Telephone poles on rock faces?

[JonMyrlennBailey]

This is a shot from the Avery-Drexel route.

It seems odd that there are telephone poles up along a steep rock face as shown. Is this prototypical? How is running power lines and such practical and cost-effective along difficult terrain like that? How is doing that even possible?

Another odd thing about this route from the original author, tume, is that there are often big trees growing on slopes almost vertical!

 

[Forester1]

I can't speak for the phone poles, but I am not surprised to see big trees on steep hills in the Bitterroot mountains. Short of large fires like the 1910 burn, nothing is probably going to happen to these trees for the most part except to grow old and die. They did not do high lead or skyline logging in the bitterroot mountains, as there was plenty of easier to get timber at the time, and while I have worked with helicopter logging in Idaho, it was much more recent, and fairly small scale on private land, and the logs have to pay their way to the mills. So, if it was on public land like Forest Service, it was probably considered scenic viewshed and not managed for timber. And I am guessing that the railroad wasn't that interested in trying to harvest those slopes if they owned them either.

 

[JonMyrlennBailey]

I did a little Googling to find old photos of Milwaukee Road in Bitterroots. I'll be damned. They did run those telephone poles up the side of steep slopes after all! I don't know if the railroad owned them or some other company. It looks like they would be dangerous, difficult and expensive to install and maintain.



MR abandoned it's St. Paul Pass right of way in 1980. Money troubles. Now, the old route is traveled by hikers and bicycle riders.

Railroads in America might be much better off (much safer and much more efficient) if they were made public entities and ran under the auspices of governments.

 

[JCitron]

MR abandoned it's St. Paul Pass right of way in 1980. Money troubles.

Actually, it was management troubles and an accounting error. The management were hell bent on selling everything off and went through great lengths to do the company in. During the 1970s, management decided it was time to dismantle the electric power instead of taking on the offer from the US Government to bail them out and rebuild the system as well as connect the two sections together and get new locomotives. Hell bent on more destruction, the geniuses instead dismantled the catenary and sold off the copper, just as copper prices dropped, and instead purchased diesel guzzling GP38s and GP40s just as the oil crisis hit.

This was only part of the mess. They deferred maintenance causing further delays and derailments and also engaged in a costly lease-back program that had a third-party agency own the boxcars instead of the company which meant any profits made on the freight that moved, never went to the company. To add insult to injury, there were more boxcars out of service also due to deferred maintenance.

Then in 1980, after the financials came out, someone in the accounting department had a decimal or two, or maybe three or four in the wrong place and added things wrong. The PNW Northwest Extension was the profitable part of the railroad and not the competitive eastern portion that dealt with seasonal grain and cattle. With that mistake, they abandoned the railroad west of Miles City and ripped up the tracks immediately.

It's too bad that the line isn't put back into service. When the company was run correctly, the PNW Extension was a far faster route to Seattle than the competing Burlington Northern. If that route was in service today, it would provide a much more efficient way of moving goods from the congested port in Seattle east to Minneapolis and further on to Chicago.

 

[JonMyrlennBailey]

John, so it seems that the trouble is not always with railroad technology or Mother Nature. It's defective human brains in the wrong places.

I read somewhere not long ago the Milwaukee Road electrified the St. Paul Pass originally even back in the 1920's because their steam locomotives wouldn't cut it over this route somehow. The altitude here is not that high and the grades not that steep. Steam locomotives in America have seemed to have done damned well in the Rocky Mountains and in the Sierra Nevada which both make the Bitterroots of Idaho and Montana look like molehills by comparison. Steam locomotives are praised in the Swiss Alps because they can deal with high altitude atmosphere better the diesels. If Milwaukee Road steam locomotives were a failing to them over their mountainous terrain, it was probably because they had crappy-made engines, or they were not using enough locos for heavy trains. Railroads run into troubles when they cheap out on locomotives by using too few in number for the task at hand or using those that are of incorrect specifications for the specific duty at hand or failing to upkeep the engines properly.

Milwaukee Road has had a long, troubled past.

 

[JCitron]

Milwaukee Road has had a long, troubled past.

They sure did. From what I've read, they were latecomers to the Rockies with the PNW Extension, meaning the & Pacific part of their name. By the time they came along Jim Hill's Great Northern was already in operation across the plains and into the Rockies across the top with the MILW nearly running parallel in many places. The extension was also very expensive and the electrification only added to the debt that the railroad could never recover from. Combine this with management as you said, the other part that can ruin a business, that were hellbent on sucking every cent out of the company and lining their pockets.

The other issue is that the railroad also didn't interchange with GN or CB&Q when there were other opportunities such as near Cushman or Forsyth. This is quite obvious with the old route in Forsyth, MT. I stopped there on a storm-chasing trip as we headed up to Great Falls in July 2012. On the southern side of the Yellowstone River is the town, which is a BNSF division point on their trans-con line. When we were there, the yard had a number of trains waiting crews or dispatching, and at one point the yard was even bigger but was slimmed down to what it is today. The town literally parallels the railroad and exists because of the railroad.

The now abandoned MILW ROW was located across the river and ran deep down in the valley far away with no interchange possible with what is today's BNSF main line.

The MILW then continued on its northwestern trek towards Seattle as it passed through some of the most remote areas with zero, or near zero populations through towns such as Sumatra, MT. Their biggest business out there was seasonal cattle and grain, and seasonal business doesn't do a lot. The PNW Extension had fast through freights, but with their deferred maintenance on everything this mitigated any chances they had of making more money even though this line was actually making money.

As the route parallels US 12, it finally hits what is a more substantial town of Melstone, MT. With US 12 paralleling the line all the way, I could see the site of the old roundhouse and even remnants of infrastructure such as a train order loop. That was it and this continued all the way along the line until they reached Roundup where we headed due north as the old ROW headed west and actually curved a bit south.

I have a feeling that the railroad engineering department chose the wrong locomotives for the line but were too cash-strapped to upgrade them to something more substantial.