Over The HumpOver The HumpA Photographic Folio ofA Photographic Folio of

Great Northern Railway’sGreat Northern Railway’s

Cascade Division,Cascade Division,

1898 – 19061898 – 1906Gordon Clark

©Copyright 2011

Introduction

was 12 or 13 years old when this collection of remarkable Great Northern photos fell into my hands. They were given to me by a pal who knew I was fascinated by anything having to do with railroads. At the time (more than 50 years ago, now) we lived in Edmonds, Wash., hard along the mainline of the Great Northern Railway, between Everett and Seattle. For us, playing along the tracks and watching trains was a favorite pastime.I

The photos are copies of the glass-plate originals. They are mounted on display-quality cardboard typical of photographers’ work of a hundred years ago. No photographer credits exist, and only one photo – the Commissary -- has any identification of subject matter. Another photo has a curved line in the upper left where the glass plate cracked. I have not seen any of these photos in other publications, although others by the same photographers are widely known.

All the photographs are of the west side of Stevens Pass, taken around the turn of the last century. As a kid, I was already familiar with the area shown in the photos. Most every Saturday during the winter found me skiing up at The Pass, and I spent many summer weekends camping in an old cabin located just a hundred yards from the West portal of the “new” Cascade Tunnel.

I was fascinated with the old railroad town of Wellington, perched precariously on the side of the mountain near Stevens Pass. With my Dad, we discovered we could drive the original right-of-way from the Pass down to the abandoned town site. Together we scrambled up, over, and around the remaining building foundations and snowsheds, populated then only by ghosts.

In 1910 Wellington was the scene of this country’s worst railroad disaster. On the cold, black night of March 1, after days of blizzards and freezing rain, a wall of snow let loose from the steep slopes of Windy Mountain nearly 3000 feet above the town. The slide grew to be a massive avalanche, estimated to be 1000 feet wide and 15 feet high. Roaring down the denuded slopes, it swept clean everything in its path, including much of the town, a mail train and two passenger trains stalled for

several days in the snow, three steam engines, four electric engines, a rotary snowplow, and the division superintendent’s private car.

John P. Brady, an engineer on the first train into Wellington after the slide, described the scene: “Picture then the enormous mass of snow; the avalanche carrying great boulders along like pebbles, snapping off trees and rolling over Wellington with little warning but the telltale sucking wind. The three trains were carted like toys a thousand feet down into Tye Creek. [Superintendent] O'Neill's car was flattened on the track where it stood.”

An estimated 115 men, women, and children were hurled into the canyon; only 17 survived, including four adults and an 18-month old baby found crying in the snow. The total death toll was at least 96.

Wellington was the western portal of the first Cascade Tunnel. As a kid I walked through the old tunnel with my dad and my two older brothers. It was a straight shot through the bore, with a faint dot of lightcoming from the other end, but it seemed to take forever to hike through it. And of course my brothersregaled me with ghost stories for the better part its 2.6 miles. When we finally came out on the other side, we met a retired GN trainman. He told us that nothing could drag him into the tunnel now, because in its earlier days the GN had stuffed a trainload of hay into a hole in the ceiling and still couldn’t prevent the slow collapse of the roof. We wisely kept mum about having just come through the tunnel on foot.

What follows, then, is my reconstruction of the events surrounding the photos. I have discovered all the locations but one. By comparing these to previously published works, I have mostly identified the photographers. However, any errors in attribution or identification are mine.

Gordon Clark Boulder Creek, Calif.

September 2002 Age 9; Edmonds, Wash.

Stevens Pass, Cascade Division

Great Northern Railway

ohn Frank Stevens was a man who could get things done. James Jerome Hill was a man who wanted one thing done above all else: a transcontinental railroad from St. Paul to Seattle to compete against the Northern Pacific. Hill hired Stevens as his chief surveying engineer, at the

age of 33. Stevens’ first great challenge was to find a suitable crossing of the Rocky Mountains for Hill’s Great Northern Railway. On December 11, 1889, Stevens and a Flathead Indian guide followed a branch of the Marias River in Montana, discovering a hidden route that shortened the GN mainline by over 150 miles and at a grade of only one percent.

JStevens’s next challenge was to breech the mighty Cascade Mountains. The cigar-chomping Stevens engineered a tortuous line of switchbacks over the pass that today bears his name. Stevens knew the switchbacks would be a brutal bit of railroading, but Mr. Hill was in a hurry. The railroad opened as scheduled in 1893, but seven years later the highest of the switchbacks were abandoned when the 2½-mile Cascade Tunnel was completed.

By 1903, Stevens was general manager of the Great Northern Railway and recognized as the world's foremost railway civil engineer. That year he was selected to be Chief Engineer of the Panama Canal and its construction railway, the Panama Rail Road. The canal project was in total disarray and the railroad was near collapse. On arriving, he sarcastically noted, “About the only claim for good work heard made was that there had been no collisions for some time. A collision has its good points as well as its bad ones—it indicates there is something moving on the railroad."

The Canal was President Theodore Roosevelt’s pet project, and Stevens was his kind of man. Roosevelt described Stevens as “a big fellow, a man of daring and good sense, and burly power.”

In 1917 Stevens was picked to lead a delegation to the Russian Far East to improve operations of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the longest continuous railway on earth. The railroad was considered vital for shipping military supplies to the Allied Russian armies in Europe, but had almost ceased to function. Most of the 250 railroad men selected to accompany Stevens were from the Dakotas and Montana, familiar with the tough railroading conditions and grueling weather they would encounter in Siberia. Stevens stayed in Russia for five years.

John F. Stevens died on June 2, 1943, in Southern Pines, N.C. just after his 90th birthday.

Madison Station: Beginning the Hump

Photographer: Claude Witt

Date: about 1898

he Cascade Mountains of Washington presented a formidable obstacle to James Hill’s dream of a northern transcontinental railroad. However, even John Stevens’ engineering brilliance could not avoid pushing the railroad over a brutal up-and-down climb of 3,000 vertical feet in just a

few miles.TFrom the west, the route follows the Skykomish River on a relatively easy uphill grade. But at Madison, shown here, the real work begins. A mile or two past the station and behind the photographer, the railroad makes a wide, 180-degree loop across the Tye River to begin the slow grind up to Wellington, near the summit. As the crow flies, it is about 3 miles between Madison and Wellington, but the railroad required 21 miles to make the climb, at a standard grade of not less than 2.2%.

In the direct center of this photograph is a water tank next to the track. This was the main purpose for a station at this lonely spot: to replenish thirsty steam engines making the long haul up from Skykomish, before they tackled the even tougher grind up to Wellington.

In this summer scene, the Madison stationmaster appears to have thrown a mattress onto a stump next to the station, perhaps to air it out. With the opening of new Cascade Tunnel and realignment of the track in 1929, this station was dismantled and a new station named Scenic was built on the other side of the Tye River.

Great Northern Hot Springs Hotel

Photographer: James H. Gridley

Date: about 1899

he hotel opened about 1893, along with the railroad. Located not too far from Madison station, it overlooked the Tye River crossing. The pedestrian bridge in the foreground led to a small platform along the tracks. This photograph was probably taken just after the opening; the sign

appears to be a temporary banner.TThis building burned down sometime around 1906. In its place GN constructed a larger, more ornate hotel and renamed it Scenic Hot Springs.

The new spa quickly became a favorite spot for visitors to “take the waters”. It was also the social hub of the area for the locals. Dances with live music were held several times a year. The hotel’s heyday was probably during construction of the new 8-mile Cascade Tunnel, when GN had up to 2,000 men working on the bore. The hotel was in the way of the tunnel approach, but it was kept open to house tunnel workers until 1927. “Spoils” (dirt and rock taken from the bore) were used to form the elevated approach, which buried the front lawn shown here (and ultimately the hotel site) to a depth nearly as high as the building itself.

Today the hot springs are available for public use, but the hotel is long gone and no accommodations are available.

Coincidently, the hot springs were close to the site of the last spike of the Great Northern Railroad, hammered down on a cold, snowy day in January 1893. James J. Hill completed his transcontinental railroad almost exactly on schedule despite the ferocious hardships of driving a railroad over Stevens Pass.

Clearing the Line

Photographer: James H. Gridley

Date: 1900

inter railroading over Stevens Pass in the early days was as tough a job of railroading as any in the country. In spite of building and maintaining many miles of wood-and-concrete snowsheds from Madison to the west end of the small yards at Wellington, the Cascade

Division still kept several rotary plows busy during snow season.WHere a plow is clearing the mainline just in front of the Madison station. In the valley, snowfall was relatively light and easily cleared. However, up at Wellington the worst snowfalls in the Cascades were routinely recorded, averaging 50 feet per year. After every new snowfall, two heavy engines would be coupled back to back with opposite-facing rotaries at each end, to avoid getting stuck in a snow tunnel of their own making. This strange consist would keep the line clear until the next snowfall.

GN numbered its rotaries in the X800s. One of thee, X807, was swept to the bottom of the canyon during the disastrous Wellington avalanche on March 1, 1910. It was never recovered.

The rotary was a big improvement over earlier shovel-nosed plows, which used as many as eight steam engines to drive the plow full speed into a snow bank. The hope was that brute force would dislodge the snow. As often as not, the plow would be derailed instead, and hand crews would have to dig it out.

The rotary snowplow, invented in 1884, used two massive sets of blades spinning in opposite directions. The first set cut the snow from the drift and flung it backward into the second set, which blew it off to the side of the track in an impressive arc of powdered snow. An internal steam engine propelled the blades but not the plow, so at least one pusher engine was required. The plow and pusher required an onboard crew of half a dozen or more men; when clearing slides, another dozen might be needed to manually remove trees and debris that could ruin the blades. Rotary plows were still being built into the 1950s, and even today are pressed into emergency service in some locations such as BNSF’s Marias Pass in Montana and the Cumbres & Toltec Railroad in Colorado.

In the Hole at Madison

Photographer: James H. Gridley

Date: 1900

now-dusted freight cars sit idle (“in the hole”) on the spur near Madison. Two trainmen can be seen on the westbound track beyond the crossover switch. Beyond them, out of sight around the corner, is the Madison station.S

A short distance to the right of the photographer, the railroad crosses the Tye River and, hidden behind the trees, begins the steep grade westbound up to Horseshoe Tunnel. Inside the tunnel, the line reverses direction 180 degrees for the final, nine-mile eastbound crawl up to Wellington. The high line is visible across the canyon, showing bridges 397 and 398, with an eastbound freight faintly visible on the first (left-hand) bridge.

Dangerous avalanche chutes are clearly seen above the high line, prompting GN to begin building snowsheds even before the line was finished. The railroad built more than nine miles of snowsheds in an effort to keep trains running. The sheds were massively constructed, using millions of board feet of wood timbers and roofed with steel sheeting. Eventually many of the wood structures were rebuilt of concrete. Yet they were costly to build and maintain, running many hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. The new Cascade Tunnel completely eliminated the need for showsheds, and bored under the worst avalanche areas.

Today, 70 years after they last saw live steam, the crumbling snowsheds are a popular attraction for hikers along the Iron Goat Trail. This trail follows the original rail line from the Pass, through the site of Wellington, through the snowsheds (but not the horseshoe tunnel) and down to Scenic.

No. 1 Varnish Crossing High Steel

Photographer: Harrison Usher

Date: about 1905

t is summer, the consist is light, and the threat of avalanches is gone for the season as the Oriental Limited heads west several miles downhill from Wellington. White smoke shows that the hogger is riding the primitive air brakes, carefully easing across the high, curved steel over upper

Martin Creek before disappearing into the infamous Horseshoe Tunnel. This 1511-foot bore doubles back under itself in a 180-degree curve that sends the train eastward across an almost identical lower trestle to re-cross Martin Creek. In this way the line quickly loses a few hundred feet in altitude to make the Tye River crossing at Madison.

IThe original upper Martin Creek trestle (bridge no. 401) was a wood structure built in 1892. It was rebuilt in 1900 as the metal structure shown here, and used continuously until 1929 when GN opened the new, lower Cascade Tunnel. The trestle was on a 10-degree curve and a stiff grade, making slow-orders mandatory for all trains. A nearly identical bridge, the Foss River Bridge near Skykomish, was built at the same time and is still used today by the BNSF.

The Oriental Limited was the original Train No 1 and the pride of the Great Northern varnish fleet until the Empire Builder supplanted it in 1929. A Limited departed Chicago and Seattle every day for the 4-day run to the opposite terminal. The Limited’s standard 10- or 12-wheeler road engine always received at least one Consolidated helper engine at Skykomish on the west or Leavenworth on the east to boost the train up the stiff grade to Wellington. There the helper engine would drop off.

Soon after this photo was taken, an observation car was added to the tail end of the Oriental Limited. The next year, the Limited’s schedule was shortened to just 58 hours from St. Paul to Seattle, beating the Northern Pacific’s North Coast Limited by 4½ hours. Average speed was 31 miles per hour, an astonishing speed for the times.

The photographer is Harrison Usher, a North Cascade Division telegrapher and amateur photographer based at Wellington during the first decade and a half of the railroad’s operation. Many of the best photos of the times are his.

Riding the Pilot through the Bore

Photographer: Harrison Usher

Date: 1905

he original 1893 route used a series of nine torturous switchbacks for the final climb over the 4059-foot summit. The route was prone to rock slides in good weather, snow slides in bad, and runaway trains anytime. With a 4% controlling grade, it was extremely hard on men and

equipment. Even as he surveyed the route, Mr. Hill’s Chief Engineer John F. Stevens knew he eventually would have to tunnel under the escarpment to avoid these treacherous conditions and exhausting switchbacks.

TBut pressure to open the line was intense, so tunneling had to wait for another seven years. It was not until 1900 that the first Cascade Tunnel opened for service and the summit crossing was dropped to 3383 feet elevation. The 2.6-mile tunnel was an improvement over the earlier switchbacks, but the approaches – especially on the west side shown here – were still treacherous for winter railroading.

The tunnel introduced other problems as well. In one noted incident, a passenger train stalled in the middle when its helper engine uncoupled and set the train brakes. The helper continued on out, but the remaining engine crew could not get the train moving. Nearly all the passengers were unconscious or very sick by the time an intrepid trainman climbed into the cab and backed the train out. For this act of heroism he was promoted and presented with a $1000 check from James J. Hill.

Shown here, an eastbound freight slowly pounds up the grade from Wellington to enter the tunnel. Two men (freeloaders?) can be seen riding the pilot of the engine. In the tunnel, conditions for trainmen (and freeloaders) were brutal, especially on the 1.7% eastbound grade. Hot engine gases and smoke could nearly suffocate crews riding in open cabs. Often they had to resort to breathing through water-soaked cotton batting. For the freeloaders, the best place of all was riding the pilot, in front of the smoke stack and out of sight of the train crew.

GN electrified the tunnel in 1909. Electric locomotives, called “motors” by trainmen, were cut in to power the loads through the tunnel, a distance of just under five miles between Wellington (west portal) and Cascade Tunnel Station (east portal). The normal road engines carried just enough steam to avoid being a drag on the load. Electrification vastly improved life for crew and passengers. (The lack of overhead catenary wires clearly dates this photo.) With the opening of the new Cascade

Tunnel, this tunnel was abandoned and electrification was expanded to 71 miles, from Skykomish to Wenatchee.

Albert Armstrong’s Office and Commisary at Grant Smith’s Camp

Photographer: James H. Gridley

Date: 1900

udging by the attire, today may be a holiday, with wives visiting their men working in one of the Great Northern construction camps. Certainly women were not common in these primitive, remote camps high up in the Cascades. The gent in the bowler may be a section head. Bowler

hats were the preferred headgear of the time, because they didn’t blow off as easily in the wind of a moving train.

JThis is the only photograph in the collection that contains an identifying reference: the title, above, complete with the misspelled “commissary”. Grant Smith was a GN contractor who managed many of the construction projects in the Cascade Division during the first decade of the railroad’s operation.

Smith later built the Olympic Hotel and the White-Henry-Stuart Building in Seattle. He died just four months after marrying Deette McAuslan in1923. The new widow Mrs. Smith used her late husband’s construction firm to build an imposing brick residence on the south slope of Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill. She died in 1979. The home remains today an historical Seattle landmark.

Losing Its Footing Near Wellington

Photographer: Harrison Usher

Date: 1903

now slides and avalanches were a common hazard for trainmen working the Cascade Division. Wary engine crews learned to scan the upper slopes for snow movement and listen for the muffled roar indicating a slide up ahead. Every winter big and small avalanches knocked

engines and cars off the tracks, as happened here. And just as often, the trains had to be dug out by hand before a Big Hook could be brought in to right them again.

SHere engine 951 lies steaming in a crumpled heap, likely knocked askew by the large rock lying on the track behind the workman on the right. Her tender is sideways on the tracks, but the passenger cars appear to have kept their feet on the rails.

The engine probably is an early Baldwin-built 10-wheeler (4-6-0), the main motive power for cross-summit work in 1903. With high-stepping 73” drivers, these ten-spots remained on the GN active duty roster until the last one was scrapped in 1942.

This hand crew appears to be Japanese, possibly part of the original construction crew brought over from Japan. Further down the line, the shantytown of Nippon (renamed Alpine in 1903) housed the Japanese railroad workers. U.S. Census records from 1910 and 1920 list many Japanese surnames living in Wellington.

Crews dug out engines and structures during the winter and built or repaired snowsheds during the summer. During bad winters, as many as 300 men were assigned to the Cascade Division to keep the trains moving.

A Six-Spot Takes A Bath

Photographer: Unknown

Date: 1905

Ittle is known of this photograph except for the engine itself. A Great Northern engine roster shows No. 320 to be a Mogul-class steam engine built in 1887 by Rogers Locomotive and Machine Works. The Mogul was a popular 2-6-0 arrangement, featuring a two-wheel swivelling

front (pony) truck, six 55-inch driving wheels, and no wheels under the cab, a design used for more than 60 years throughout North America. This six-spot had a traction weight of 78,200 pounds, light-weight by later standards. Rogers was a 19th-century manufacturer of railroad steam locomotives based in Paterson, New Jersey. The company built more than six thousand steam locomotives for railroads around the world. By the early 20th century the company was failing; in 1905 it was absorbed by the American Locomotive Company (ALCO).

L

Below is a builder’s photo of a similar engine, the Brooks-built Mogul No. 371, renumbered to No. 450 in 1899. Like No. 320, this engine featured an oil headlight, spoked pilot truck wheels, and wooden cab and pilot (“cow catcher”).

©Copyright 2002 and 2011

Gordon Clark

Weaverville, North Carolina

Email: gordonvictoria@earthlink.net