidad, closed in 1966. This wasn’t a surprise, considering that less-than-carload freight – smaller amounts of parcel deliveries than required a full railcar – had dropped from 51 million tons to less than 2% of that in the previous half century. Smaller stations simply were not profitable.

Other forms of shipment were beginning to take hold across the state, as well as the nation. The Grant County airport opened in October of that year, and over the next year and a half, Boeing announced both the 737 passenger jet and the 747 Jumbo jet. On the ground, Interstate-5 opened between Everett and Tacoma on January 31, 1967; when the Everett to Seattle section opened two years earlier, it created such excitement for drivers that three accidents occurred during just the opening ceremonies.

Despite all this, the ICC granted the NP authorization to construct its proposed branchline to the Wahluke Slope on October 5, 1967. It denied the Milwaukee Road’s similar request, claiming that the NP’s plans served the entirety of the new farming region, compared to the ICC’s understanding that Milwaukee’s plan would only serve 1/3 of that area. Other reasons involved the cost of constructing a line through or around the Saddle Mountains, the reasonable inclusion of the produce from the Wahluke into the Yakima or Tri-Cities markets, and Milwaukee’s reactionary attitude toward the NP application for construction authority.

The Milwaukee fought the decision, petitioning to have the case reopened. It argued that it had long intended to provide rail service to this area as soon as irrigation was offered there, and that the potential of 100 cars would be more appropriate to their small-scale local service in the Royal Slope region than to the NP’s 19,000 cars in the Yakima market.

The ICC held its ground, granting authority only to the NP.

Other than this heated dispute, railroad activity in Grant County was quiet in the late 1960s. Construction materials for Grand Coulee Dam, grain and produce grown in the Columbia Basin, and products generated at the county’s processing plants continued to be shipped across the rails. As the 1970s approached, these activities continued but did so under efforts to consolidate railroad services into only a handful of large railroad empires. The years of railroad competition within Grant County were drawing to a close.

Railroads of Grant County 1949-1959

The 1950s can be considered a time of general decline of the railroad across the nation, as competition from the automobile, trucking industry and airlines took away a great deal of rail business. To be sure, the railroads tried to hold onto as much of it as they could. The period following WWII showed a decrease in rail traffic, but the start of the Korean War in 1950 increased traffic again significantly. On August 27 of that year, President Harry Truman ordered the Army to take control of U.S. railroads to prevent a strike between railroad workers and owners over pay and rule changes; this attempt was largely unsuccessful, leaving the railroads in the hands of the military while the strike ensued for 21 months coincident with the war.

Passenger trains also saw a marked decline, despite the new streamliners finally being offered by the railroads, a noted improvement over pre-WWII cars. Introduction of the dome car was another attempt at improving ridership by offering passengers nearly the same view as seen by the train crews up in the locomotives. The first domes appeared on the Milwaukee in 1952, on the NP in 1954, and on the GN in 1955.

In Grant County, railroad news was still focused on the Grand Coulee Dam project. Washington State’s highway department and the Bureau of Reclamation had undertaken the relocation of the highway between Coulee City and Grand Coulee at an estimated cost of 4 ½ million dollars. The largest highway project the eastern side of the state had ever seen, it was to include seven bridges and would be able to handle the heavy trucks which would now carry equipment to and from the dam site; the government railway on the coulee floor was to be abandoned when the new irrigation reservoir flooded over it. The new highway along the coulee wall was due to be finished in the latter half of 1950.

As part of the track removal project, a trans-shipment building was constructed at Odair for the Bureau of Reclamation. The 75-ton, bridge-type crane inside the station would transfer equipment from railcars on the Northern Pacific siding to trucks, for the remaining leg of the journey to Grand Coulee Dam. Bids for the construction of this building were opened in June of 1949, and called for a completion date three months after acceptance. Don Adkins, Inc. of Ellensburg won the bid.

Companies were allowed to submit bids for the track removal project on August 31, 1950. The Star reported these statistics on August 10:

The “sagebrush special” or “gopher chaser,” as it was sometimes called, … hauled more than twelve million barrels of cement, approximately 46,500 carloads for the construction of the dam; 77 million pounds of reinforcing steel, and ten million pounds of steel for the 18 foot penstocks, which feed the giant generators of the dam.

The article also reported on two employees who had been with the government railroad since its construction in 1934; Mr. Floyd Craig and Mr. Haskell Finch were still employed at the time as conductor and engineer, respectively.

At the dam end of the line, crews began tearing out Crick and Kuney’s original construction tracks at river level on the downriver side of the dam. Plans were underway in December of 1949 to make significant improvements to the structure of the river channel, including laying in armor rock in order to protect riverbank stability; the contract for this project went for nearly $1.7 million.

A casualty of this necessity was the “famous little tourist train” described in “The Star,” Grand Coulee’s newspaper, on December 29, 1949. Claiming a short run both in history and physical distance, the tourist train had run at river level from the base of the dam toward the bridge downstream. This short line was now to be removed, since all construction at the base of the dam was complete.
The next summer, President Truman made a visit to Grand Coulee Dam and Dry Falls State Park. In his address at the dedication of Grand Coulee Dam on May 11, he said, “I say to you that the American spirit which blazed the Oregon Trail is not dead. Here in the Northwest you are still pushing back frontiers. There is no better example of that than this great dam.”
Soon, the president was involved in matters of war, and the Northern Pacific was quickly distancing itself from any perceived ties to Korea. On its company logo, NP had used the monad – the yin-yang symbol used for good luck in Asian cultures – which was also the centerpiece of the Korean flag. The Coulee City News ran an ad by local agent C.W. Connor explaining the logo choice on October 19, 1950, just four months after the war with North Korea began. The ad claimed that, in America, the symbol had become known as a sign of good transportation.

On the Great Northern line, 1951 brought hopeful attempts at increasing passenger service. Winchester built a new depot to replace the smaller shelter from 1945. On June 3, the GN introduced a newly-equipped Empire Builder, complete with five new sets of trains. Meanwhile, GN took the old Empire Builder trains and combined them with another new set, placing them into service as the Western Star, which took over the schedule of the Oriental Limited. The Oriental Limited had been revived in 1947, after being used between 1905 and 1931. All three of these trains were daily visitors in Grant County, on their way through from Chicago to Seattle and back.

The next year saw expansion in industry, specifically in Grant County. The Coulee City News reported on February 8, 1952, the addition of a new grain elevator for Centennial Mills in Coulee City. The three steel bins would cost $190,000 and increase storage capacity at the facility by roughly 110,000 bushels.

Farther south in the county, a 1600-acre plot on Wheeler Road in Moses Lake became the newest U&I sugar plant in the country, converting sugar beets grown in the region into granulated sugar for both commercial and domestic use.

To aid in the movement of supplies and finished product, two railroads built spurs out to the plant. The NP created spur off its Wheeler siding, and the Milwaukee’s spur location came to be called “Scalley,” after U&I’s local manager, Paul Scalley.

Not far from this location, the NP suffered a derailment on December 27, 1952, It occurred at Bassett Junction on its old Connell Northern line between Warden and Wheeler where the “Ritzville Branch” to Schrag takes off. There were 3 deaths, all of which were in the locomotive cab, which was crushed. The accident was caused by a defective track switch.

Fifteen months later, the NP discontinued its passenger service between Coulee City and Spokane. NP train No. 315 carried 30 passengers into Coulee City on Saturday, February 27, 1954. A daily train carrying mail, passengers and express for 65 years, the return trip carried Mr. Wayne Bolyard, who said the historic ride cost him 50 cents.

The NP’s truck service had already taken over in-state cargo shipments, cream from local dairies, and mail service. The Railroad Post Office at Coulee City had officially closed on January 31, 1954.

In January of 1955, the Milwaukee Road discontinued the western segment of the Columbian, their Chicago-to-Tacoma secondary passenger train. The train now went no further west than Avery, Idaho. By the end of the year it too was gone entirely.

The handwriting seemed to be on the wall, but too many were ignoring it. A few railroads attempted to accept that the truck was the way of the future by offering to move the trailers cross-country via flatcar; a generous compromise, this now-common style of service continues today on all major lines.

Other railroads continued to try to improve their fleets in order to save their business. One of these new improvements was the mechanical refrigerator car. Previously, perishable traffic required special cars cooled with massive amounts of ice, which were refilled multiple times en route. The mechanical version used a diesel engine to run a compressor and blowers to cool the car. It only needed periodic maintenance and fuel instead of very expensive ice-making and -storing facilities at strategic parts of the rail network.

Then, in June of 1956, President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act into law, creating a 20-year highway construction project across the country; it was the largest public works project to date. Known as the interstate highway act, it upset the tenuous balance of business between the three forms of transportation available to intercity travelers. Railroads at the time transported 34.8% of passengers, while busses moved 31% and airlines 31.5%.

The building of the interstate highway system was a major blow to many railroads. At first trains were used in some areas to transport the materials to build the new roads, but in many cases, those roads were built along existing railroad grades. For example, the Northern Pacific line through the better part of Montana now has I-90 as a neighbor, and also in parts of Washington. This allowed trucks to cruise cross-country on very straight alignments, versus older, narrow, curvy roads that many times followed section lines.

That July, the Great Northern discontinued its operation of electric locomotives over Stevens Pass, due to the increasing reliability of the diesel locomotive. The Milwaukee Road continued to use electric locomotives over Snoqualmie Pass, but for a time its Olympian Hiawatha passenger train used diesels from Chicago through to Tacoma.

In the Basin, south of Grant County, plans were afoot at the very end of the decade on the NP line. A new branchline across the Wahluke Slope was to carry high projected yields of a number of crops from this newly irrigated area near Mattawa to the mainline at Mesa. The project was scheduled to cost $6 million.

The fiftieth anniversary of Grant County fell in a period of both decline and a faint sense of hope for the railroad industry. While passenger service was being cut and electric locomotives were on their way out, diesel engines were on the rise and spurs to new industry was breathing new life into the railroads, not to mention the Basin. It seemed the future was too unpredictable to call.

Railroads of Grant County 1929-1939

In February of 1929, Grant County entered its third decade with a sense of defeat. Discouragement over the failing economy, the weariness from the efforts expended during World War I, the devastation of the drought that drove settlers from the searing desert, and the decline of the railroads from their former state of glory all contributed to the darkening hope of carving out a worthwhile living from the Columbia Basin.

Changes were evident everywhere. Farms were now federally subsidized, but there were fewer of them and more restrictions and loopholes made the money harder to obtain. Dust still rolled across the sagebrush fields, making the Basin nearly uninhabitable. Business was still slow; Grant County was in all practicality a frontier town when it came to the latest in modern advances. The stock market was showing signs of collapse, and though most local people had little to do with such things, the shock waves rippled across the country to this meager corner of the world. Banks, schools, rural post offices, businesses and farms began to fail, close and disappear.

Railroads were no longer the primary mode of transportation for either freight or personal travel. The government had extensive control over rail traffic through the Interstate Commerce Commission, which began to have a negative effect on growth in the industry. The last major rail construction project was completed in 1931, connecting Klamath Falls, Oregon, 203 miles to Keddie, California, along the Great Northern/Western Pacific line. No one believed it was a profitable venture anymore.

Locally, there was very little rail activity other than the day-to-day movement of goods, mostly, from one regional center to the next. Larger operations, once successful in a thriving industry, now downgraded or recycled instead of rebuilding. The depot at Trinidad burned down in 1931, to be replaced by the original 1892 structure from Rock Island. The Krupp depot was retired and sold in 1936, and replaced a year later with a small, 16’x24’ shelter/shed-style depot. The Great Northern line changed its endpoints for railway post office service, but the only local indication of that was the new town name on the postage cancellation stamp appearing on mail delivered to Grant County.

Rumors and outlandish ideas began to swirl around the region back in the first decade of the county’s history about bringing irrigation waters to the dry, desert plateau. A quiet move by the county commissioners to investigate these ideas was leaked to the press in 1918, fueling a heated debate spreading from Wenatchee to Spokane. Finally, in the midst of a deepening recession and faltering hope came a reason for Basin settlers to rejoice: a large dam for irrigation was to be built at the northern end of the Grand Coulee, bringing jobs, business and growth in every area of Grant County.

Two opposing parties eventually emerged, one supporting the irrigation dam at the Grand Coulee site, the other proposing a gravity-fed canal system stemming from the Pond Oreille River. Besides the study initiated by the Grant County Commissioners, the Northern Pacific (NP) conducted a railroad line survey up through the floor of the Grand Coulee to determine the most feasible route from Coulee City to the proposed Grand Coulee dam site, and the Army Corps of Engineers began a three-year survey of the comparative feasibility of the two debated irrigation systems. Major John Butler of the Corps finished first, and published his findings in favor of the Grand Coulee option, sometime in the year after Black Thursday, 1929. President Herbert Hoover disagreed, arguing that the cost was too high and that it would only make worse the surplus of farms after the war.

This all changed as the next presidential election loomed large in the fall of 1931. Franklin Delano Roosevelt made a campaign promise to build the country’s “next great hydro-electric development” at Grand Coulee. His devotion to the new Keynesian economics of the time included a belief that large projects such as the Grand Coulee Dam would create large federal expenditures and thus promote economic growth. Under this dramatic attitude change, he immediately included the dam project in his Public Works Administration program upon his election.

Nationally, one in four workers seeking jobs was unable to find employment, despite the fact that the first recessionary period of the Great Depression had ended in March of 1933. FDR wasn’t convinced yet that the country was out of the woods. He called a bank holiday in March for one week to save money, and when he met with the supporters of the Grand Coulee Dam the next month, he pressured them to construct a smaller dam that could be expanded upon later, in hopes of reducing the $400 million price tag of the high dam option. Reluctantly going ahead with his plan, the Bureau of Reclamation began signing contracts with both the state and contractors, leading to the groundbreaking ceremony for the new “low dam” on July 16, 1933.

In September, the NP finished their survey of the Grand Coulee for the purpose of constructing a railroad line from Coulee City’s Odair junction to the dam site 28.5 miles to the north. Two months later, they posted a public notice petitioning the ICC to build the line. Two problems arose. First, the NP was a land-grant railroad, and under its contract with the federal government, the cost of freight shipped along its line for government purposes was subject to a 50% price reduction; this would have cost the company $1.5 million in revenues. Also, trucking companies insisted that the government open the project to bids, rather than rely solely on rail service as they had intended.

The NP had also made three stipulations in its petition to the ICC. It stated that it would not build the line if it could not be proven that the dam would be built, which the ICC held as a foregone conclusion. The second demanded all the rail commerce business generated by the dam; in this case, they were told it was their responsibility to obtain such business by their own effort. Lastly, the NP wanted prior permission to abandon the line upon completion of the dam. The ICC understood that the current construction was for a low dam with the option of increasing the height to 375’ at a later date; the line would be necessary in the near future if this remained the plan, and so the NP would be required to apply for that option when this was decided.

In its decisions, the ICC also referenced the recent onset of construction at Boulder Dam at Colorado, stating that rail service contracts had been established before work began and so it would be here. The estimate for the construction of the rail line was $750,000, and the media implied that the speed at which Boulder’s dam was built was to be met here as well.

The Interior Department and the Bureau of Reclamation discussed early on whether the main contractor for the dam would also build the line, but ultimately decided that the rail project would be government-funded. The contractor would be responsible to provide and fund any items to be taken away from the site at the completion of the dam; the government would purchase the rest. This was due to concerns over whether a contractor could procure the funding in a reasonable timeframe to complete the project in the short window proposed.

This intention, of course, did not remain the case. On the day that bids for the rail project were accepted on May 18, 1934, it was discovered that the NP had miscalculated the estimate of the amount of rock tonnage to be removed along the proposed right-of-way. The twelve bidders endured a half-day postponement while their bids were reevaluated under the new estimate.

Out of these firms mostly from Seattle or Spokane, only one had an office relatively near the site. David H. Ryan, a California contractor with an office in Almira, won the right to use the NP survey to build the government railroad from Odair, the NP siding at Coulee City, to the head of the Grand Coulee. Ryan had won the bid for the excavation of the foundation of the dam, but had experienced serious conflicts over his contract; it took three months to complete federal investigations and approve the contract for the construction of the railroad.

As the Spokane Chronicle reported on July 18, 1934, “Grading will begin immediately at the Odair, or south, end of the railroad, with at least 100 men, working 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” Crews finally began moving his operations from his headquarters in Grand Coulee to Odair in August, where his daughter Helena dug the first shovelful of earth from the coulee floor in preparation for the railbed on the eighth of that month. As the Chronicle reported on April 19, 1934, “The whistle of locomotives will be heard in the Grand coulee for the first time in history.”

James Crick and Max J. Kuney of Spokane won the bid on June 18, 1934, to construct the portion of the MWAK company line from just east of the dam site down the hillside to the excavation site. This included a highway as well, and paving of the engineers’ model townsite as well; this townsite is now the west half of the city of Coulee Dam.

Soon Grant County was buzzing with preparations for a planned visit to the dam site by President Roosevelt, and the railroad was to be his primary means of reaching the remote location in the northern Columbia Basin. Originally, FDR was to travel by train to Soap Lake, and then be carried to Grand Coulee by a limousine from the Seattle Police Department.

On July 31, 1934, the Chronicle reported the following:

Colonel E.V. Starling, head of the White House secret service in charge of the president’s trip, said in Spokane last Saturday he had recommended the change, after he discovered the platform at the Soap Lake station is only 150 feet long.

To avoid making most of the passengers on the train detrain in the sagebrush, the schedule has been revised, with the approval of Marvin McIntyre, the president’s secretary in Washington.

What the article did not report was the cause for the concern. Few people in the country knew that our president was handicapped. Had the train stopped in Soap Lake at the proper location for FDR’s wheelchair to be lowered onto the small platform, the other passengers would have been left to step onto gravel and sagebrush far from the depot. The Ephrata platform extended the entire length of the train, and would not cause undue notice of the president’s condition.

Five days later, the official train reached Spokane from Portland and Bonneville at 1 a.m., where large crowds were expected to greet him despite the early hour and predicted rainshowers. Once the train was moved to the Great Northern line, it was to travel directly to Ephrata, where more large crowds were to await a glimpse of the president. At nine in the morning, FDR left his train for the limousine. According to the Chronicle, he viewed “a display of mid-Columbia products” (“Columbia Basin irrigated farm products’, as in said in an earlier release) (Spokesman called it a “Grange exhibit”, and said he visited ML too) before leaving town. The party took the North Central Highway (part of today’s Highway 28) five miles to Soap Lake, then up over High Hill Road and Pinto Ridge to Coulee City. All told, it was a journey of 55 miles over what was then called a comfortable ride over “oiled roads.” While on this journey, all roads leading to the dam site were closed to general travel, ostensibly for security purposes.

At the site of the dam, FDR inspected the dam site with Bureau officials, then spoke shortly after noon to an audience of roughly 20,000 at the “Green Bowl,” a natural amphitheater conveniently located beside the construction site. While he was away, his train was backed up all the way to the last vestiges of the roundhouse at Wilson Creek, where it was turned around and again backed down the track to Soap Lake. The president boarded there and whisked away to arrive back in Spokane by 6 p.m.

Originally, officials had expected much more work to be completed by the president’s visit than FDR actually witnessed. The roughly 200-foot-long tunnel through the admittedly hard granite was still not completed in May of the next year, according to the Chronicle; experienced drillers claimed that the constant need to resharpen their tools caused very slow progress, worse than they had ever faced. After completing the drilling process, the tunnel was abandoned altogether.

This happened because the rail bridge farther down the grade, on which general traffic flowed through October of 1935, was never used for rail traffic; by the time repairs had been made due to several slides and slippages damaging the structure, there was little need for rail service to the east side of the river. Officials stated the bridge would not be capable of sustaining the weight of the tracks and the loads carried on them.

The steel rails for the project weren’t laid according to plan, either. The first rail was laid in September of 1934, and didn’t reach Grand Coulee until December, finally bringing the company and government roads together, an accomplishment worthy of celebration.

Dignitaries came from across the country to drive in the “golden spike” commemorating the joining of Ryan’s supply line to Crick and Kuneys’ construction spur. On Saturday, December 8, 1934, Governor Clarence Martin, United Stated Senator C. C. Dill, Contractor David Ryan, Cheney Cowles of the Spokane Chronicle, and others gathered at Grand Coulee Center. After a large crane dropped the last piece of rail into place, the dignitaries tapped the golden spike into place.

Behind these men stood the “Queen of the Columbia,” Miss Lou Turner of Harrington. As the Spokane Chronicle reported it earlier that fall, “The most beautiful of all the girls of the Columbia basin area will be chosen to preside over the driving of the golden spike in the new government railway, leading from Coulee City to the dam site. The Chronicle, at the request of the Coulee dam post of the American legion, will undertake to find the queen of youth and beauty and to crown her on the day of the completion of the railroad.” One of Miss Turner’s other official honors was to pull the throttle on the old logging locomotive – a favorite of Mr. Ryan – which would soon run up and down the hillside beside the dam site.

Mr. Ryan was also crowned “King of the Rails,” and the day’s events included a reception for the two royalty, speeches, a banquet, and a dance hosted by the American Legion.

At last closing out a busy 1934, MWAK announced on December 20 that the new government railroad would not offer passenger service to and from the dam, dispelling rampant rumors to the contrary.

In 1935, construction of the railroad continued. Despite the golden spike ceremony, ties still lay beside the tracks and ballast hadn’t been placed; Governor Martin had commented on this, saying he intended to return “when the railroad looks more like a railroad,” according to the Chronicle. A portion of the railroad was relocated in the spring because of continued sliding in the area; rail was expected to finally be laid by early May, allowing the first locomotive to pass along the line by the end of June.

Again, all estimates failed, and rail service didn’t begin until July. On the 27th, Governor Clarence Martin acted as engineer for the special train from Grand Coulee to Coulee City, christening the new line at long last.

In April of 1935, the Supreme Court ruled against FDR’s administration, saying that the construction of Parker Dam in Arizona and others like it had been built without the required authorization of Congress. The president began to push legislation which would finally give legitimacy to the more than twenty dams already under construction around the country that had been initiated by his administration. After a large controversy over the unfathomable Grand Coulee Dam project, Congress forwarded the amended Rivers and Harbors Bill to the president, who signed it into law on August 30, 1935. Meanwhile, the month of June saw the order from the Secretary of the Interior to construct the base for the high dam, instead of the in-progress low one.

With excitement building over the okay to construct the dam originally chosen by Grant County pioneers, materials began to pour into Grand Coulee. November 1, 1935 brought the first delivery of cement by rail up the Grand Coulee. Five cars came from the Lehigh Portland Cement Company’s Metaline Falls plant, and three from other companies on the coast. It was stored in large silos at the west end of the construction site until it could be mixed in the concrete mix plants at the time of pouring into forms. Each of these silos held 40,000 barrels or 160 carloads of 250 barrels each, according to the Chronicle. As the demand for cement picked up, the intention was to run two cement trains to the dam site a day; each week, approximately six cars came from Metaline Falls, three from the Irvin plant of Spokane Portland Cement, and 30 from the west coast plants.

An article in October in the Spokesman Review had this to say about the cement and supply operations involving rail traffic at the dam site:

With 50 or so cars of materials and equipment arriving daily at the dam, once concrete pouring is well started, provision for handling much of that heavy work was necessary and a huge gantry crane has been set up at the railroad yards at Coulee Dam City, a mile up the coulee. There the trains will be sidetracked and unloaded and the material sent down the grade to the dam site. Eventually there will be four of the big cranes in operation. They are nearly 20 feet high and straddle the rails. Flat cars are pushed under the cranes, which pick up the materials and unload them. The cranes are mounted on wheels to permit shifting from place to place. Nine cars, loaded with 34 mammoth concrete buckets, are standing in the yards, waiting for the day when they will be put into service carrying the mixture from the mixing plants to the waiting forms. The railroad yard is becoming one of the busy spots of the area, with the erection for small checking offices, sheds and several lines of cars on sidings.

Governor Martin again visited the site on December 6, 1935 – another of many visits he would make to the largest project occurring in his jurisdiction. He made the first official concrete pour of four cubic-yards; though over a week earlier, on Thanksgiving, officials had poured nearly 400 times that amount as a test pour.

Rail was used in multiple areas beyond the supply line from Odair. The construction trestles included the many tracks used by small steam locomotives which shuffled the large vats of concrete between the plants and the pour locations. The switchbacks descending the hill to the base of the dam, which outlasted the tunnel and bridge counterparts, were used, as well as a skip system, to bring rail cars down to the level of construction.

For the next several years, not much changed in day-to-day rail operations. A typical locomotive ran daily trips between Odair and Grand Coulee, where it met with the steam-powered logging engine. This Shay locomotive backed down a two-mile, 5% grade, at eight to ten miles per hour, carrying 25 cement cars, each of which held 72,000 pounds of cement. An official MWAK newsletter in May of 1936 stated that, in 21 months of construction at the Grand Coulee Dam, the railroad had only been in operation eight months, and yet had carried 55% of the total tonnage of supplies for the project.

During the remaining three years of this decade of Grant County’s history, concrete pours were halted by freezes, landslides, and water cresting over the concrete forms and coffer dams. Once construction resumed, several records for the amount of concrete placed were achieved each summer.

In the middle of the second recession of the Great Depression, the contract for the second phase of dam construction was awarded on January 28, 1938, to Interior Construction, soon to be renamed Consolidated Builders Inc. (CBI) to avoid confusion with the Department of the Interior. CBI’s first projects, accomplished in the spring on 1938, were to move the west concrete plant to join with the east plant, to build a new railroad bridge, and to replace the lower MWAK construction trestle with a new, higher trestle to facilitate the construction of the taller dam.

In relation to the current traffic bridge below the dam, the MWAK rail bridge was to the north, and on a more level plane; it was roughly half a mile to the north of the dam. The location of the two construction trestles in question is now ensconced within the perimeter of the dam; MWAK’s was lower, CBI’s was higher and more southerly.

Unfortunately, CBI put off hiring back the majority of workers until the end of the year, causing economic hardship to many workers and their families who had moved to the area; the average worker earned only $0.80 an hour, and in dangerous conditions. On the other hand, railroad workers – when cement was in demand and concrete was being poured – were paid fairly well. Brakemen and firemen were paid $0.90 an hour, conductors one dollar, and locomotive engineers $1.35 an hour; these men would have still had jobs when concrete works shut down because they brought in many different supplies used in construction.

The Grand Coulee Dam project had brought a level of prosperity back to the Basin. A gas station owner in Coulee City was reported as saying that he saw business jump to a point where he was making more profit in a month than he previously had in a year. Thousands of men who couldn’t find jobs elsewhere in the country rode the rails to reach this barren desert, hoping to work on the massive dam and its railroad.

The next decade saw not only a continuation of these hopes, but the completion of the dam, the second world war, and the beginning of the long-awaited irrigation project that would breathe new life into Grant County and the Columbia Basin.

Railroads of Grant County 1919-1929

The second decade of the 20th century can be characterized as the “Golden Age” of railroad history. Nationally, track mileage peaked in 1916 at 254,000 miles, and both goods and passengers regularly traveled by train. Here in Grant County, laid track also peaked, and numerous small towns had sprung up in the high desert because of the easy access afforded by rail.

The 1920s began the decline of the railroad, both locally and nationally, for many reasons. Changes in modes of transportation, government intervention and World War I, and local weather and economic issues all played a part in railroad history in Grant County.

In June of 1914, the first world war began, eventually drawing the country into the conflict half a world away. As war resources began to be shipped from production locations to the battlefront, the government pushed for greater speed and efficiency in transport. Manufacturers had previously sent their goods along their favorite railroad lines, no matter how inefficient. Under the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), the route of travel, efficient or not, shared the same rate for the total service; in order for a railroad to gain any profit, a manufacturer must send their goods along that line and thus grant it a piece of the shipping pie. For the moment, individual railroads were making money, but goods weren’t traveling fast enough, and a shortage of cars was beginning to hamper both normal business traffic and government war efforts.

A few months later, in August of 1914, the new Panama Canal opened for business hundreds of miles away from the Basin. It wasn’t long, though, until its effects were felt here, limiting the business transported across the county in favor of a water route to the east coast. Ironically enough, the original engineer for the canal was John F. Stevens, the former chief surveyor for the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba (SPMM) who located Stevens Pass in 1890, and would eventually act as a consultant on the project to construct a second Cascade tunnel, which has benefited the State of Washington for the last sixty years.

In reaction to the chaos ensuing in the industry, the railroads had come under government control at the very end of 1917 to improve traffic flow throughout the United States during war time. Shipments were now required to be sent along the most efficient path, so the payment of rates went to the line with the most direct route from point A to point B. Smaller and more remote lines naturally earned less profit, relying more on local agriculture and business.

During this time period, though, loads of freight declined too, as the drought of 1917 to 1924 hit Columbia Basin farmers hard. Many moved away after crops failed to produce the amount grown in previous years. Fewer people buying what was left meant fewer shipments to towns. Fewer and smaller crops meant less grain to move to market by rail. The picture was bleak, despite the prosperous war economy elsewhere.

On November 11, 1918, the war ended. The railroads, though, were far from safe and continued to struggle under ICC oversight, government ownership, and economic hardship. The Chicago Milwaukee & St. Paul (CMSP) completed the electrification of its mainline between Othello and Tacoma in 1919, the only line in Grant County to do so. This gave it the ability to use electrically-powered locomotives to move its trains, rather than the inefficient steam locomotives of the past. The cost of this venture was substantial, and paired with the loss of an impressive amount of business to the Panama Canal, bankruptcy was a dire possibility. The war had sustained the CMSP, which now discovered that they only carried 1/10 of the potential of their new line. Demand for rail service had crashed, leaving several railroad lines in financial straits.

On March 1, 1920, by order of President Wilson, the government control finally ended American railroad's 26 months of nationalization. The control had allowed the government to run all the railroads as one big system, instead of the many individual companies. While this allowed for direct routings of freight, it also meant that unneeded passenger services were dropped in favor of the automobile.

Still, larger railroad companies continued to plan for expansion. The Northern Pacific (NP) did many cost studies on the use of the CMSP between Lind and Ellensburg in the early 1920s. During 1922, the NP was still considering this option, which would shorten its mileage across the state, in the hope of speeding transcontinental freight runs. One of the many things the NP considered included whether they would be fully responsible for any costs associated with fueling and maintaining steam locomotives, since the CMSP was electrified through most of this section. They were also very concerned for the grades involved in getting up the west bank of the Columbia River. A second option used the CMPS to the Beverly area too, before turning south and crossing the Columbia in the vicinity of Priest Rapids by way of a newly-built line in their own name. Heavy grading between this crossing point and the Yakima area kept this option from being considered further either.

Another part of the industry’s decline was due to regulations placed on the railroads by the government, via the ICC. While general and maintenance costs rose dramatically during the war, railroads were not given permission to increase their rates to match inflation and thus recoup these losses. As the public began abandoning old-fashioned rail travel and took to the automobile, and as road quality continued to increase over time to the benefit of truck service, railroads found it harder to maintain branchline and mail service to every remote place. Mail continued to be delivered by rail, but to fewer places than once served. One cutback was the discontinuance of Central Washington’s train between Adrian and Coulee City on June 28, 1925.

A few months earlier, in March, the CMSP finally succumbed to bankruptcy, and finally reorganized as the Chicago Milwaukee St. Paul & Pacific on January 13, 1927. This was just one of the many changes made on Grant County railroads in the 1920s.

Krupp, a small community on the Great Northern line had originally been named by railroad officials trying to flatter a local German immigrant farmer. A prominent and centuries-old German dynasty by that name manufactured armaments for American foes in World War I, prompting a demand for a renaming of the town amid anti-German sentiment after the war. A suggestion had been Crab Creek, but this was a duplicate of a town in Lincoln County. The name of Marlin was finally adopted in September of 1918, as a reference to another early settler, John Marlin. The depot in Marlin burned down on May 18, 1925. A year later, a 24’x48’ depot was moved from Downs (east of Odessa in Lincoln County) to the same location, and it survived there for ten years.

Coulee Junction’s name was likewise deemed to be too similar to another railroad town, this time to Coulee City. The new namesake was a W.H. Adair, who owned a ranch near the junction and operated a restaurant in Coulee City. This name, too, needed to be changed because it was too similar to Adrian, the junction fifteen miles to the south. On June 1, 1922, it was renamed Odair by the NP.

For reasons now lost to history, the Trinidad depot was also moved from its original location to a point about 1/3 of a mile east “to better serve the needs of the people there.”

The Great Northern station at Wilson Creek was established as an intermediate terminal in 1892 and was situated with a roundhouse and a large coaling dock. The terminal itself was moved to Wenatchee in 1925, at the same time that the Leavenworth terminal was closed. These two changes coincided with a related project on the Great Northern line over Stevens Pass, which abandoned a 2.6-mile tunnel and bored a new 7.8-mile tunnel.

Coulee City, though, remained a viable intermediate terminal through this decade, but in a different form than is seen today. In 1926, the following railroad items were to be found there: a two-story passenger and freight depot; a stock yard; a large ice house; a two-stall roundhouse; a 56-foot, bridge-style turntable; a sand and oil house; an ash pit; and a coal dock and shed with 254-foot loading trestle and 206-foot approach trestle. This was typical for an end-of-branchline station, or intermediate terminal. Only the depot remains, though not in its former location, and the occasional remnant of a foundation.

The last significant railroad event in Grant County in the 1920s occurred on February 1, 1927, when the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern filed application with Interstate Commerce Commission for their third attempt at uniting the two companies. This was similar to the second planned merger back in 1903 that caused the building of the branch from Coulee City on the NP to the mainline station on the GN at Adrian. The unification did not happen at this time, due to restrictions placed on the two railroads that they did not want to keep. The ICC, under a mandate to set up regional railroads to replace the multiple private rail companies within each region, had demanded that the two companies sell a mutual subsidiary line which ran to Chicago from St. Paul. Both companies declined.

As the second decade of Grant County’s existence drew to a close, the rail industry faced difficult and desperate times. The next decade, though, brought another federal stimulus to the region, sustaining the railroads for another decade.

Railroads of Grant County 1939-1949

Here is the unedited version of the Centennial piece that appeared in print on 5-22-09.

As if the Roaring ‘20s hadn’t brought enough change and the Depression era of the ‘30s weren’t too solemnizing, the decade of the ‘40s brought more of both across the country, as well as in Grant County.

The largest project the region had ever seen – the construction of Grand Coulee Dam – was progressing nicely in 1939. With the help of the government railroad line from Coulee City to Grand Coulee, a long-standing record was set for the largest amount of concrete placed in 24 hours, at an impressive 41,000 tons on May 25. Materials and supplies for the construction effort continued to pour into Grand Coulee for the rest of the decade.

As the county looked ahead to the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project, plans began to be laid for creating irrigation districts to manage the water soon to be headed south from the great dam. The legislature first created the legal foundation for irrigation districts; then landowners locally and across the state were convened to vote on the creation of these districts. The Great Northern line was instrumental in this action, conducting a special train to bring absentee landowners from the west side of the state to Grant County to vote on this historic measure.

The special train itself was an unusual sight. Passengership on the railroad lines had been suffering from a severe decline throughout the Great Depression, which was only slightly preceded by the increased popularity of private automobiles over rail travel in the 1920s. Many measures were being employed to try to lure customers back to the railroad; one of these was to modernize the fleets.

Over the previous decade, passenger cars that had once been made of wood and iron were now being constructed of stainless steel, with additions of aluminum and Cor-Ten steel. This reduced the weight of the cars, giving streamlined speed and greater comfort to the passengers – as well as a more streamlined look – compared to the “rattletraps” described in the early history of trains. Many of these steel cars went unpainted except for the legally-required reporting marks.

Inside, car builders created luxurious rooms and private compartments, such as the Pullman Company’s roomettes – one-passenger suites similar to the twin-berth compartments used in Europe. Even these amenities, though, didn’t make up for low ridership. People were taking to the new highways at an unprecedented rate, and rail companies were beginning to sell off unprofitable ventures, such as the interurban rail system between Everett and Seattle, which had been in place for forty years.

The world was changing. Cars were becoming increasingly popular, prompting the construction of new highways; public transit in any form was in a long, slow decline, including the urban streetcar systems. Even the majestic steam engines of the past were on their way out, making reluctant room for new diesel-powered locomotives.

Steam engines were becoming unwieldy monstrosities. The size of the engine components had nearly outsized the capacity of the tracks to hold them, and required more mechanical operation than ever before. Maintenance requirements slowed turn-around time after each run, and the constant necessity for water stole precious time. With the advent of mass-production of the diesel locomotive, steam engines were being relegated to yard work, scrap yards, museums and amusement parks.

General Motors’ Electro-Motive Division was the first to mass-produce the new locomotives. Its “FT” toured the country at the beginning of 1940, showing off 5400 horsepower in four power units, and blowing past steam locomotives at every turn. Instead of the frequent water and maintenance stops, it seemingly turned on a dime and did twice the work or more. It could be idled for days at a time, run by one man instead of a team, and created less noise and smoke pollution. Multiple units could be coupled together – or scaled – to complete larger jobs as well. It was reliable, comfortable for both passenger and crew, and with thermal efficiencies running at 73% compared to steam’s 26% or less, it appeared to be an engineering miracle. Steam engine producers couldn’t keep up; as the companies began switching to the longer-hauling diesel trains, smaller division points began to close.

Besides the impressive sight of these new machines rumbling past (Milwaukee Road’s first diesel on the mainline ran from Avery, Idaho to Othello, Washington on November 6, 1941), much of the Basin was unaffected by these changes. Passenger service was still operational between the small towns of Grant County and surrounding areas, but sleeper compartments and luxury accommodations weren’t the most important features considered when travelling anywhere locally.

One change that made an appearance in 1940 was the name switch for the railroad post office on the Northern Pacific from “Coulee” back to “Coulee City” on February 25. Again, though, it was a minor change and few took notice.

What did bring notice, though, was the news in June that Nazi Germany had conquered France. Four months later, the military initiated the first peacetime draft in United States’ history. GN’s president, Ralph Budd, was appointed to be the Transportation Commissioner on the Council of National Defense, and began to determine the plan for the transport of troops and supplies during the inevitable involvement of the U.S. in the war. During WWI, this level of planning hadn’t been accomplished and railroad officials wanted to be prepared for changes affecting their business practices.

Budd’s policy centered on the “discontinuance of trains that are not necessary.” He warned the railroads six months ahead of time to expect troop movements to double in 1942, but advised they not expand their fleets; in fact, he asked them to consider which trains could be dropped. A month later, the military issued the same directive, and when the country entered the war on December 4, 1941, these predictions came true. Troops moved from the interior of the country to the coasts, and supplies for military production moved back to the interior from coastal ports. The entire state of Washington was actively engaged in converting raw materials into finished products and shipping them back to military posts on the west side of the state. Passenger service was all but suspended. Civilian riders holding tickets were regularly bumped from their scheduled train due to lack of seating.

Abandonment of branch line tracks was considered, to help with the wartime shortage of metals, but other than a few spur tracks to nowhere, no rails were lifted in the Columbia Basin. Most branch line traffic in Grant County was agricultural in nature, not participating in wartime industrial expansion, and so remained fairly stable.

The notable exception was, of course, the U.S. government railroad to Grand Coulee. A year after the draft was initiated in 1940, the first generator came online at the new dam, providing the first delivery of locally-generated electricity to Nespelem’s Rural Electric Association on September 12. Other generators were yet to be completed, and the construction of the irrigation pumping plant was just beginning, so the rail line continued to be used heavily.

With the war raging on the other side of the world, though, the country again went into wartime industrial mode, salvaging metals, mass-producing supplies, and conserving food and resources. In a fictional “letter home from the war” published in a Milwaukee Road magazine in 1943, the company advertised the success of their salvage operations:
The folks at home who work on The Milwaukee Road are doing all right too. President Scandrett had a message in the magazine the other day telling about it: "Four thousand pounds of scrap and fittings were removed from under buildings. There have been 98,650 pounds of shop-made tools taken from the blacksmith shop and converted into scrap ... also from the shops, 1,849 pounds of brass recovered ... also 36,559 pounds of miscellaneous scrap recovered from the roundhouse and shops." (The Milwaukee Magazine, May 10 1943)

When the war came home with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the realities of the situation did finally touch the Columbia Basin. Local Japanese immigrants and naturalized citizens were forced off their farms and out of their communities as far east as Yakima by Lieutenant General De Witt’s Public Proclamation Number One, delivered on May 26, 1942. These evacuees were shuttled to Portland by train, and then on to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, northwest of Cody, Wyoming.

The construction of the irrigation system stemming from Grand Coulee Dam was put on hold as well, in order to supply much-needed energy to aluminum plants and to the top-secret Manhattan Project at Hanford, which began in March of 1943 after the condemnation of private land for an undisclosed military purpose. Generation of electricity took precedence; officials at Grand Coulee even borrowed generators from other facilities for a short time until the dam was sufficiently completed to do the job.

While Hanford was specifically chosen by the Army and its contractor DuPont because of its remote location from highways and railroads, 158 miles of new track were built on the site and linked to the Milwaukee mainline at Beverly. The Milwaukee was also used to move much of the town’s population in one quick operation to other locations outside the project site.

Not even the 51,000 employees at Hanford knew what was being created there. Secrecy and defense of those secrets was a focus of a great deal of energy, since no one had any idea when one or all major projects could become a target for Japanese and German attacks. Grand Coulee Dam, too, could be a target, as could the government railroad supplying workers there with materials to create greater hydro-electric generating capability.

A young married couple living in a remodeled railroad car in Odair, at the head of the government line, took the job of Air Raid Warden in 1942 under the national Air Raid Program. Roy and Maxine Ramey watched the sky for suspicious airplanes and policed the use of blackout shades in their tiny neighborhood of four people. In an interview with the couple, they shared that Roy’s hours, and thus Maxine’s as well, numbered 62 a week – nine each on Monday through Saturday, with an extra eight on Sundays. Maxine reported that they typically saw one or two planes a day during the six years Roy served his country and community under this program.

At the other end of the county, ten military passengers – not yet to the front where they would serve – were killed, ten others injured, and one railway official also injured in a train wreck near Warden on August 4, 1943 at nearly 1 a.m. In this case, the length of one car caused severe destruction and loss of life when a regular train didn’t pull far enough into the clear to allow a special military train to pass safely. When the locomotive of passenger train Extra 251 West collided into the locomotive of mixed train Extra 849 West, which was frantically trying to move backwards off the mainline at 2 miles per hour, the former train was moving at 55 miles per hour. Train 251 was pulling twelve Pullman sleeper cars of military personnel; car eleven telescoped more than thirty feet into car twelve. With the increased traffic came increased chance of accidents; until this point, the county had been spared any major rail casualties since 1917.

In Ephrata, more changes were afoot. A rail transportation department had been created to fill government orders for the transportation of freight and troops whether by train, or by other means. On August 27, 1942, this name was changed to the Transportation Corps, and more personnel were granted to it to accomplish its duties. Two personnel were assigned to the Ephrata GN Railway station, where Mr. E. C. Pittinger, railway agent, allotted them 100 square feet in which to set up their operations.

In the next two weeks, the GN and military engineers began construction of a railway spur track from the GN mainline to a warehouse area on the new Ephrata Air Base. This short spur minimized freight handling, added efficiency, and provided secrecy for military movements on and off the air base.

As published by Patricia J. Dunsten in “Certain Lands Southeast of Ephrata,” the GN made its first trip on the spur on November 15, 1943, “bringing in one carload of coal for the post engineers, one carload of targets for the base ordinance, one carload of engines for the sub-depot and one carload of Teletype equipment for the base signal.”

The air base eventually purchased their own Plymouth gas-powered locomotive, but before this, the GN used its own local power to switch cars on the military spur. Small gas-powered “tug” vehicles, used to move planes between the hangars and the airfield, were also used to move rail cars from the spur to various unloading points. Walt Thayer, a Civil Service guard for the spur, recalled in an interview in 1993, that he often had to repair switchpoints and rerail cars after these tugs mishandled the boxcars. He also recalled that penny-pinching railroad employees would stop their trains on the air base spur while they grabbed lunch at the mess hall for a measly “two bits.” On their way back to the train, they’d convince some other civilian with privileges to find them cigarettes, a rationed item highly desired by many trainmen.

To the northeast, at Hartline, the NP tore down the 50-year-old depot on February 3, 1944. This was also the same year the NP built its last new steam engine.

In other places outside the county, the war continued, oblivious to the changes the locals were experiencing. In September, the first reactor at Hanford went critical, launching the production of uranium and plutonium that would eventually be used to end the war. Two months later, Japan launched 9000 incendiary balloons from Hokkaido into the jet stream, hoping to set fires on the west coast of the United States and draw resources away from the war effort. On February 12 of the next year, the first of the 28 balloons ultimately to be found in Washington State was discovered north of Spokane. Another balloon exploded on power lines at Hanford, causing a blackout and a halt in operations for a short time.

Five days before President Truman announced Victory-in-Europe Day in May of 1945, the Soap Lake depot in the Grant Orchards area burned down under non-military circumstances, to be replaced by a 10’x16’ watchman’s house from a siding by the name of Columbia River, near the Rock Island Dam. It took crews five months to move the small building. Winchester, too, replaced its 37-year-old depot that year with a small shack, which only lasted another six years.

With the European end of the war finally over, the Milwaukee Road published yet another letter between their fictional father and son, which included the assertion that the company was planning for peacetime improvements to the line, including new track. The company continued to speak highly of their own ability to handle the increased traffic and requirements during the war, as well as the successes of the Army’s 744th Railway Operating Battalion, whose 6916 members – some employees of Milwaukee – had served on the European railroads during the first half of the war. Little did they know their fictitional prediction that “the Japs won’t last long” would be so accurate.

On July 16, the first atomic explosion was tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Less than one month later, when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the northwest would hear for the first time what was happening south of Grant County in that secret complex. The world – and especially the Columbia Basin – was still reeling from this revelation when the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki; this particular bomb specifically used the plutonium created alongside the Columbia River. When Japan surrendered the next day, all the trouble and sacrifices paid by the railroads, industry, business, government, and even individual citizens seemed to have paid off. The war was finally over, and everyone had contributed to that end.

Life slowly began to return to normal. The Milwaukee Road, constantly fighting bankruptcy, announced that it was once again out of receivership in December of 1945. Construction resumed on the pumping plant at the Grand Coulee Dam the next year. In 1947, the Washington State legislature finished its legal battle to construct limited-access highways to ensure fewer accidents on the greatly-popular car routes.

The railroads felt this. Officials noted the increase in rail traffic due to the war, following a long, slow slump in passengership. The hope was that, after the war, numbers would average out and level off. This didn’t happen, and still more passenger-service programs were scrapped, including Tacoma’s Municipal Belt Line Railway. It was a continuation of earlier trends, and it didn’t bring encouragement to rail companies or their employees.

Despite this reality, the railroads continued their vision of modernizing their lines, expecting that doing so would ultimately bring riders back to the rails. The older wood and iron passenger and box cars had been completely worn out during the war, making the purchase of new cars vital. The choice of luxury cars, though, was rarely allowed by tight budgets.

In 1947, the GN was the first northwest road to receive streamlined cars, which they had ordered during the war. The riding public saw these cars as the wave of the future, and for a limited time, ridership improved.

New diesels were also featured on the Milwaukee line at the same time. The streamlined “dreamliner” Olympian Hiawatha pulled its first train in June from Chicago to Seattle/Tacoma with a SkyTop lounge on the end, a rounded glass-top observation car. The train also included coach cars, Touralux sleeper cars, and a Tip Top Grill and dining car, but lacked the Pullman private-room sleepers for which the Milwaukee Road had hoped. The trip took 45 hours, the fastest schedule yet recorded between these two endpoints. The Milwaukee also began using end-to-end and dispatcher-to-train radios in Washington that same year.

The NP placed its new cars into service in 1947 too. In an ad run locally on June 10, 1947, by Mr. H. L. Hutchinson, railway agent at Coulee City, the NP boasted of their new 4-unit, 6000-horsepower diesel locomotives, 1500 new boxcars, and a fancy, new yard machine called a forklift that could raise “a million peas high enough to walk under.” It seems this common machine today caused great excitement in 1947.

Mr. Hutchinson had had plenty of his own excitement that January when the Coulee City depot nearly burned down. The fireplace had burst into flames, and threw embers onto the roof shingles. Hutchinson praised the local fire department for saving everything in his family’s apartment on the second floor, and said that only a package of shingles was needed to fix the damage.

Coulee City seemed to be in the news often in 1947, especially in the month of January. The Coulee City News reported on the 24th that wheat couldn’t be shipped out of town due to a shortage of boxcars after the war. Only 29 cars of wheat had been loaded and shipped over the winter, but another 350,000 bushels remained in the Centennial Mills elevator and on local farms.

That summer, the old NP roundhouse at Coulee City burned in a “spectacular fire” which completely destroyed the structure. Telephones and power went out during the fire, leaving the fire department’s notification of the blaze to a passerby who opted to drive to the stationhouse. Efforts were also hampered by the distance to a fire hydrant and lack of sufficient hose to reach it. The building was owned at the time by Bitco, a tool-sharpening business involved with the Bureau of Reclamation’s Columbia Basin Project at the nearby Bacon Siphon Tunnel.

The railroads finished out this busy decade with high hopes, but deepening worries about their future. Agriculture still reigned in Grant County, though, and the railroad was the most efficient way to deliver those goods to the rest of the country. No one at the time doubted railroads would continue indefinitely in the Basin.