Author: Jim Pearson

The time is 12:30 PM on October 13, 1949.  We’re inside Mission Tower, half a mile out of Los Angeles Union Station, watching Southern Pacific train 4, the Golden State (left) and Santa Fe 20, the Chief, departing simultaneously for Chicago.  It looks like a race, but it’s not really much of a contest:  The Chief, running on Santa Fe all the way for 2,224 miles, will beat the Golden State (2,268 miles on the SP and Rock Island) to the Windy City by about 7-3/4 hours.

The Chief will cross Cajon Pass to Barstow and shoot east across northern Arizona to Albuquerque, NM, then northeast over two mountain passes, and cut through the southeast corner of Colorado. After a stop in Dodge City and a few others, it will aim for Kansas City. Cutting through the SE corner of Iowa, crossing the Mississippi River, it will visit some cities in Illinois before arriving at Dearborn Station, one of seven railroad stations in Chicago.

The Golden State exits California near Yuma, does a bee-line for El Paso, then NE through New Mexico to Tucumcari. There the Rock Island takes over touching a bit of Oklahoma, slicing through Kansas to Topeka and on to Kansas City. Then the GS treks through a corner of Iowa, zips through the Quad Cities.  On through the corn fields of Illinois, it completes its trek at LaSalle Street Station, only a few blocks from Dearborn and the Santa Fe.

There were other passenger trains that competed head-to-head, mainly the New York Centrals 20^th Century Limited and Pennsy’s Broadway Limited. They raced out-of-Chicago, on parallel tracks, for many miles in their quest to get their patrons to New York City, fast.  That daily race was a little more even-handed. The New York Central route to the Big Apple was 960.9 miles, with mostly water level terrain.  The Broadway’s routing was only 908.2 miles, but included scaling the Appalachian Mountains in Pennsylvania.  Wikipedia states that both of these luxury trains completed their task in about 16 hours.   The green hat crowd and the red hatters probably will never agree on that.

Credits:   First paragraph verbatim in Classic Trains Magazine, Spring 2021

Submitted by Gary O. Ostlund

The Missouri River is the longest river in North America. Rising in the Rocky Mountains of western Montana, the Missouri flows east and south for 2,341 miles before entering the Mississippi River north of St. Louis, Missouri. The river drains a sparsely populated, semi-arid watershed of more than 500,000 square miles, which includes parts of ten U.S. states and two Canadian provinces. Although nominally considered a tributary of the Mississippi, the Missouri River above the confluence is much longer and carries a comparable volume of water. When combined with the lower Mississippi River, it forms the world’s fourth longest river system.

Matthew Herson climbed this hillside in the Fall of 1967 to capture this scene downriver from Three Forks, Montana, where the Gallatin, Jefferson, and Madison rivers converge whereupon — America’s longest river is born.  If you add the length of the Madison River, then nearly the first 400 miles of this system travels northwest and northeast, then east, before trekking mostly south to meet the mighty Mississippi.

The train is the Northern Pacific’s Mainstreeter going downriver, westbound to the coast. Across the river is the track of the Milwaukee Railroad. An anomaly has the NP’s westbound trains going downriver, while the Milwaukee westbounds go upriver. Sounds impossible, but it’s all in the routing of their tracks.

Later when asked “if he saw any rattlesnakes,” the place is full of them.  Thanks for the advance notice…. Credits:     First paragraph verbatim – Internet.  Herson’s photo skills were featured in the latest Mainstreeter, the NP Railway Historical Associations quarterly magazine.   Submitted by Gary Ostlund