I just did some research (yea, it probably should've be done by the time I start this. sue me
) and the standard height for the catenary was 24ft. 2 in., 4 feet above the AAR maximum loading gauge of 20 ft. 2 in, so I'd actually be fine.
Having four feet of overhead clearance for these cars is fine for 3000V DC, but for 25kV electrification, you're running a real risk of arcing with four feet of clearance. The AAR's minimum clearance for 20'2" freight cars and electrification is 24'3", and IMO with high-current electrification that's pushing it. You'd probably want at least 26' to avoid any real risk of arcing. Beyond that, you'd need to make sure all of the tunnels on this route would be able to handle the double stacks you'll need to run, and make sure they can handle the size (and weight) of heavy loads. In the hydropower-rich Northwest, you may also consider running greater clearance to allow the use of 50kV electrification, which would give additional full-throttle power to the electrics so long as their traction motors and circuits can handle the voltage and the locomotives can make use of said power. From 1984 until 2000, British Columbia Railway's Tumbler Ridge subdivision was worked by EMD GM6C electrics operating on 50 kV, and that's line's demands were not that far off what the Milwaukee would need to make Pacific Extension electrification work.
As far as the rest of the track goes, I'm first going to point out that I made a typo. class 3 is 40 MPH freight, 60 passenger, whereas the current state of the BN route is mostly class 4/5 (60/80 Freight, 80/90 passenger) However, having driven along that route, I don't think I've seen any train go close to that.
Maybe they could get 60 mph on flat lands like the shores of Puget Sound or parts of the route from Portland to Tacoma, but there is no way in hell anybody's freight train is gonna go 60 mph in the Cascades, the route is too twisty. That said, you want the roadbed to be as tough as possible as this is a way of reducing maintenance requirements and thus the cost of maintaining the route. It's a classic case of spend a little more now to spend less later.
So let's say they want to upgrade to class 4. According to a BNSF study for their Black Mesa project done in '08, it takes about $264,000 per mile to upgrade a mile of track to class 4, or about $47,575/mi in 1970. For easier math, we'll round that up to $50,000 per mile. The length of the transcon from MSTP to Seattle is about 1800 miles, for a total of $90 mil, and a grand total of $141 mil to get to class 4.
Plus the cost of electrification rebuilding, don't forget. You'll need that to make this work properly. The proposal from GE and the Northwest Rail Improvement Committee said that the cost of rebuilding the electrification and closing the electrification gap would be about $40 million. I'd spend more than that and stretch the electric lines to Terry, MT or McLaughlin, SD, and use the hydropower of the northwest and the power of new electric locomotives (the Little Joes could at best make 5,100 horsepower and 75,700 lbs of tractive effort, the GE E44A could supply 6,000 horsepower and 96,000 lbs of tractive effort on the PRR's 11 kV electrification and GM's GM6C (6,000 hp, 126,000 lbs) and GM10B (10,000 hp, 114,000 lbs) beat that by an order of magnitude. Go with the big-voltage 50 kV / 60 Hz system used by the British Columbia Railway system and (assuming the new locomotives can handle it) will give you that much more power. (For comparison, the EMD SD40-2, which was BN's go-to locomotive from the mid-1970s until well into BNSF years on the Cascade routes, produces 3,000 hp and 83,100 lbs tractive effort.) The cost of the electrification rebuild to those standards and that length would probably run about $60-65 million, but would pay for itself very rapidly as the ability to keep the diesels on Lines East would make for greater motive power and thus the ability to rebuilt or retire older units.
However, I would argue that class 4 is sort of a long term goal, as at the same time MILW was abandoning their transcon, BN was ripping up double track and selling/ leasing their former NP and GN routes, so with the Milwaukee still kicking, they could sufficiently drag traffic away from BN where the maintenance emergency has a lot more time to be resolved.
If BN knows that the Milwaukee is gonna fight for every nickel of revenue from Lines West, you can bet that ripping up of double track is going to stop and quickly. BN's management prided themselves on keeping as high a standard as they could for their lines and I know from personal experience that they meant that. If the electric Milwaukee with its efficient operations are playing tough BN is going to try to fight back as well.
The big curveball that will hit you in the 1970s is if both Burlington Northern and Milwaukee Road are really playing rough. The Port of Portland was short of capacity (and this would be made worse in May 1980 by the eruption of Mount St. Helens, which dumped a pile of sediment into the Columbia River), San Francisco's piers shrunk dramatically in the 1960s, Oakland was a busy port in the 1960s but its shallow depth made for problems after that and until the building of the Alameda Corridor trying to run rail freight out of the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles was a pain in the neck due to the density of South Central Los Angeles - none of these problems apply to Seattle (which has both BN and MILW rail service by the time of this TL's beginning) or Tacoma (ditto). With it being shorter to ship to Seattle, does a 1960s-1970s slugout between BN and MILW result in the Ports of Seattle and Tacoma growing? Seattle today has a massive bulk grain terminal on the waterfront south of Balmer Yard and a sizable port southwest of the downtown core, does a BN-MILW slugout mean more traffic there or to Tidewater Flats in Tacoma? Does BN and MILW re-route traffic bound to north of Seattle around the city and use Balmer as a destination yard, maybe turning Seattle and Tacoma into rivals to Los Angeles and Long Beach? If that ends up being the case and if MILW runs to Portland (where the interchange with SP existed, and SP held a grudge against BN for wanting to exchange cars at Bieber, CA rather than Portland) and Vancouver (specifically the huge port at Roberts Bank) one could easily see MILW having the lion's share of lumber traffic from the northwest headed straight onto the SP at Portland, bound for booming California, and a relationship with the British Columbia Railway to add to the north-south loads. Hell, with better lines and faster transit times, what's stopping the fishing fleets that roamed out of Seattle from dropping off their catches and having one railroad or another make regular unit trains of frozen fish for eastern markets? Or how about the Milwaukee take advantage of their car-offloading facility in Tacoma to unload new cars inbound from Japan starting in the early 1970s directly onto unit trains of new cars? The possibilities are quite wide....
The issue with exchanging at Portland was solved in the OTL merger, and I have plans to deal with that which I'll withhold for now.
Short-term (first ~15 years) is survival, long term is to become competition. Also, I'm afraid I'm not familiar with the bolded phrase.
The bolded phrase was a typo caused by an overzealous autocorrect. Sorry about that.
If it was me doing this, I'd try for both Portland and Vancouver/Roberts Bank, even if the latter would require new construction. Best bet for this might be a condition of the BN merger being the Northern Pacific line from Seattle to Sumas, WA, being sold to the Milwaukee Road, then new-building to Roberts Bank and the Port of Vancouver, along with using the British Columbia Railway to gather loads in BC that have to go south, picking them up at Vancouver or Roberts Bank and delivering them to the SP at Portland to take them to California. (Or if SP's being a pain in the neck or the WP wants them, to BN to deliver to Bieber for the WP.)
The ICC was perfectly okay with the merger, they just wanted to adjust the stake in the new company to better reflect the stock prices of both companies, which meant that the CNW had to trade a lot more due to its decreased stock price.
That's a big problem, though, as not doing that would either allow CNW stockholders to make out like bandits, cost MILW stock holders a pile or both. Having to work around that is a must.
Really the only market that would be effected would be San Fran/ Oakland, as that's really the only one with a significant decrease in available routes to Chicago at Omaha, whereas you still have the GN/NP or BN and the CP in the northwest and the SP/SSW/RI or ATSF in the southwest. Whereas after going WP/DRGW/MP or SP/UP in the center, you're now down an option once you get to Omaha, unless you want to route things down to KC.
A fair point, but UP also has the option of using the Rock Island Main Line from Omaha west to Chicago, and until 1968 they also have the option of the Chicago Great Western, which UP could probably also simply buy out. If you're getting this done before the mess that was the UP-RI merger proposal, you could still form the second mega-railroad of the West, as your combined MILW-CNW merging with the Rock Island would still be a mostly end-to-end merger....
(sidenote, is my constant use of abbreviations annoying?)
Nah, not to me, I know where you're going with this.
I mean, I'll write about passenger operations until *Amtrak takes over, but that was all solved when the MILW/CNW drafted their combined timetable during merger proceedings.
Okay, not ALL of it, because it still would've lost a fuckton of money, but you know what I mean
I'm not entirely sure of that. Canadian National Railways did a great job of reducing their passenger losses in the 1960s and 1970s by running better systems and thinking of long-distance passenger service as an experience and not just transport from one place to another. The CNW and MILW both had a history of that, and the electrified divisions could, given sufficiently good equipment (buy used and upgrade or buy new Hi-Level style double-deckers, either can work) be a real option even in the Jet Age. There would be little point to coach cars here, you'll want all-sleeper trains for this, with the best of amenities. Even if they lose money, this also has the benefit of showing off to customers and the public, a point that the Rio Grande exploited for over two decades with the Rio Grande Zephyr long after the creation of Amtrak.
It's just an idea, but its one my railroad TLs have used. After all, the Milwaukee's passenger car fleet included a bunch of cars (namely the 'Super Dome' dome cars and 'Skytop' observation cars) that made a big impact and were among those that were loved by passengers. Imagine an Olympian Hiawatha (or if BN's not gonna use it, an Empire Builder
) made up of a twenty-three-car luxury train with one of SP's three-unit dining cars with a kitchen in the middle, two Super Domes on either end of the restaurant car set, a pair of two-unit dome lounge-bar car sets, a pair of picture window-equipped lounge cars, ten sleepers in the train, a pair of baggage cars at the front and a Skytop at the tail end, all hauled at 85 or 90 mph on the smooth, solid-roadbed Milwaukee main line behind a A-B-B-A set of EMD E9s or Alco PA2s from Chicago through Lines East and then a pair or trio of GE E44As on the Pacific Extension. These trains also have sufficient power that if you wanted to you could haul some additional express cars. I'm having visions of a Milwaukee express crew delivering a handful of specially-designed boxcars (think the NYC's X60W series, eight-door 86' boxcars on express trucks) for the Hiawatha to take to Seattle....
