The Butte, Anaconda and Pacific Railway

By Editor

Silver Bow and Deer Lodge Counties, Montana, 1891-1967

In 1890, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company was moving ore from the richest copper hill on earth to its smelters in Anaconda, Montana, over a railroad it did not own. The Montana Union Railway charged what it chose to charge, and the Anaconda Company paid what it was charged, because there was no alternative. Marcus Daly, who had built the Anaconda Company from a single mine claim into the largest copper producer in the world, decided to build his own railroad.

The Butte, Anaconda and Pacific Railway was incorporated in 1891. It ran 30 miles between Butte and Anaconda, with 114 miles of total trackage including branches into the mine yards. It was chartered as a common carrier and took passengers and general freight, but its reason for existing was copper ore: the millions of tons of rock that had to move from the headframes of Butte to the smelter stacks of Anaconda every year, without interruption, at a cost that the Anaconda Company controlled.

The men who ran the ore trains in the early years worked with steam locomotives. The work was heavy and constant. The grades out of Butte were steep, the loads were enormous, and the engines wore out fast. By 1910, the railroad's management was looking for a different way to move the ore.

What they chose was electricity.

The BA&P electrified 75 of its 114 miles between 1912 and 1913, a project carried out by General Electric and the railroad's own crews. The power came from Great Falls, 125 miles to the northeast, transmitted at high voltage and converted to direct current at substations along the line. The operating voltage was 2,400 volts DC, the highest in use on any railroad in the United States at the time. Seventeen new electric locomotives were ordered from General Electric, each weighing 80 tons. Fifteen were freight units, geared to haul at 35 miles per hour. Two were passenger units, geared for 45 miles per hour with double pantographs and dual headlights.

A contemporary account by E.W. Rice Jr. quoted John D. Ryan, who had succeeded Daly as the principal owner of the railroad, on the results: "The cost was within the original estimate, the operation has been an unqualified success and the economy at least 50% in excess of the promises of the engineers at the time the work was undertaken. The tonnage handled over the lines increased over 50% in three years."

What Ryan did not quote, because it was not the kind of thing that appeared in engineering journals, was the wage paid to the men who loaded the ore cars at the mine portals, or the conditions under which the smelter workers in Anaconda received the trains. The Anaconda Company operated Butte and Anaconda as a company system: it owned the mines, the railroad, the smelter, and a substantial portion of the housing, the newspapers, and the political machinery of the state of Montana. A man who worked in the mines of Butte in 1913 earned between two and three dollars a day. He worked underground in rock dust that would eventually fill his lungs. He was paid in wages that were good by the standards of the era, but the era's standards were set by the companies.

The freight runs during the electrification years were of a scale that is difficult to picture. A single ore train consisted of sixty cars, each carrying 50 tons of rock. The total mass of such a train was 4,080 tons, not counting the locomotive. These trains ran continuously, day and night, moving the output of the Butte hill to the smelter. The smelter ran continuously in return, processing the ore and releasing sulfur dioxide into the air of the Deer Lodge Valley in quantities that killed the grass on the surrounding hills and eventually stripped the slopes bare. The Anaconda Company paid damages to the ranchers whose cattle died, and the smelter continued to operate.

The electrification lasted until 1967, when diesel-electric locomotives became cheaper to operate than the overhead wire system. By then, the Anaconda Company's dominance of Montana was beginning to erode. The smelter at Anaconda closed in 1980, taking with it the reason for the railroad's existence. The BA&P was sold in 1985 to a consortium of local investors and renamed the Rarus Railway. It was sold again in 2007 to the Patriot Rail Corporation, which restored the original name.

The railroad still runs today, carrying what freight remains between Butte and Anaconda. The headframes of the Butte mines are mostly silent now, and the Berkeley Pit, the open-pit mine that replaced the underground workings in the 1950s, is filled with acidic water that rises slowly toward the water table. The Superfund designation covers most of the Silver Bow Creek drainage. The men who loaded the ore cars are gone, and the companies that employed them are gone, and what remains is the landscape they left behind.

The BA&P Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988.

See also

• Butte, Anaconda and Pacific Railway, Wikipedia
• Anaconda Copper Mining Company, corporate history
• Berkeley Pit, Butte, Montana