The Railway's Endless Fight Against the Mud
High hills between Seattle and Everett continue to collapse onto the tracks, creating a nightmare for the Seattle & Montana Railway.
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.
The Seattle & Montana railway is having a great deal of trouble with landslides on its line between Seattle and Everett. For seven miles this side of Edmonds, the line skirts the foot of high hills which slide down and cover the tracks every time there is wet weather. This bit of road is considered by railway men the most expensive to maintain in the whole state, and engineers even doubt the advisability of trying to maintain the line in its present location at all. With the melting of the snow yesterday, the hills began to come down, and although Superintendent Copeland with a large force of laborers was on the ground in anticipation of the trouble and rapidly cleared the tracks, fresh slides kept coming almost as fast as the first ones were cleared.
“This bit of road is considered by railway men the most expensive to maintain in the whole state.”
The geography of the Puget Sound region has always dictated the pace of development. The 'expensive to maintain' tracks described here mirror the ongoing, costly, and precarious struggle to keep coastal rail corridors operational against landslide risks today.
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