The Milwaukee Road Electrification

By Editor

Meagher, Wheatland, and Powell Counties, Montana, 1914-1974

The grade out of Harlowton climbed at 1.66 percent, and the steam locomotives that had been working it since 1909 were not equal to the task in winter.

At minus-forty degrees Fahrenheit, which is what the Montana high country produces without apology in January, a steam locomotive cannot generate sufficient pressure to move a heavy freight train over a mountain grade. The water in the tender freezes. The steam condenses before it can do its work. The crews who ran those trains knew the mathematics of cold iron and failing pressure, and by 1912 the Milwaukee Road's management knew it too. They had built 2,300 miles of new transcontinental railroad through the most varied topography in the country in three years, and the mountain sections were beating them.

The solution was electricity.

Between 1914 and 1916, the Milwaukee Road strung overhead wire from Harlowton, Montana, to Avery, Idaho, a distance of 438 miles. The system ran at 3,000 volts direct current, delivered through a single overhead wire to a pantograph on the roof of each locomotive. The power came from hydroelectric stations in the mountains, which had the advantage of being both abundant and cheap. The copper for the wire came from Anaconda, which was convenient. The work was done by the railroad's own crews and by General Electric, which supplied the first generation of electric locomotives.

You would have seen, if you had stood at the Harlowton terminal in the winter of 1916, a thing that had not existed anywhere in the world at that scale: 438 miles of electrified main line, the longest such system on earth at the time. The locomotives that ran it were boxcab units, ungainly to look at but capable of sustained effort that no steam engine could match on a mountain grade. Where a steam locomotive working at its limit might produce 3,000 horsepower for a short period before its boiler pressure fell, an electric locomotive produced its rated power continuously, for as long as the wire overhead carried current.

The Milwaukee Road electrified its Cascade crossing in Washington between 1917 and 1920, adding another 207 miles. The combined 645 miles of electrified main line was the largest such project in the world, and would not be exceeded in the United States until the Pennsylvania Railroad's electrification of its Northeast Corridor in the 1930s. The cost was $27 million, and the annual savings in operating efficiency exceeded $1 million per year. The electric locomotives climbed the grades that had defeated steam, and they climbed them in any weather.

The Olympian crossed Montana on electric power from 1916 onward, and later the Olympian Hiawatha, the Milwaukee Road's postwar streamliner, made the same crossing with the same efficiency. Passengers who looked out the windows of those trains saw the catenary wire overhead and the substations at intervals along the line, and most of them gave it no more thought than they gave to the rails beneath them. The men who maintained the system knew what it meant. A broken wire in a Montana blizzard required a crew to go out in conditions that would kill an unprepared man, and restore current to a line that could not stop running.

In 1974, the Milwaukee Road ended its electrification. The electric locomotive fleet had reached the end of its service life, and the railroad's management calculated that new diesel-electric locomotives could handle the grades more cheaply than rebuilding the overhead wire system. The final electric freight arrived at Deer Lodge, Montana, on June 15, 1974. The wire came down, the substations were closed, and sixty years of electric operation over the Montana mountains ended without ceremony.

Three years later, the Milwaukee Road filed for bankruptcy. In 1980, it abandoned the entire Pacific Extension, including every mile of track in Montana. The grade out of Harlowton that the electric locomotives had climbed in forty-below weather is now a hiking trail.

The professional judgment, rendered in hindsight, is that the decision to end the electrification was a mistake. The railroad that abandoned its most efficient technology in 1974 was bankrupt by 1977. The wire that came down in the summer of that year had been doing its work correctly for sixty years, and the men who built it had known what they were doing.

See also

• Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, Wikipedia
• Harlowton, Montana, eastern end of the electrified zone
• Route of the Olympian, former Milwaukee Road rail trail in Montana