Nostalgia & History > Stampede Pass

After reading lwilton’s posting on Completion of Northwestern Pacific Railroad I did a Google Image search of various combinations of the words Construction Northwestern Pacific Railroad and Eel River Canyon. I obtained two websites with two terrific pictures.

Picture 1 is from the following website,

http://www.crowwinghistory.org/nprr.html

The following excerpt is from the above website.

“NORTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD IN BRAINERD

Dedication: This page is dedicated to the workers and families of the Northern Pacific Railroad who struggled, lived and died in order to build the railroad and the city of Brainerd, in particular, to my grandfather, Martin Henry Nelson (1870-1950), who worked for the Northern Pacific for nearly fifty-five years, retiring in 1941 as the Superintendent of the Brainerd NP shops. Ann M. Nelson.
Introduction: Contained in the following information is an engraving of the 1888 Northern Pacific Railroad Shops along with a key to the buildings shown in the engraving, a description of the development in 1893 of the Northern Pacific Monad and a Chronology of the development of the Northern Pacific Railroad in Brainerd from 1864-2000.”

Wikipedia has a webpage on Brainerd,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainerd,_Minnesota#History

The following excerpt is from the above website,

“Brainerd was the brainchild of Northern Pacific railroad president John Gregory Smith, who in 1870 named the township after his wife, Anne Eliza Brainerd Smith, and father-in-law, Lawrence Brainerd. The company built a bridge over the Mississippi seven miles north of Crow Wing Village and used the Brainerd station as a machine and car shop, prompting many to move north and abandon Crow Wing. Brainerd was organized as a city on March 6, 1873.”

Picture 1 on the above webpage for crowwinghistory is under the date, April 21, 1889. “The Northern Pacific granted its machinists a raise of 1 1/2 cents an hour. For some years the company has paid its machinists 27 1/2 cents an hour. The request for 30 cents an hour was not granted but a satisfactory compromise was affected providing for a rate of 29 cents. (This Was Brainerd, Brainerd Dispatch, 21 April 1999).”

Picture 1, “Northern Pacific shops employees, ca. 1890. Source: Crow Wing County Historical Society”

---

Picture 2 is from the following website,

http://ernielb.blogspot.com/2009_11_01_archive.html

Picture 2 on the website has the caption, “A construction crew in 1885 at Green River in the Cascades.” But I could not find any additional information on the picture on the website. In an effort to determine if the picture is related to the Northwestern Pacific Railroad I did a Google search for “Railroad Construction on the Green River in the Cascades.” Among the results was the following Wikipedia webpage for Stampede Pass,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stampede_Pass

The following excerpts are from the above website,

“Stampede Pass is a mountain pass through the Cascade Range just south of Snoqualmie Pass in Washington. Its importance to transportation lies almost entirely with railroading, as no paved roads cross it. The pass, and the tunnel which takes advantage of it, the 1.86 mile Stampede Tunnel, played a significant role in the history of the Northern Pacific Railway.”

“The pass was discovered by Virgil Bogue, a civil engineer working for the Northern Pacific Railway. (Bogue went on to become chief engineer of the Union Pacific Railroad and later the Western Pacific Railroad.),

Below is Bogue's report, written in January, 1881, from the collection of Robert A. Robey, the Northern Pacific's roadmaster at Auburn, Washington, in charge of the line across Stampede Pass throughout the 1960s.”

[Bogue’s report is given on the Wikipedia webpage.]

Picture 2, “A construction crew in 1885 at Green River in the Cascades.”



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/07/12 06:39 by flynn.

---

There are some terrific photos on the following website. The same photos or similar photos were on the China Daily yesterday.

http://photoblog.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/06/15728122-grave-interruption-building-around-a-tomb-in-china?lite



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/07/12 06:34 by flynn.