Old Missoula

Many Residents Turned Out in 1900 To Greet First North Coast Limited

It was May 1, 1900. Long before the train was due at Missoula, many of the town’s residents had driven their carriages to the Northern Pacific passenger station, tied the horses to the hitching posts and were waiting on the platform.

In the distance a whistle rose to full pitch and faded away. The familiar sound of a steam locomotive could be heard. It grew louder and soon the train emerged from Hell Gate Canyon, rounded the bend and pulled up at the station.

Maiden Run

This was what the townspeople had been waiting for – the first electrically lighted train ever operated in the Northwest. It was the first North Coast Limited, which only two days before had left the Twin Cities on its maiden run to the North Pacific Coast.

‘Age of Magic’

Little girls with ribbons in their pigtails and boys in wide-collared blouses and knee pants stared at the marvels of the flickering lights, the electric fans and a real bathtub and heard their elders remark that the age of magic had surely arrived.

Up to that time, travelers had been accustomed to kerosene lanterns and wood stoves. But here was a train with steam heat, a barbershop, luxuriously appointed diner, observation club car, plush Pullman sleeping cars and other travel frills.

Thus the Northern Pacific ushered in the new century with a new train – a train that today is the oldest “name train” still in operation west of the Mississippi River.

With the tempo of travel stepping up as more visitors and settlers came west, the Northern Pacific built a new passenger station in Missoula in 1902. One of the unique features of the structure is that it was built from bricks made in China. Imported by NP in 1890, these bricks had originally been intended for a luxury hotel to be known as the Olympic at Tacoma, Wash. When a fire gutted the interior of the hotel before it was completed, the railway abandoned this project and decided to use the bricks in the construction of the Missoula and Wallace, Idaho depots.

58,255 From Olympic

The Missoula depot took 58,255 bricks from the walls of the ill fated Olympic and 33,845 new ones from a stockpile of leftovers. Later some 15,000 use bricks went into the small chateau-like depot at Wallace.

Couldn’t Get Copies

The bricks were buff-colored Roman style, 12 inches long. In 1921, when an addition to the Missoula fire station was being contemplated, efforts to have the brick copied in this country were unsuccessful. And the closest possible reproduction would have cost $75 per thousand, more than three times that of the rare original.

Other buildings erected in Missoula shortly after the turn of the century were a machine shop in 1902, and additions of nine frame stalls in 1905 and 1907 to the 12-stall brick roundhouse which had been built in 1887. The original stock yard went up in 1907.

The period following the turn of the century was one of expansion and development. The railway turned its energies toward construction of branch lines, improving its main line and building and expanding terminal and shop facilities.

The main line between Garrison and Missoula was reconstructed and greatly improved in 1909 to expedite increasing movement of traffic through the mountains and Hell Gate Canyon.

The Bitter Root branch line, completed as far as Grantsdale in 1888 and extended to Charlos Heights in 1900, was extended to Darby in 1904 and 1905

In addition to expanding its facilities and providing transportation service to the region, the railway was also active in land settlement activities. This work was continued until it was temporarily interrupted by World War I.