Milwaukee Road's Bellingham operations--and the Lynden branch. . .
The Milwaukee Road's Lynden branch wasn't always a Milwaukee Road line. In fact, in common with most of the Milwaukee Road's branchlines west of the Cascades, the railroad was in place as an independent railroad years before the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul built their transcontinental line west of the Dakotas into the Pacific Northwest. "The Milwaukee Road" purchased several shortlines to generate traffic across their new, long, lonely railroad to the coast.
As was typical of local beehives of commerce just prior to the arrival of a transcontinental railroad to a region, the builders of the Lynden branch were caught up in a bit of "railroad fever" as the transcontinentals built west across the Rockies towards the Northwest. If I am to believe what I read on Wikipedia (and being too lazy right now to pick up likely more accurate histories of railroads of Whatcom county), it was actually the goal of the Bellingham Bay & British Columbia (BB&BC) to connect the port of Whatcom (now Bellingham) with the Canadian Pacific Railway, building westward towards the Fraser Valley. Incorporated in 1883, construction of the BB&BC began the next year northward towards Canada, rather than south to a connection with the NP, which had chosen Tacoma as its Pacific Coast port.
The new railroad built northeast from the Whatcom waterfront along Whatcom Creek, but progress was slow, taking five years to reach Sumas, on the US-Canada border. It was two more years until CPR built south from its mainline at Mission City to a connection with BB&BC.
While the closest rail connection lay in Canada, an upstart competitor, Fairhaven & Southern, started building south from Bellingham in 1889, first to reach coal mines in Skagit County but with an ultimate goal of connecting with NP. F&S eventually reached Burlington and connection with the Seattle & Montana Railroad, which was later purchased by Hill's Great Northern, which had reached Seattle in 1893.
BB&BC wasn't done expanding. It extended the railroad from Sumas into the Casacade foothills to Glacier, 46 miles from Bellingham, in 1902, and the following year constructed a 5 1/2 mile branch from a connection on the mainline at Hampton to the farming community of Lynden.
The Northwest's last transcontinental railroad, Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, reached the tideflats of Tacoma in 1909. Bellingham had pushed hard to attract CM&St.P as its west coast terminal, offering land for a large marine and rail terminal, to no avail. But the traffic generated by BB&BC did attract the Milwaukee, which purchased the railroad as the subsidiary Bellingham & Northern in 1911, operating it independently until 1918, when it was folded into the mother railroad. Just as it did its isolated Kitsap Peninsula line to Port Angeles, Milwaukee reached Bellingham via car barge from Seattle into the 1950s, when a haulage agreement was reached with Great Northern to handle traffic between Everett and Bellingham. A trackage rights swap reached with the newly merged Burlington Northern finally found Milwaukee operating its own trains into Bellingham after 1972 between Everett and Bellingham using the Everett branch from Cedar Falls to Everett; this branch was abandoned in 1974, and Milwaukee began operating through Bellingham trains from Renton to Snohomish on the former Northern Pacific Sumas line, then over ex-Great Northern trackage from Snohomish through Everett to Bellingham.
Bellingham was a maze of railroads for a small port city its size. Great Northern skirted the waterfront north and south; Milwaukee Road's line to Sumas and Glacier headed east along Squalicum creek, and a Northern Pacific branch from a connection with its own Snohomish-Sumas mainline at Wickersham skirted Lake Whatcom and ran down Railroad Avenue to ultimately reach the city's Fairhaven district. Logging, of course, was the primary industry.
The trackage rights over BN really opened up potential for Milwaukee Road's business in the 1970s, allowing occasional unit trains of agricultural chemicals to flow directly from the gateway with CP Rail south to Tacoma and interchange with Union Pacific, or south to Portland and Southern Pacific. But only one scheduled daily freight train, in later years #904 (northbound) and 905 (southbound) connected Bellingham at Tacoma. This business was quite healthy until the end of Milwaukee Road operations in 1980, with interchange off CPRail at Sumas and several lumber and paper mills generating traffic at Bellingham and Everett. The Bellingham traffic, along with the large and very profitable lumber traffic of British Columbia Railway which barged between North Vancouver, BC and Seattle, provided nearly a train a day of long east cars to the trancontinental mainline--until a marketing department plan to divert and starve the mainline found most of this traffic moving to Union Pacific in 1979, hastening the railroad's demise.
The northbound train would arrive Bellingham right around sunrise, and after a quick switch of through and local traffic by a yard crew, the "extra" would be called for late morning to make a turn to Sumas, stopping on the way north to switch Lynden and returning to Bellingham by evening, when the southbound for Tacoma would be called before midnight. Five days a week, a second train, the "rock train, moved limestone between a quarry at Limestone Junction, above Sumas, and Columbia Portland Cement's cement plant on Bellingham's north side. Despite using a single ancient SD9 and a string of fully-amortized ore jennies one step from the scrappers and cast off from service hauling iron ore in Michigan's upper peninsula, the regulated envinronment of the period kept profit margins razor thin. When the equipment wore out 1976, Milwaukee Road was forced to keep running the service by leasing cars from Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range, no doubt throwing the operation financially into the red. By 1979, Columbia had abandoned the rail haul for trucks, which no doubt did no favors for the county's road department.
To Be Continued. . . .
As was typical of local beehives of commerce just prior to the arrival of a transcontinental railroad to a region, the builders of the Lynden branch were caught up in a bit of "railroad fever" as the transcontinentals built west across the Rockies towards the Northwest. If I am to believe what I read on Wikipedia (and being too lazy right now to pick up likely more accurate histories of railroads of Whatcom county), it was actually the goal of the Bellingham Bay & British Columbia (BB&BC) to connect the port of Whatcom (now Bellingham) with the Canadian Pacific Railway, building westward towards the Fraser Valley. Incorporated in 1883, construction of the BB&BC began the next year northward towards Canada, rather than south to a connection with the NP, which had chosen Tacoma as its Pacific Coast port.
The new railroad built northeast from the Whatcom waterfront along Whatcom Creek, but progress was slow, taking five years to reach Sumas, on the US-Canada border. It was two more years until CPR built south from its mainline at Mission City to a connection with BB&BC.
While the closest rail connection lay in Canada, an upstart competitor, Fairhaven & Southern, started building south from Bellingham in 1889, first to reach coal mines in Skagit County but with an ultimate goal of connecting with NP. F&S eventually reached Burlington and connection with the Seattle & Montana Railroad, which was later purchased by Hill's Great Northern, which had reached Seattle in 1893.
BB&BC wasn't done expanding. It extended the railroad from Sumas into the Casacade foothills to Glacier, 46 miles from Bellingham, in 1902, and the following year constructed a 5 1/2 mile branch from a connection on the mainline at Hampton to the farming community of Lynden.
The Northwest's last transcontinental railroad, Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, reached the tideflats of Tacoma in 1909. Bellingham had pushed hard to attract CM&St.P as its west coast terminal, offering land for a large marine and rail terminal, to no avail. But the traffic generated by BB&BC did attract the Milwaukee, which purchased the railroad as the subsidiary Bellingham & Northern in 1911, operating it independently until 1918, when it was folded into the mother railroad. Just as it did its isolated Kitsap Peninsula line to Port Angeles, Milwaukee reached Bellingham via car barge from Seattle into the 1950s, when a haulage agreement was reached with Great Northern to handle traffic between Everett and Bellingham. A trackage rights swap reached with the newly merged Burlington Northern finally found Milwaukee operating its own trains into Bellingham after 1972 between Everett and Bellingham using the Everett branch from Cedar Falls to Everett; this branch was abandoned in 1974, and Milwaukee began operating through Bellingham trains from Renton to Snohomish on the former Northern Pacific Sumas line, then over ex-Great Northern trackage from Snohomish through Everett to Bellingham.
Bellingham was a maze of railroads for a small port city its size. Great Northern skirted the waterfront north and south; Milwaukee Road's line to Sumas and Glacier headed east along Squalicum creek, and a Northern Pacific branch from a connection with its own Snohomish-Sumas mainline at Wickersham skirted Lake Whatcom and ran down Railroad Avenue to ultimately reach the city's Fairhaven district. Logging, of course, was the primary industry.
The trackage rights over BN really opened up potential for Milwaukee Road's business in the 1970s, allowing occasional unit trains of agricultural chemicals to flow directly from the gateway with CP Rail south to Tacoma and interchange with Union Pacific, or south to Portland and Southern Pacific. But only one scheduled daily freight train, in later years #904 (northbound) and 905 (southbound) connected Bellingham at Tacoma. This business was quite healthy until the end of Milwaukee Road operations in 1980, with interchange off CPRail at Sumas and several lumber and paper mills generating traffic at Bellingham and Everett. The Bellingham traffic, along with the large and very profitable lumber traffic of British Columbia Railway which barged between North Vancouver, BC and Seattle, provided nearly a train a day of long east cars to the trancontinental mainline--until a marketing department plan to divert and starve the mainline found most of this traffic moving to Union Pacific in 1979, hastening the railroad's demise.
The northbound train would arrive Bellingham right around sunrise, and after a quick switch of through and local traffic by a yard crew, the "extra" would be called for late morning to make a turn to Sumas, stopping on the way north to switch Lynden and returning to Bellingham by evening, when the southbound for Tacoma would be called before midnight. Five days a week, a second train, the "rock train, moved limestone between a quarry at Limestone Junction, above Sumas, and Columbia Portland Cement's cement plant on Bellingham's north side. Despite using a single ancient SD9 and a string of fully-amortized ore jennies one step from the scrappers and cast off from service hauling iron ore in Michigan's upper peninsula, the regulated envinronment of the period kept profit margins razor thin. When the equipment wore out 1976, Milwaukee Road was forced to keep running the service by leasing cars from Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range, no doubt throwing the operation financially into the red. By 1979, Columbia had abandoned the rail haul for trucks, which no doubt did no favors for the county's road department.
To Be Continued. . . .
Enjoyed the visit me made to MILW Bellingham in 1979. Neat place. And those smash boards at the BN crossing!
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