Forty-Five Hours Through the Mountains: The Empire Builder

By Editor

Chicago to Seattle via Glacier Country, 1929-Present

The train leaves Chicago in the evening, and by the time the sky begins to lighten over the plains of North Dakota, you have been traveling for twelve hours and the land has been flat for most of them, the great interior grassland spreading away in every direction under a sky that seems larger than any sky you have seen before, because the land is so level and the horizon so far that the sky has room to be itself. Then the Missouri River, and then the high plains of Montana, and then, if you are watching at the right hour of the morning, the first suggestion of mountains at the western edge of the sky, a darkness against the dawn that resolves, as the light grows, into the Rocky Mountain Front.

The Great Northern Railway inaugurated the Empire Builder on June 10, 1929. It was named for James J. Hill, who had built the Great Northern from a failing Minnesota short line into the northernmost transcontinental railroad in the United States, and who was called the Empire Builder because of what he had done. The train ran from Chicago to Seattle, 2,206 miles, in 45 hours and 15 minutes, which was fast enough to be remarkable and slow enough to let you see the country.

The route crossed Marias Pass, the lowest crossing of the Continental Divide in the northern Rockies, at an elevation of 5,213 feet. John Frank Stevens had found the pass in the winter of 1889, walking alone into the mountains with a thermometer and a compass, and what he found was a passage through the mountains that the Great Northern could use at a grade of less than one percent. The Empire Builder crossed it at speed, and the passengers who were awake for the crossing could look north and see the peaks of Glacier National Park rising above the valley, the argillite and limestone of the Lewis Overthrust laid in horizontal bands of red and gray, the glaciers in their cirques catching the morning light.

The Great Northern had lobbied for the creation of Glacier National Park in 1910, and it had built the hotels that made the park accessible, and it ran the Empire Builder through the park's southern edge as a kind of moving advertisement for what lay to the north. In 1955, the railroad re-equipped the train with dome cars, and the passengers in the domes could see the mountains in every direction, the peaks and the snowfields and the hanging valleys where the glaciers had been and where some of them still were, retreating year by year as the climate warmed but still present, still blue-white against the gray rock, still grand in the particular way that things are grand when they have been forming for ten thousand years.

The train passed through Whitefish and then descended the western slope of the Rockies toward the Flathead Valley, and the mountains fell away behind it, and the country opened into the broad valley of the Clark Fork River, and then the Bitterroot Range appeared to the south, and then the Idaho Panhandle, and then the Columbia Plateau, and then the Cascades, and then the descent to Puget Sound and the end of the journey in Seattle, 2,206 miles from Chicago, 45 hours and 15 minutes from the time of departure.

The Empire Builder still runs. Amtrak operates it now, on the same route, with the same name, through the same mountains. The dome cars are gone, replaced by Sightseer Lounge cars that offer a view but not the same view. The schedule is approximately the same, though the on-time performance is not, because the train runs on freight railroad tracks and freight trains have priority. But the mountains are the same. The argillite and limestone of the Lewis Overthrust are the same. The light on the peaks at dawn is the same light it has always been, falling on rock that was laid down at the bottom of a sea more than a billion years ago, and the passengers who are awake for the crossing of Marias Pass can still look north and see Glacier National Park rising above the valley, and some of them feel what the passengers in 1929 felt, which is that they are passing through country that is larger than they are, and older, and will be there long after the train is gone.

See also

• Empire Builder, Amtrak's current service on the historic route
• Marias Pass, the Continental Divide crossing at the heart of the route
• Glacier National Park, the park the Great Northern built and promoted
• James J. Hill, the Empire Builder himself