Northern Pacific Railway HO Scale Models

The Northern Pacific Railway was chartered by an act of the 38th United States Congress on July 2, 1864, with the ambitious goal of connecting the Great Lakes region to Puget Sound along the northern tier of the country. Though the charter was granted during the final years of the Civil War, actual construction did not begin until February 1870, when groundbreaking took place at Carlton, Minnesota, roughly twenty-five miles west of Duluth. Financier Jay Cooke provided crucial early backing, and construction crews pushed westward across the difficult terrain of Minnesota and Dakota Territory while separate work proceeded northward from Kalama, Washington Territory, on the Columbia River. The railroad reached Fargo in June 1872 and pressed on to the upper Missouri River at the settlement then called Edwinton, later renamed Bismarck, by June 1873. The financial panic of 1873 halted further progress for years, but work eventually resumed, and on September 8, 1883, the final spike was driven in western Montana Territory, completing the main transcontinental line. Congress had awarded the railroad a land grant of nearly forty million acres to support construction, land the company used both to raise capital in Europe and to attract settlers, particularly from Germany and Scandinavia, to the northern Great Plains. The Northern Pacific's main line ran from the Twin Cities area westward through North Dakota and Montana, crossing the Continental Divide and continuing through Idaho before reaching Tacoma and other Puget Sound destinations in Washington. The railroad served extensive territory in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, with total trackage reaching approximately 6,800 miles at its peak. Agricultural freight, particularly wheat from the northern plains, formed the backbone of the railroad's revenue, supplemented by timber from the Pacific Northwest, livestock, and minerals. The railroad also operated a notable passenger service, with the North Coast Limited serving as its flagship train between Chicago and Seattle, a route that became one of the more celebrated runs in American passenger railroading. For a time the NP also operated an international branch, the Northern Pacific and Manitoba Railway, running north to Winnipeg, though that venture came to an end by the close of the nineteenth century. The Northern Pacific endured a turbulent financial history throughout its existence, passing through multiple receiverships and reorganizations. It was headquartered first in Brainerd, Minnesota, then later in Saint Paul. The railroad became entangled in the famous contest between E. H. Harriman and James J. Hill at the turn of the twentieth century, a struggle for control that contributed to the financial panic of 1901 and led to the formation of the Northern Securities Company, a holding company subsequently dissolved by the Supreme Court under antitrust law in 1904. Hill's Great Northern Railway and the Northern Pacific nonetheless remained closely allied for decades, sharing interests in the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad and cooperating across much of their parallel territory in the Pacific Northwest. On January 1, 1970, the Northern Pacific merged with the Great Northern Railway, the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, and the Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway to form the Burlington Northern Railroad, ending more than a century of independent operation under the NP reporting mark. The merger represented one of the largest railroad consolidations in American history to that point. Burlington Northern itself continued to expand, and in 1996 it merged with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway to create BNSF Railway, the successor system that still operates over much of the former Northern Pacific's main line today. The NP's route across the northern tier of the continent remains a vital freight corridor, and the railroad's legacy endures in the infrastructure, communities, and regional economies it helped shape across the northern American West.