Mountain of Earth Buries Northern Pacific Rails
A catastrophic landslide near Palmer halts travel for days as crews scramble to clear the Green River route.
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.
One of the largest and most disastrous land slides in the history of the Northern Pacific occurred at Palmer, 43 miles from Tacoma, on Friday, the 16th inst. A mountain of earth and rock, unloosed by the rains, fell on the track, driving ten lengths of rails into Green River and covering the road-bed for 300 feet. Owing to the formation of the country, no track could be built around the slide, and freight traffic was stopped for several days, while passengers, mail and express had to be transferred. A large force of men and a steam shovel had the blockade raised by the fore part of this week.
“A mountain of earth and rock, unloosed by the rains, fell on the track.”
The precarious nature of rail transit through the Cascades remains a reality of regional infrastructure. While modern engineering has vastly reduced the danger of such slides, the reliance on single, vulnerable corridors through the mountain passes continues to mirror the fragility exposed by this 1891 disaster.
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