Ever Bigger and Better

The railroad company shown on the front of this post card is one of the

ancestors of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad of today. It all began with the small St. Paul & Pacific and, by the time of his passing in 1917, the GN was a transcontinental carrier of more than 8,000 miles. This website provides a great short history of James Hill's involvement in the railroad history: https://www.bnsf.com/news-media/railtalk/heritage/jjhill.html The Great Northern Railway (GN) was the result of the foresight of James Jerome Hill. Hill was a Canadian-American businessman who settled in St. Paul, Minnesota. At 18, he began his career in the steamboat trade, and after 20 years, he became interested in investing and joined a group of powerful investors called the “Associates.” The Associates purchased the nearly bankrupt St. Paul and Pacific Railroad (SP&P) in 1878, and a year later, the SP&P properties were reorganized as the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba (SPM&M), with Hill becoming president in 1882. Hill became known as “The Empire Builder” as his dedication to railroad expansion led to the growth and development of the United States. Over the next three decades, Hill pursued the expansion of his rail line north to Canada and west toward the Pacific coast. Also in 1889, the railroad (now the Minneapolis & St. Cloud Railway) was renamed Great Northern Railway. GN’s Pacific Coast expansion began in 1890 near Havre, Montana, with the final spike connecting Seattle to the East driven near Scenic, Washington, in 1893. Then he purchased the Northern Pacific Railroad as well as the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad. These three railroad lines would become part of Burlington Northern Railroad (BN) when they merged with the Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway (SP&S) in 1970, fulfilling one of Hill’s lifelong dreams more than 50 years after his death. BN merged with the Santa Fe Railway in 1995 to create BNSF.

The picture on the front of the post card is a 3600 horsepower F-45 "cowl" unit showing off its new "Big Sky Blue" paint scheme in 1969. The post card was published by Lyman E. Cox of Sacramento, California. I have 19 of his post cards in my collection. The picture was provided to him courtesy of the Great Northern Railway.