Nostalgia & History > Article on B.A.&P. Electrification

The Butte, Anaconda, and Pacific is a 26 mile long line between the mines in Butte and the smelters in Anaconda. It was probably the first common carrier (other than streetcars) to completely electrify. Here is an article from a 1920 Railway Age issue on the electrification. Hopefully the result will be readable. (Some text is trimmed on the right of the second page in the original scan.)

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The Milwaukee Road purchased BA & P back in the early 20's.

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EL-SD45-3632 Wrote:
> The Milwaukee Road purchased BA & P back in the early 20's.

You need to recheck your facts. The BA&P was built by and remained a wholly owned subsidiary of Anaconda Copper Company until the copper producer shut down it's Montana operations and sold the BA&P in 1985. The Milwaukee and ACM may have had overlapping directorates, but the BA&P was never owned by the Milwaukee.

steeplecab

The B, A & P was a great operation... They proved what electrification was really about.... Heavy loads, steep grades, low maintenance....
Thanks for posting this great article...

leroy

While travelling westbound on I-90 between Whitehall and Butte Montana, there appear to be right-of-way and tracks on the right (hill) side of the freeway. What are those tracks? They are pretty rusty as of this time last year.

Are there any remnants of the line, equipment, photos? Is the mine still shut down?

There's a BAP box motor and caboose at the San Anselmo mine. The roundhouse facility
at Anaconda is mostly intact, there's a display at the Anaconda station. The line to
the GN yard is still intact as is some of the street trackage.

Out

I have railfanned the BA&P and there is not much to see or photograph. Here's most of what you will see in Anaconda.

1. The display downtown featuring Anaconda Copper Mining Co. 9. Looks like a depot behind it.

2. A lumber yard that sure looks like a ex-depot. It is not downtown but maybe a mile west of the downtown. Was this the BA&P depot?

3. BA&P coach #9 in a downtown park.

Comments and corrections welcome.

Marty Bernard

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There's a small but very nice section of photos of BA&P operations in the Morning Sun book "Under Milwaukee Wires."

Actually, the BA&P was built and operated for a while by the GN. Some rails on the line still have GN LINE markings. It stayed under ACM control until the mines and smelter was shut down by Atlantic Richfield who sold the railroad to the Green family. It has since been purchased by Patriot Rail.

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The rusting line on the north side of I-90 is the former NP/BN Homestake Pass line unused since the end of AMTK service.

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whistlepig Wrote:
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> While travelling westbound on I-90 between
> Whitehall and Butte Montana, there appear to be
> right-of-way and tracks on the right (hill) side
> of the freeway. What are those tracks? They are
> pretty rusty as of this time last year.

You're looking at the former Northern Pacific Homestake
Pass line. FBE or Monad Dave or any of the Montanans
probably have more info on who owns it now, and
what its status is. On the south side of the freeway
is the former MILW Pipestone Pass, but the rails are
long gone.

DOH!!, , , FBE beat me to it!

Larry Dodgion
Wilsonville, OR



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/01/14 12:49 by truxtrax.

Here are three photos of BA&P equipment you can see in Butte, Montana.

1) A short BA&P train on the grounds of the Anselmo Mine - NE of the intersection of Caledonia Street and Excelsior Avenue.

2) Closer view of BA&P motor #47

3) BA&P Line Car at the World Museum of Mining - at 155 Museum Way. Take Park Street west through the Montana Tech campus to get to Museum Way.

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From Wikipedia, an abbreviated history:

The Butte, Anaconda and Pacific Railway (reporting mark BAP) is a short line railroad in the U.S. state of Montana which was founded in 1892. It was financed by the interests behind the Anaconda Copper Mining Company and operated primarily to carry copper ore from the mines at Butte, Montana to the smelters at Anaconda, Montana, although the company was chartered as a common carrier and also carried passengers and general freight.

The BA&P was an electrification pioneer, converting in 1913 and being the first primarily freight railroad to electrify. Electrification was at 2,400 volts DC; the work was performed by General Electric and the railroad's own staff. The electrification was abandoned in 1967 as it had become cheaper to operate diesel-electric locomotives.

The railroad as a whole lost much of its business following the closure of the Anaconda smelters, and in 1985 was sold to a consortium of local investors and reconstituted as the Rarus Railway (reporting mark RARW). On July 19, 2007, Patriot Rail Corporation, the parent company which acquired Rarus Railway in May 2007, announced that the railway's name was officially changed back to Butte, Anaconda and Pacific Railway.[1]


And from the Patriot Rail site: http://www.patriotrail.com/butte-anaconda-pacific-railway/

The Butte, Anaconda & Pacific Railway (“BAP”) operates a total of 63 miles (including 26 main line miles) of rail line running from Anaconda, Montana, to Butte, Montana. The BAP interchanges with Class I carriers BNSF at Butte and Silver Bow, Montana, and Union Pacific at Silver Bow, Montana. BAP also operates a well-equipped 20-bay locomotive roundhouse, wheel shop and machine shop in Anaconda.


The attached Google image appears to be their shop complex.

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MartyBernard Wrote:
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> 2. A lumber yard that sure looks like a ex-depot.
> It is not downtown but maybe a mile west of the
> downtown. Was this the BA&P depot?

Doesn't look quite like the one in this image, so I would say no. But it might have been GN or some other line that came through Butte.

I have not been able to locate where the pictured depot was, I suspect it no longer exists.

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The Anaconda lumber yard is the old BA&P passenger station there. The photo lw posted is the Butte passenger station also used for a while by the Milwaukee under steam and electrification.

There was one other railroad which came to anaconda from Stuart. This was from the Silver Bow to Garrison line of the Utah Northern/Montana Union/NP and perhaps BN. I have no idea if any of these roads offered passenger service. The line from Stuart mostly hauled ore to the Old Works smelters on the north side of the valley. When the Washoe Works was built on the hill on the north side of the valley the BA&P was built to haul ores from Butte to Anaconda effectively cutting off all traffic on the Stuart line.

So how did Jim Hill the Scotsman and Marcus Daly the Irishman get together to build railroads in Montana? It seems they were good whiskey drinking buddies with a mutual distrust of the NP and UP. Daly thought the NP and UP conspired to keep his freight rates exorbitant and Jim Hill was already involved in rights of way battles and traffic control fights so these two decided they might work together.

Jim Hill stopped westward progress of the GN at Pacific Jct west of Havre and turned southwest to Great Falls, Helena and Butte all NP bastions. He then built Daly's own railroad between the mines and the smelter cutting the NP, UP and Montana Union out of the local ACM completely. When the electrolysis process was started at Black Eagle near Great Falls it was the GN which hauled the ingots from Anaconda to Black Eagle. The MILW also hauled some of the ingot business to keep some of the revenues in the Rockefeller family.

The BA&P history is covered in the book "Wired For Success" by Charles Muchler.

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> The Anaconda lumber yard is the old BA&P passenger station there.

The lumber yard in Anaconda was originally the Montana Union depot and the BA&P took over after buying out what was left of the MU branch after Daly starved them out.

> There was one other railroad which came to anaconda from Stuart. This was from the Silver Bow to
> Garrison line of the Utah Northern/Montana Union/NP and perhaps BN.

The line from Stuart to Anaconda was the original branch to Anaconda built by the Montana Union, a joint operation of the NP and UP. This line served Daly's first Washoe smelter, but service was terrible to say the least. Loads took days to get from Butte to Anaconda and salt from Utah took weeks longer than it should have, slowing production at ACM's smelters in both Butte and Anaconda. Daly vowed to rid himself of the problem and paid the GN to build him his own railroad from Butte to Anaconda. When the BA&P was completed, Daly shut off all Company shipments by the MU and shipped everything by his own BA&P. By the this time the NP was in control of the MU (the UP predecessor had been squeezed out) and the NP supported it for a short while, but the only traffic was a little carload freight that came in from the east. Daly kept all the money-making freight for his own BA&P and starved out the MU. When the MU finally pulled out of Anaconda and abandoned the branch from Stuart, the BA&P bought the remnants of the line. The depot became the BA&P depot and the Company kept the line from Anaconda to Opportunity as an interurban line for the smelter workers who lived in Opportunity. That line wasn't completely abandoned until the late '60s.

> Jim Hill stopped westward progress of the GN at Pacific Jct west of Havre and turned southwest to
> Great Falls, Helena and Butte all NP bastions.

A side note on this. The way I heard it, the GN's goal was originally Butte and later on the line to the Pacific was branched off and built. That's why it's called Pacific Junction (where the line to the coast branched off) and not Great Falls Junction.

By the way, the "depot" in Anaconda behind the Family Dollar, on Park Street, was never really a depot. It was built by the Anaconda Company as a visitor center to be run by the Anaconda Chamber of Commerce so they could close their own visitor center at the west gate to the smelter. The coach painted BA&P is just as bogus. The real BA&P coach met it's demise in Nevada City in the old Bovey collection. If you look closely at the coach, you can see Big Sky Blue peeking out in many place.

steeplecab
Helena

Thanks for the details, Dan. It is interesting the MU depot in Anaconda was brick since none of the others between Silver Bow and Garrison were as permanent or ornate.

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> It is interesting the MU depot in Anaconda was brick since none of the others between Silver Bow
> and Garrison were as permanent or ornate.

You need to remember that the other depots between Butte and Garrison were built by the Utah & Northern before the Montana Union was created. Only Stuart and Anaconda were added by the MU, and Stuart was not intended to be much other than a wye junction. Also, Anaconda would be where the switching and perhaps some of the accounting for the rail traffic to and from the Old Works was handled out of. You can get a little idea of the complexity of the trackage from the June, 1896, Anaconda Sanborn map on page 1.

I don't know when the Anaconda roundhouse was built or if that was built by the MU or the GN/BA&P. There's probably a cornerstone or something that would indicate, but I've never looked. The BA&P was formed in 1892.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/03/14 23:51 by steeplecab.