Over The Hump

A Photographic Folio of
Great Northern Railway’s
 Cascade Division,
1898 – 1906
Gordon Clark
©
Copyright 2011

Introduction

I
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.
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 light
coming from the other end, but it seemed to take forever to hike through it. And of course my
brothers
regaled 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

J 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.
Stevens’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

T
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.
From 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

T
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.
This 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

W
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.
Here 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

S
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.
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

I
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.
The 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

T
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.
But 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

J 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.
This 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

S
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.
Here 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

L
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).
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