America’s pioneer transcontinental railroad, Union Pacific has for more than a hundred years been one of the nation’s largest and most important transportation companies. With an extensive mainline system embracing Omaha, Denver, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and Portland, Union Pacific added Puget Sound to its network in 1910. The last railroad to link Seattle with the rest of the nation, Union Pacific nonetheless established itself as a major player in Pacific Northwest transportation, a position it continues to hold in 2025. But getting to Seattle was an endeavor typical of its bold and colorful time.
All Railroads Lead to Seattle
For the white Midwesterners who settled on Elliott Bay in 1851 and named their tiny hamlet first New York and then Seattle, connection to the national rail network was essential to their survival. This took more than three decades of scheming and agonizing, but in 1884, Seattle’s first standard-gauge railroad, the Puget Sound Shore, was completed to present-day Auburn, where it connected with the Northern Pacific Railroad (NP) from Tacoma and the East. Northern Pacific, which had staked out Tacoma as its western terminus in 1873, was then only an indirect transcontinental route via Portland, but this changed in 1887 when its main line over the Cascades was completed and a flood of new settlers and development descended upon Tacoma and Seattle.
Puget Sound boomed and the press was rife with reports of other lines – Chicago & North Western, Chicago Milwaukee & St. Paul, Southern Pacific, Union Pacific – planning Seattle extensions. In January 1890 the Northern Pacific purchased the Puget Sound Shore and became the first major line to establish itself in Seattle. The NP began a vigorous program of expansion in Washington, building or taking over lines to Grays and Willapa harbors and the Canadian border. Meawhile, James J. Hill’s Great Northern was driving west from Montana, and Hill made no secret of his intention to occupy all of Puget Sound.
Completed between Omaha and Salt Lake City in 1869 (and on to San Francisco over partner Central Pacific), Union Pacific looked with growing envy at the Northwest boom. Added incentive was provided by financier Henry Villard (1853-1900), who in 1879 began to occupy the Columbia River Valley from Portland east with his Oregon Railway & Navigation Co. (OR&N). In 1881 Villard captured control of the NP and announced plans for regional expansion. Now thoroughly alarmed, Union Pacific began building northwestward from Granger, Wyoming, using a subsidiary, the Oregon Short Line (OSL). The OSL reached Huntington, Oregon, in 1883 and continued west via trackage rights over Villard’s OR&N. In November 1884 the first train steamed into Portland. Puget Sound beckoned.
Feints and Finaglings
Financial stringencies during the early 1880s forestalled Union Pacific’s Puget Sound extension, but the expansive activities of Northern Pacific and Great Northern at the end of the decade made action imperative. On November 8, 1889, Union Pacific incorporated the proxy Portland & Puget Sound Railroad to take it into Western Washington. Over the ensuing decade of Western Washington 'railroad mania' Union Pacific made numerous feints and promises to either build its own rail line or get to the Sound using rights over the existing Northern Pacific track north of Portland. In August 1890 Judge Thomas Burke (1849-1925) got Seattle City Council approval for a Union Pacific right of way franchise across the lower Elliott Bay tidelands to West Seattle, the projected line’s declared terminus, and along Railroad Avenue downtown. That fall some 3,000 men were at work grading roadbed down the Columbia and Cowlitz valleys and driving piles into the Seattle tideflats. They did not get far; bad weather, continuing financial difficulties, and legal battles with the Great Northern and others halted construction early the next year, and both Union Pacific and the Portland & Puget went bankrupt in the Panic of 1893.
In stepped Edward H. Harriman. Capitalist, head of the Illinois Central Railroad, and canny executive, Harriman (1848-1909) captured control of the UP in 1897 and began a decade-long campaign to transform the pioneer transcontinental from a sick man of American railroading to an industry leader. In July 1899 Harriman rode his private car into Seattle; impressed by the Gold Rush vigor of the city, he met with Northern Pacific president Charles Mellen and suggested that NP grant UP trackage rights over its Portland-Seattle main line, arguing that bank-breaking duplication of existing track was in no one’s interest. Mellen assented – but in 1901 Great Northern Railway president James J. Hill (1838-1916) took control of the NP, and Hill instinctively feared Harriman as a formidable competitor. Hill said no to UP trackage rights.
Harriman resigned himself to building his own line and on February 2, 1906, formed the Washington Northern Railway (WN) to begin surveys. In May the WN was reconstituted as the Oregon & Washington Railroad (itself supplanted in 1910 by the Oregon-Washington Railroad & Navigation Co.), and its surveying teams took to the field running lines through Lewis and Chehalis counties and as far north as Everett. Stoutly denying that they were acting on Harriman’s behalf, clandestine agents began taking options on prospective terminal grounds on the Elliott Bay tideflats and Salmon Bay, north of town. A mile-long tunnel, parallel to Great Northern’s 1904 bore, would take the UP under the city. All the while Harriman kept up pressure on the NP and wooed the Chicago Milwaukee & St. Paul, now building toward Tacoma from South Dakota, for trackage rights between Tacoma and Seattle. The Milwaukee said yes, but new Northern Pacific president Howard Elliott balked at allowing the UP access to its online industries and shined Harriman on for two more years before at last agreeing in March 1909 – with some 'persuasion' by Jim Hill, who wanted similar rights for Great Northern – to allow access to its Portland-Tacoma line. Operations were to begin January 1, 1910.
The Seattle City Council proved equally balky. The 1889 Portland & Puget Sound franchise had long since expired and Harriman renewed application for a right of way along 4th Avenue S to a projected passenger station on S Jackson Street. James Hill, who ever since his road’s 1893 arrival in Seattle was pleased to dictate railroad matters in the city, registered his objections to the route. Reluctant to defy the prickly "Empire Builder," the council dithered and Harriman, Hill’s eternal nemesis, fumed. Arriving aboard a special train in April 1906, he told reporters, "Seattle ought to give us the same advantages in entering the city that are possessed by the other railroads. Seattle is not indispensable to us; we are not absolutely necessary to Seattle. But we can give Seattle shippers a territory reached by 17,000 miles of road that they do not serve now … We have spent between eight and ten million dollars in acquiring terminal properties in Seattle … but we have been made the victims of real estate speculation" ("Must Be Treated ..."). To a select audience of business leaders at the Rainier Club, Harriman drove his message home: The Union Pacific did not need Seattle as much as Seattle needed the Union Pacific. It could easily go elsewhere for its Puget Sound terminus. What happened next was up to Seattle.
The Seattle Times argued against sacrificing any of 4th Avenue, "one of the main outlets of the city toward the south,” to railroad tracks, and suggested Union Pacific use 5th Avenue instead, a route that was eventually adopted. Taking up Hill’s cudgel, the paper praised the Great Northern for building, at great expense, its mile-long tunnel to clear the waterfront of railroad congestion. Now, here came Harriman demanding free right of way. (Apparently, few now remembered the right-of-way war of the 1890s, when Hill had demanded and received a franchise, free and clear, for a four-track-wide right of way along Railroad Avenue on the downtown waterfront.) Seattle, lectured the Times, should stand firm: "What Mr. Harriman wants is to come in on one of the principal streets of the city, and he wants to come in free. The question of the franchise on Fourth Avenue has nothing to do with the price of land" ("Editorial").
Harriman yielded, and in January 1907 the city council agreed to a joint UP-GN corridor along 5th Avenue S and the UP tunnel. In March laborers began boring into the soft soil just north of 5th and Jackson; the Panic of 1907 shut things down briefly, but work resumed the following spring and on March 4, 1908, the council ratified the final Oregon & Washington franchise application including the passenger terminal at 5th and Jackson. Track gangs and pile drivers went to work, trestling and filling across the tideflats were rushed, and a large freight yard, 11-stall roundhouse, car shop, and commissary were built south of the tideflats, a location the railroad named Argo. Early in 1909 ground was broken for the passenger station, designed by Harriman system architect Daniel J. Patterson and to be executed in reinforced concrete faced with brick by New York’s Thompson-Starrett Construction Co. A temporary depot was established at 1st and Dearborn, which would subsequently become UP’s Seattle freight station. (To access this, UP/O&W was granted trackage along the Northern Pacific’s new Colorado Avenue right of way from Argo north.) The Salmon Bay, West Seattle, and Everett extensions were shelved and the 800 feet of tunnel diggings were sealed up.
Seattle’s New Railroad
In his short time as the company’s president, Harriman began the transformation of the Union Pacific into one of the world’s great railroads. Automatic block signals, oil-burning locomotives, standardized equipment, and extensive line improvements made the Union Pacific of the twentieth century a transportation leader. Sadly, the "Little Giant" of railroading died on September 9, 1909, and never got to ride one of his own trains into Seattle. On January 1, 1910, engine 2300 led the first train, a seven-car local, into Dearborn Street. And on May 20, 1911, Oregon-Washington Station opened and throngs gaped in wonder at its soaring, classical barrel-vaulted grandeur, still among the city’s grandest interior spaces. Train service started first-class with the Shasta Limited in partnership with Harriman-owned Southern Pacific on a 34-hour Seattle-San Francisco schedule. A local train called at smaller communities and the O&W Owl provided overnight service. Union Pacific settled in with passenger trains distinguished by state-of-the-art steel construction, excellent dining car meals, and clean, oil-burning locomotives. And for decades UP operated through Pullman sleeping car service between Seattle and Chicago, Kansas City, and Denver, connecting with mainline trains at Portland.
During the next decade passenger and freight business grew as Seattle and all Puget Sound prospered. Despite the entrenched competition of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific "Hill lines," and the late-arriving Chicago Milwaukee & St. Paul – all oriented toward the upper Midwest – Union Pacific was well-positioned to be a major Pacific Northwest carrier. Through its Omaha, Kansas City, and Denver gateways UP was the direct link between the Pacific Northwest and southern Midwest and South. Consistent modernization and upgrading of equipment and plant kept the railroad a top player in the competition for Puget Sound traffic.
The Streamline Era
During the nineteen-teens and twenties railroads continued as the nation’s dominant transportation mode. But it was an increasingly fragile dominance; the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 prompted large increases in steamship service on both coasts and drew off substantial rail-freight business. Even more serious was the rise of the private automobile and motor truck, which with the rapid expansion of highways after World War I ate heavily into rail freight and passenger traffic. A prime case in point was the opening of the Pacific Highway along the West Coast in 1924, which hit Seattle-Portland passenger patronage hard. The glaring redundancy of Northern Pacific, Union Pacific, and Great Northern all competing for the same shrinking market was addressed in April 1925 when the three roads made a pooling arrangement to coordinate schedules, prune superfluous trains, share expenses and revenues, and make tickets between Seattle, Portland, and intermediate points interchangeable on all trains. It helped, but only so much; between 1921 and 1930 freight revenues per ton-mile decreased by 15.6 percent and passenger revenues sank 37 percent, from $1.17 billion to $731 million.
Things went into free fall during the Great Depression and railroad managers agonized over how to regain lost business. One individual who did more than tear hair was William Bushnell Stout, who argued that the railroads desperately needed attractive new passenger trains of light weight and economical motive power. He pitched his concept to the nation’s leading builder of railroad passenger cars, Pullman-Standard, and in 1932 Stout’s streamlined, gasoline-powered "Railplane" burst upon the stodgy railroad scene. Desperate to revive his struggling passenger business, Union Pacific president Carl Gray sat up and took notice. Gray did his own in-house studies that agreed with Stout’s recommendations for a radical new lightweight, diesel-powered train, and in May 1933 placed an order for an expanded version of the Railplane: a three-car distillate-engined lightweight train of astonishingly futuristic appearance. In the glum winter of 1934 the bright yellow M-10000, named Streamliner, took to the rails and on nationwide barnstorming tours became a golden ray of excitement in a dismal time. Union Pacific quickly followed the M-10000 with the six-car, diesel-powered M-10001, which after extensive testing and modification debuted on the Chicago-Portland run in June 1935 as the Streamliner City of Portland.
The traveling public flocked to the new trains and a succession of "City" Streamliners fanned out to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland, each larger and more luxurious than the last. In 1942 the M-10002 was put into Portland-Seattle service as a five-times-monthly City of Portland connection – the first streamliner service to Puget Sound. World War II postponed introduction of new trains but the railroads made up for it in the postwar years, ordering millions of dollars’ worth of new equipment and spending more millions on advertising and upgrading track and signal systems for high-speed operation. Union Pacific made a spectacular splash in 1950 when it purchased the General Motors/Pullman-Standard conceptual "Train of Tomorrow" and placed it in service on Portland-Seattle trains 457/458. Out went the old heavyweight coaches, some in service since E. H. Harriman’s time, and in came streamlined coaches, "Astra-dome" coach (reserved seats), dome dining car, dome sleeping car (bedrooms used as premium-fare parlor space), and dome parlor-observation car. A surfeit of luxury on a four-hour daytime run, Trains 457/458 were without question the most luxurious trains ever to run between Seattle and Portland.
In 1955 UP Streamliners became "Domeliners" with the addition of luxurious Astra-dome coaches, diners, and lounges, and Union Pacific’s were some of the finest trains in the world. It couldn’t last; starting in the late 1940s the DC-6 sucked the railroads dry of the all-important business travel market, and steadily improving highways captured most of the rest. Through Seattle sleeper service was dropped in spring 1961, and with the completion of I-5 in 1966, the once-palatial Trains 457/458 were often reduced to a paltry three coaches, café-lounge, and baggage car. On May 1, 1971, Amtrak put most of America’s privately-run passenger trains out of their misery, Union Pacific’s among them.
Thriving Partnership
During the 1950s and 1960s competition for Seattle business was keen among the Union Pacific, Northern Pacific, Great Northern, and Milwaukee Road. The 1970 merger of the NP and GN to form Burlington Northern ostensibly narrowed the competition but created a formidable force driven by new marketing strategies and economy of scale that kept UP on its mettle. Union Pacific added Alaska to its route map via Alaska Railroad/Alaska Marine Lines barge transport, and in 1967 became the first American railroad to open a branch office in Japan. The following year UP inaugurated high-speed East-West Coast "land bridge" container service, all of which increased its traffic through the Port of Seattle.
More radical change followed. The Staggers Rail Act of 1980 radically transformed the railroad industry, and the abandonment early that year of the Milwaukee Road’s Pacific Extension from South Dakota to Seattle/Tacoma removed what had been a leading contender for Port of Seattle traffic. Like other major railroads, UP focused increasingly on maximizing long-haul traffic and spun off much of its local/short-haul business to truckers and small regional railroads. Opened in the early 1990s, the Harriman Dispatching Center at Union Pacific’s headquarters city of Omaha centralized train control and allowed the closure of thousands of wayside stations. Containerized Asian and domestic intermodal traffic in partnership with trucking companies like J. B. Hunt and United Parcel greatly increased in the 2000s, and millions of tons of freight enter Seattle each year over the Union Pacific.
Even with computerized locomotives and satellite dispatching, getting the trains through doesn’t happen easily. Seattleite Steve Olsen worked as a Union Pacific locomotive engineer in the 2000s, moving long, heavy trains over the Blue Mountains of Oregon:
"The 20,000-ton ore trains are the most interesting ones to get over the hill between LaGrande and Hinkle. Ten locomotives are required: three on the head-end, two shoving on the rear, and five just behind mid-train, all controlled by the engineer up front. You have to balance the pulling and shoving and use the air brakes just so as you top the summit and ease into transition, still shoving on the rear while you’re in dynamic braking on the head-end. It’s very easy for things to go wrong here, and it’s a lot of work for the conductor when you come apart on the mountain: a long walk, sometimes in the snow and at night, tying hand brakes to secure the disconnected portion of the train before you can replace the broken knuckle and put the train back together, then another walk to untie all those hand brakes. I once had to set 123 hand brakes when my train went into emergency, and secure the entire train before we could recover our air brakes.
"On several occasions, to prevent my train from stalling during a snowstorm, I had to stand on the front steps of the locomotive holding a broom to one of the rails sweeping away the snow to prevent wheel slip. It worked, but they might have fired me if they saw me doing it. My longest time on duty was twenty-one hours when we went dead on our twelve-hour maximum service limit on a mountain siding during a snowstorm. Access roads were not passable and it was hours before the tracks were cleared allowing another train to rescue us. Then the rescue train was put into a siding and the head office in Omaha forgot about us – until a concerned wife called the railroad wondering where her husband was. When we finally got rescued by a van, management complained that we stopped to eat on the way to our hotel. Worse than the weather was the frequent lack of sleep; sometimes following a quick trip we had to get rested for our next trip after being awake for maybe only eight hours. I can’t go to sleep at the drop of a hat and didn’t appreciate being called to work just two hours after finally falling asleep. They get really mad if you refuse your call and sometimes bad things happen when you’re not clear-headed. Believe it or not, rest times used to be even shorter" (Olsen interview with author).
Through mergers with other lines, Union Pacific in 2025 is America’s second-largest railroad, at over 32,000 miles, and continues to rack up record-breaking revenue and performance statistics. Like the rest of the industry the company faces daunting issues: maintaining profitability and improving infrastructure amid rising costs and truck competition … the escalating threat of cybercrime … one-person crews and automation … minimizing accidents and maximizing safety … crew fatigue and employee relations. Perhaps most significantly for Seattle, the fates of railroad and city are intertwined in changing government policies and their impacts on relations with China and other international trade partners. Through all the challenges, however, there is no doubt that Union Pacific will continue as a major presence in the Pacific Northwest economy.
