Northern Pacific Railway

The Northern Pacific Railway (reporting mark NP) was an important American transcontinental railroad that operated across the northern tier of the Western United States, from Minnesota to the Pacific Northwest between 1864 and 1970. It was approved and chartered by the 38th Congress of the United States in the national / federal capital of Washington, D.C., during the last years of the American Civil War (1861–1865), and received nearly 40 million acres (62,000 sq mi; 160,000 km2) of adjacent land grants, which it used to raise additional money in Europe (especially in Northern Pacific president Henry Villard's home country of the new German Empire), for construction funding.

Construction began in 1870, and the main line had opened all the way from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean, just south of the Canada–United States border, when Ulysses S. Grant drove in the final "golden spike" completing the line in western Montana Territory, on September 8, 1883. The railroad had about 6,800 miles (10,900 km) of track and served a large area, including extensive trackage in the western Federal territories and later states of Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin. In addition, the N.P. had an international branch, Northern Pacific and Manitoba Railway (formed 1888), running north to Winnipeg, capital of the province of Manitoba, in the newly organized Canada. The main activities were shipping wheat and other farm products, cattle, timber, and minerals; bringing in consumer goods, transporting passengers; and selling land. This joint venture ended in 1899 and remaining Canadian trackage and Winnipeg East Yard acquired by the Canadian Northern Railway in 1901.

The Northern Pacific was headquartered in Minnesota, first in Brainerd, then in the state capital of Saint Paul. It had a tumultuous financial history; the N.P. merged with other lines over a century later in 1970 to form the modern Burlington Northern Railroad, which in turn merged with the famous Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway to become the renamed BNSF Railway in 1996, operating in the western U.S.

History

Organization

The 38th United States Congress chartered the Northern Pacific Railway Company on July 2, 1864, with the goals of connecting the Great Lakes with Puget Sound on the northwestern coast of the United States on the Pacific Ocean, opening vast new lands for farming, ranching, lumbering and mining, and linking the federal territory of Washington and state of Oregon to the rest of the country (plus connecting the northern Great Plains of central Canada to the northern states of the U.S. and especially its Midwestern big cities, manufacturing centers and markets.

The U.S. Congress granted the Northern Pacific Railroad a generous potential bonanza of 60 million acres (94,000 sq mi; 240,000 km2) of land adjacent to the line in exchange for building rail transportation to an undeveloped western territory.