Battling the Cascades: A Railroad Contractor’s Winter Ordeal
Before high-tech de-icing, railroad crews in the Cascade Mountains spent months shoveling snow by hand just to keep the tracks from vanishing into the mud.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Mr. W. J. Miller and Mr. Dan O’Neill, contractors who built the Cascade division of the Northern Pacific Railroad from Weston to Ellensburgh, were in the city yesterday for the purpose of adjusting the accounts of the construction company for that work. Their contract covers about fifty-six miles. Mr. Miller, the bridge contractor, said: 'We had an awful winter of it. The snow, the rain, and the mud were simply terrific. From the 1st of October until the 13th of May, it snowed, it hailed, it sleeted, and it rained. We had enough snow shoveling to do to keep the labor gang from idling. For two weeks we were totally shut in, so that the pack trains could not reach us, and we paid the men all that time for doing nothing but packing in their own provisions on snowshoes. I have seen them try to lay track under such conditions upon the mud, and often the rail and the ties have sunk down out of sight—buried in the mud.' Regarding the company's plan for next winter, Miller noted, 'They will try next winter to get along with covering only such places where they cannot use the snow plow to advantage. They will experiment with the plow next winter. They claim great things for the recently improved plows.'
“I have seen them try to lay track under such conditions upon the mud, and often the rail and the ties have sunk down out of sight—buried in the mud.”
Building transit infrastructure through the Cascades remains a logistical nightmare today. This 1887 report on the struggles of the Northern Pacific Railroad echoes the persistent battle between Pacific Northwest engineering and the region's intense winter weather cycles.
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