Substation 13

By editor

[East Portal, Mineral County, Montana, 1915]

The Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway, having arrived late to the transcontinental party and finding all the easy grades already taken, decided to compensate for its tardiness by spending more money than anyone else. They built their line through the Bitterroot Mountains, a range that seems to have been designed specifically to discourage railroads. When the steam locomotives proved unequal to the task of hauling heavy freight up these impossible grades in the dead of winter, the Milwaukee Road did not retreat. They simply decided to electrify the whole operation.

It was a magnificent piece of hubris. Between 1914 and 1916, they strung copper wire across 440 miles of some of the most unforgiving terrain in North America, from Harlowton, Montana, to Avery, Idaho. To power this grand experiment, they built twenty-two substations, spaced roughly thirty miles apart, to step down the 100,000-volt alternating current from the Thompson Falls and Great Falls hydroelectric dams into the 3,000-volt direct current required by the locomotives.

Substation 13, sitting here at East Portal, was the largest of the lot. It was essentially a gigantic electric vault, a brick-and-concrete monument to the belief that enough voltage can conquer any geography. Inside, three massive 1,500-kilowatt motor-generator sets hummed with the power of a captive thunderstorm. The men who worked here lived in company bungalows just down the hill, raising families in the shadow of the great brick building, their lives regulated by the steady thrum of the generators and the occasional terrifying crack of a circuit breaker blowing out.

The electric locomotives themselves were marvels of the age. They were clean, quiet, and possessed of a regenerative braking system that turned the motors into generators on the downhill runs, feeding power back into the overhead wires. A train descending the western slope of the Bitterroots could actually help pull another train up the eastern slope. It was an elegant system, and for sixty years it worked beautifully.

But elegance is rarely a defense against economics. By the 1970s, the copper wire was aging, the substations needed upgrading, and the Milwaukee Road was bankrupt. In a decision that still inspires awe for its sheer shortsightedness, the railroad's management decided to scrap the electrification system just as the oil crisis of the 1970s was making diesel fuel ruinously expensive. They tore down the wires, sold the copper for scrap, and replaced the clean, quiet electrics with diesel locomotives that struggled and smoked their way over the passes just as the steam engines had done sixty years before.

The Milwaukee Road abandoned its Pacific Extension entirely in 1980. The tracks were pulled up, the ties were sold for landscaping, and the great brick substations were left to the elements. Substation 13 still stands, a hollow shell stripped of its copper and its purpose, a silent witness to the fact that progress is not always a straight line, and that sometimes the most advanced technology we possess is the technology we throw away.

See also

• Substation 13 at East Portal, Mineral County (United States Forest Service, erected 1998)
• [The Route of the Hiawatha] - The rail-trail that now occupies the abandoned Milwaukee Road grade.