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 The Northern Pacific Railway system map | |
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| Overview | |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Saint Paul, Minnesota |
| Key people |
|
| Founder | Josiah Perham |
| Reporting mark | NP |
| Locale | Ashland, Wisconsin and Saint Paul, Minnesota to Seattle, Washington, Tacoma, Washington, and Portland, Oregon |
| Dates of operation | 1864–1970 |
| Successor | Burlington Northern (later BNSF) |
| Technical | |
| Track gauge | 4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge |
The Northern Pacific Railway (reporting mark NP) was an important transcontinental railroad that operated across the northern tier of the western United States, from Minnesota to the Pacific Northwest. It was approved and chartered in 1864 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 given 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 President Henry Villard's home country of the new German Empire), for construction funding.
Construction began in 1870 and the main line opened all the way from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean, just south of the United States-Canada border when Ulysses S. Grant, drove in the final "golden spike" completing the line in western Montana Territory (future State of Montana in 1889), 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 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.
The Northern Pacific was headquartered in Minnesota, first in Brainerd, then in the territorial / 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.