The Last Transcontinental:

The Milwaukee Road in Montana, 1905-1980

The Decision to Go West

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway had built itself into a formidable Midwestern carrier, its lines threading through Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It connected Chicago to the Twin Cities and stretched its rails as far west as the Missouri River. But the Missouri formed a wall, and on the other side of that wall lay everything the railroad's directors coveted: the grain fields of central Montana, the mineral wealth of the northern Rockies, and the markets of the Pacific Coast. By the early 1900s, two established transcontinental railroads already dominated the northern tier of the West. The Northern Pacific had reached Tacoma in 1884. James J. Hill's Great Northern had completed its line to Seattle in 1893. The Milwaukee's directors understood that a third transcontinental line faced formidable obstacles. They pressed ahead regardless.

In December 1905, the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul organized its Montana branch, selecting a route that would run through south-central Montana, across northern Idaho, and on to Tacoma, Washington. The route was deliberately positioned between the existing Northern Pacific and Great Northern lines, threading a new corridor through territory neither rival had fully exploited. Construction began in 1906 from Mobridge, South Dakota, building westward. From Seattle, contractors built eastward simultaneously, their crews racing toward a junction somewhere in Montana. The undertaking was immense in both ambition and expense. Unlike the Northern Pacific and Great Northern, the Milwaukee received no federal land grants, which meant it had to purchase rights-of-way from private landowners and acquire smaller existing railroads at going-market rates. As the Archives West finding aid for the Milwaukee Road's Montana records notes, the company "felt that to be competitive it had to expand its services to the Pacific Coast," and along with building its own track, it absorbed several existing local railways, including the Jawbone Railroad of central Montana and the Gallatin Valley Electric Railway near Bozeman (Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Pacific Railroad Company Records, Montana State University Library, Merrill G. Burlingame Special Collections, Bozeman, accessed June 2026, https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv90722).

The Pacific Extension was completed with remarkable speed. On May 19, 1909, railroad officials drove a golden spike at Garrison, Montana, marking the union of the eastward and westward construction crews. Freight service between Chicago and Tacoma commenced on July 4, 1909, and passenger service followed in May 1911 with the inauguration of two named trains, the Olympian and the Columbian (Cascade Rail Foundation, "History," https://www.milwelectric.org/history/, accessed June 2026). The Milwaukee Road could now claim a distinction no rival possessed: it was the only railroad whose own tracks ran continuously from Chicago to the Pacific Coast. The Northern Pacific and Great Northern, for all their reach, had to hand off their traffic to connecting carriers for the eastern leg of their journeys.

The Jawbone and the Judith Basin

Montana did not wait passively for the Milwaukee to arrive. The railroad entered a state already laced with existing, if precarious, local rail ventures, and the absorption of these smaller lines fundamentally shaped the Milwaukee's reach in the state. Among the most consequential of these acquisitions was the Montana Railroad, universally known as the Jawbone, a nickname earned by the dealmaking instincts of its founder, Richard Harlow. The Jawbone ran through the Musselshell Valley of central Montana, connecting the valley's agricultural producers to the Northern Pacific main line at Lombard. Harlow had borrowed money from James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railway to finance the line, and when the debts came due, the Milwaukee moved decisively. Taking advantage of Hill's absence on a trip to England, the Milwaukee advanced Harlow the funds necessary to retire the mortgage and purchased the railroad outright, gaining a critical route through Sixteen Mile Canyon and into the central Montana interior (Historic Montana, "Milwaukee Road Historic District," https://historicmt.org/items/show/3446, accessed June 2026).

The Milwaukee then selected Harlowton, the small Musselshell Valley town that Harlow's railroad had created, as a major division point. Japanese and Bulgarian workmen began construction of the Harlowton station complex in 1907, completing the depot, roundhouse, freight house, and shops in 1908. The design followed the Milwaukee's utilitarian Class A depot standard, reflecting the railroad's preference for function over architectural elaboration. Harlowton sat at a pivotal location on the system: it was the point at which the electrified mountain division began, and trains transitioning between steam-powered plains operations and electric mountain operations changed power here for decades.

North of the main line, the Milwaukee extended its reach into the Judith Basin through the North Montana Line running from Harlowton to Lewistown. The Judith Basin was among Montana's most productive agricultural territories, and the Milwaukee's entry into that district set off a cascade of consequences for the land and the people who came to farm it. The railroad actively promoted homesteading along its lines, distributing promotional literature designed to draw settlers onto the semiarid plains of central Montana. A 1917 Milwaukee Road homesteading brochure held in the Montana Historical Society Research Center Library illustrates how aggressively the company marketed settlement, capitalizing on the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909, which allowed settlers to claim 320 acres, and subsequent legislation that reduced the prove-up period to three years (Montana Historical Society, "Stories of the Land," https://mhs.mt.gov/education/StoriesOfTheLand/Part3/Chapter13/HistoricalDocCh133, accessed June 2026). The result was a proliferation of small towns strung along the Milwaukee corridors, places with T-plan street layouts platted by the railroad's surveyors. Towns like Moore, Hobson, and Garneill rose around the Milwaukee's grain elevators and depots, reaching their population peaks in the early 1920s before the combined failures of the drought and the Depression years began their long contraction.

Wires Across the Mountains: The Electrification

Almost as soon as the Pacific Extension opened for revenue service, the Milwaukee's operating men confronted a fact that the railroad's planners had underestimated. The mountain grades of Montana, Idaho, and Washington were brutal terrain for steam locomotives, and the winters made them worse. Montana winter temperatures fell to negative forty degrees Fahrenheit, at which point steam engines struggled to generate adequate steam pressure. The line crossed five mountain ranges, its tracks winding through long grades and sharp curves that taxed every piece of motive power the railroad owned.

The solution the Milwaukee settled on was without precedent in American railroad history. Beginning in 1912, management and engineers conducted feasibility studies with General Electric on the electrification of the Pacific Extension. In 1914, the railroad signed a contract with General Electric covering locomotives and the infrastructure necessary for a high-voltage direct current system, and construction began on the Rocky Mountain Division electrification from Harlowton east to Avery, Idaho. Substations were placed approximately every thirty-five miles on the flatter stretches and every twenty-five miles in the mountains, with sixteen substations on the Rocky Mountain Division alone. The initial electrified section was fully operational by late 1916, and by early 1917 electric locomotives were handling all traffic on the 440-mile Harlowton-to-Avery segment. A separate electrification of the Coast Division between Othello and Tacoma followed, completed through 1920 and extended to Seattle by 1927 (Railfan and Railroad Magazine, "Milwaukee Electrics: Fifty Years Gone," https://railfan.com/milwaukee-electrics-fifty-years-gone/, accessed June 2026). At the peak of the system, 656 route-miles of main line were under wire, making the Milwaukee the longest electrified railroad in the United States and, for a time, in the world.

The advantages were substantial. Electric locomotives operated at lower cost per ton-mile than steam on the steep grades, ran more reliably in extreme cold, and could recover energy through regenerative braking on long descents, feeding power back into the catenary wires. The copper overhead wire was supplied in large part from the Anaconda smelter, conveniently located on the Milwaukee's own line at Anaconda, Montana. Abundant hydroelectric power in the mountains provided the generating capacity. The electrification's cost of roughly twelve million dollars for the Rocky Mountain Division was reported to have been recovered within a few years through operating savings, though the overall cost of the Pacific Extension and its electrification ultimately reached $257 million, more than four times the original estimate of sixty million dollars (Harlowton Museum, "Milwaukee Railroad Harlowton," https://harlowtonmuseum.org/milwaukee-railroad-harlowton.php, accessed June 2026).

The Olympian and the Gateway Inn

For a generation of Montanans, the Milwaukee Road was not merely a freight carrier but a passenger experience. The Olympian, inaugurated in May 1911, was the railroad's flagship passenger train, carrying travelers between Chicago and Tacoma in a journey that passed through the wheat fields of the Dakotas, the ranches of central Montana, and the mountain canyons of Idaho. After the railroad's reorganization through its first bankruptcy in 1925 and its re-emergence as the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad in 1928, it launched a second, more luxurious iteration of the Olympian and opened the Gallatin Gateway Inn in 1927, a resort hotel southwest of Bozeman near the town of Gallatin Gateway. Passengers bound for Yellowstone National Park transferred from the train to buses at the inn for the remainder of their journey into the park. The hotel competed directly with tourist accommodations promoted by the Northern Pacific and Great Northern. In 1947, the railroad replaced the Olympian with the Olympian Hiawatha, a streamlined train equipped with the distinctive Super Dome and Skytop observation cars that became the Milwaukee's most recognized passenger equipment. Electric locomotives of the EP-4 class, known informally as Little Joes, powered the train through the Montana mountain districts until the Olympian Hiawatha was discontinued west of Deer Lodge in 1961 (American-Rails.com, "The Pacific Extension (Milwaukee Road)," https://www.american-rails.com/pce.html, accessed June 2026).

The Little Joes themselves had an unusual provenance. After World War II, General Electric built a fleet of powerful electric locomotives for the Soviet Union, which were then embargoed due to deteriorating relations between the two countries. The Milwaukee Road purchased twelve of these machines, had them re-gauged from the Russian broad gauge to standard gauge, and put them to work on the Rocky Mountain Division between Harlowton and Avery. They were nicknamed Little Joes after Joseph Stalin, and they ran in Montana until the end of electrified operations (Trains Magazine, "Milwaukee Road History," https://www.trains.com/ctr/railroads/fallen-flags/milwaukee-road-history/, accessed June 2026).

The Long Unwinding

The financial difficulties that would eventually destroy the Milwaukee Road were in motion almost from the moment the Pacific Extension opened. Traffic on the transcontinental route never met projections. Bonds sold to finance the construction began coming due in the 1920s, and the company declared bankruptcy in 1925. It reorganized in 1928, then succumbed again to the Depression and filed for bankruptcy a second time in 1935. Through it all, the Montana operations continued, the electric locomotives cycling through mountain passes, the branch lines carrying grain out of the Judith Basin and the Musselshell Valley.

The formation of Burlington Northern in March 1970 from the merger of the Northern Pacific, Great Northern, Burlington Route, and the Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway created a competitor that surrounded the Milwaukee Road on virtually every front. The Milwaukee sought inclusion in the merger and was denied. Then, in a decision whose consequences reverberated for years, the Milwaukee's board voted in 1973 to dismantle the electrification, concluding that the aging electrical infrastructure was an impediment to the railroad's merger prospects and that the copper overhead wire could be sold for an estimated ten million dollars. Engineers and independent analysts had argued that an investment of thirty-nine million dollars could have closed the gap between the two electrified districts, purchased new electric locomotives, and upgraded the entire system, making the Milwaukee far more efficient as diesel fuel costs climbed. The board rejected that analysis. The final electric freight arrived at Deer Lodge on June 15, 1974, ending sixty years of electrified operations (Cascade Rail Foundation, "History," https://www.milwelectric.org/history/, accessed June 2026). The copper wire brought only five million dollars when it was sold, far less than projected, and the railroad had to spend thirty-nine million dollars purchasing diesel locomotives to replace the electrics it had just scrapped. The badly deteriorated track, most in need of capital investment, was left untouched.

What followed was a collapse measured in slow orders and deferred maintenance. By 1977, much of the Pacific Extension was operating under severe speed restrictions, and transit times had nearly tripled. Between 1974 and 1977, the Milwaukee Road lost one hundred million dollars, and on December 19, 1977, the company filed for bankruptcy for the third time in forty-two years (Harlowton Museum, "Milwaukee Railroad Harlowton," https://harlowtonmuseum.org/milwaukee-railroad-harlowton.php, accessed June 2026). The bankruptcy court ultimately approved the abandonment of all Milwaukee Road trackage west of Miles City, Montana, and operations on the Pacific Extension ended on February 29, 1980. The final train passed through Montana on March 15, 1980.

The Montana Department of Transportation's Rail Planning Unit records at the Montana Historical Society, covering the years 1977 through 1982, document the state's struggle to assess and respond to the abandonment, conducting rail line surveys and community impact assessments through public hearings as hundreds of miles of track were embargoed and eventually torn up (Montana Department of Transportation, Rail Planning Unit Records, Montana Historical Society Research Center Archives, Helena, Montana, https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv73126, accessed June 2026). Grain elevators fell idle. Stockyards and freight stations closed. The small towns the Milwaukee had platted along its branch lines, already thinned by decades of agricultural consolidation and drought, lost the last institutional anchor connecting them to the wider economy.

Aftermath and Legacy

The physical remnants of the Milwaukee Road's Montana presence have followed different trajectories. Much of the main line right-of-way through the state has returned to private ownership or been converted to recreational use. The Harlowton depot, built by Japanese and Bulgarian workmen in 1907 and 1908, stands today as a museum administered locally, its roundhouse and station complex listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a testament to the engineering ambition of the electrification era. The portion of the old line through the Bitterroot Mountains at the Montana-Idaho border is preserved as a bicycle trail known as the Route of the Hiawatha. In 1982, the remnant of Milwaukee Road trackage east of Miles City through Montana was sold to Burlington Northern, and the remaining systemwide operations were absorbed by the Soo Line Railroad on January 1, 1986, ending the corporate existence of a railroad that had once operated over ten thousand miles of track.

For Montana, the Milwaukee Road was never simply a business enterprise. It was among the primary instruments by which the homesteading era was promoted and sustained, the mechanism by which central Montana's agricultural towns were created and connected to national markets, and the site of an engineering achievement in electrification that remains singular in American railroad history. That the railroad failed does not diminish the magnitude of what it built. What it built shaped the land, platted the towns, and moved the grain for three-quarters of a century. The silence that followed its passing fell heavily on a part of Montana that had known no other way of sending its products to the world.

Works Cited

Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Pacific Railroad Company Records. Montana State University Library, Merrill G. Burlingame Special Collections, Bozeman, Montana. Archives West, https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv90722. Accessed June 2026.

Drury, George H. "Milwaukee Road History." Trains Magazine, 2 Nov. 2021, https://www.trains.com/ctr/railroads/fallen-flags/milwaukee-road-history/. Accessed June 2026.

Harlowton Museum. "Milwaukee Railroad Harlowton." Upper Musselshell Museum, https://harlowtonmuseum.org/milwaukee-railroad-harlowton.php. Accessed June 2026.

Historic Montana. "Milwaukee Road Historic District." Preserve Montana / State Historic Preservation Office, https://historicmt.org/items/show/3446. Accessed June 2026.

Montana Department of Transportation, Rail Planning Unit Records, 1977-1982. Montana Historical Society Research Center Archives, Helena, Montana. Archives West, https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv73126. Accessed June 2026.

Montana Historical Society. "Context for the Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway Montana Homesteading Brochure." Stories of the Land, https://mhs.mt.gov/education/StoriesOfTheLand/Part3/Chapter13/HistoricalDocCh133. Accessed June 2026.

"Railroads in Montana Photograph Collection." Archives West, https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv572356. Accessed June 2026.

"Milwaukee Electrics: Fifty Years Gone." Railfan and Railroad Magazine, 15 May 2024, https://railfan.com/milwaukee-electrics-fifty-years-gone/. Accessed June 2026.

Cascade Rail Foundation. "History." Milwaukee Road Electrification, https://www.milwelectric.org/history/. Accessed June 2026.

Slowinski, Alex. "The Human Cost of the Milwaukee Road's Bankruptcy." Indiana Historical Bureau, https://www.in.gov/history/files/Slowinski-Hist-493-Bennett-Tinsley-sub.pdf. Accessed June 2026.