Marcus Daly

BUTTE  hill had the ores. Warm Spring valley had the water for reducing them. Between the two lay 32 miles of buttes, bluffs, gulches and rolling prairie. To move thousands of tons of ore each day from the richest hill on earth to the largest non-ferrous smelter in the world was a job fit to test the mettle of the best kind of railroad that could be built.

Such a railroad is the Butte, Anaconda & Pacific of today, which starts from the Butte hill at an elevation of 5,960 feet in the smelter yards at Anaconda, where some 350 bottom-dump cars disgorge from 10,000 to 15,000 tons of ore per day into the gigantic hoppers of the reduction works. During its return climb from the Rocker to the Butter hill, a distance of four miles, the engines buck a 2.5 percent grade, rising 523 feet in the four miles.

When Marcus Daily built the Anaconda works, the Montana Union Railroad had the monopoly on the hauling of ore from mines to smelter. Dull times coming on and the business being unable to stand the heavy freight charges, Mr. Daly appealed to the management for a reduction. This the railroad refused, although it is said that a difference of only 25 cents per ton stood in the way of an amicable settlement.

With his characteristic determination not to be balked, Mr. Daly proceeded to build his own railroad, in order that reduced freight costs might keep more men employed during the slack times.

He shut down the mines on Butte hill, turned his hardrock miners into graders, track-layers, culvert and bridge builders, and pushed the road to swift completion. By the time the road was built industrial conditions had improved, the mines were reopened, the smelter resumed operations and hundreds of workmen, who otherwise would have been unemployed, had been maintained at a gainful occupation.

Unique in Character

The B.A.&P. railway, according to the General Electric Bulletin, “is in many ways the most remarkable example of steam road electrification in the country.”

The little road, with its mammoth electric engines, its endless strings of ore cars and its enormous tonnage is unique in many ways.

Continuing the Bulletin says:
“Besides being the first 2,400 volt, direct current road, it is also credited with being the first steam road, operating electrically both freight and passenger lines purely for reasons of economy.

“The first electric locomotives were put in service May 28, 1913, hauling ore cars between the East Anaconda yards and the smelter. The entire freight traffic was gradually taken over and since November, 1913, all trains have been handled by electric locomotives.

“During the first year the electric locomotives made approximately 430,000 miles and hauled about 4,500,000 tons of ore. The unusually successful operation marks an epoch in the annals of heavy electric traction.
“The first locomotives were put in service hauling ore up the smelter hill against a 1.1 percent grade and it is a significant fact that service has never been discontinued and no material interruptions have occurred from any cause.”

Ore trains, hauled by electricity, are much heavier than those hauled by steam and the freight movement on the B.A.&P. is now among the heaviest in the world.

The lines of the system, including sidetracks, switches and spurs, cover 95 miles. The locomotives are 80 tons weight and two of them are used to haul heavy trains. The local traffic is approximately 5,000,000 tons a year, handled in steel cars weighing about 18 tons and having a capacity of 50 tons each.

Operating Methods

Trains of 30 to 40 loaded cars weighing 2,000 to 3,000 tons are taken up the Butte hill by the two-unit locomotive and hauled to Rocker, where 4,000 to 4,500-ton trains are made up for the main line. At the East Anaconda yards the train is broken up into trains of 1,400 tons and sent up Smelter hill.
The locomotive equipment consists of 17 80-ton units. Of these, 15 are for freight and two for passenger service.

Viewed from every angle, the B.A. and P. is as unique as are the towns which form its terminal. As Butte is the greatest copper camp on earth and Anaconda the greatest smelting plant on earth, so also is the B.A. and P. the most distinctive railway on the map.

It started out to connect Butte with the Pacific coast - hence the name, “Butte, Anaconda and Pacific railway.” But it found it had enough business to attend to at home and thenceforth abandoned its ideas of far-flung territorial conquest. Nevertheless, old-time railway men state the “Pacific” part of its name caused sleepless nights for more than one railroad potentate, who argued: “If Daly can build 26 miles of mountain road when the nation is lying flat on its financial back, there is nothing to stop him from building 2,000 miles, or more, and eventually cutting into our transcontinental business.”

The road’s general manager, Harry A. Gallwey, has had what is probably the most varied experience of any railway executive in the country. He began his transportation experience in Nevada when silver bullion was transported from the Comstock and other famous silver mines by stage coach at all hours of the day and night - any hour when a road agent might least expect a bullion shipment to be made.

In those days when men were numerous, but nearly all of them were catalogued in the private identification bureau of the express companies and in some mysterious way these transportation companies kept track of very stage robber’s whereabouts. Amid these surroundings Mr. Gallwey received his first lessons.

“When the railway came in,” he turned to the art of telegraphy and further familiarized himself with transportation. Incidentally, he is one of the few living men who are intimately acquainted with Mackey, Fair, Flood and O’Brien, those nabobs of new-gotten wealth of the “hot-water” country, and with Marcus Daly, the good genius of Butte.

Big in its tonnage, broad in its management, efficient in its service, always a pioneer - the B.A.&P. is worthy of its task of linking two of the most important industrial centers in the Northwest. (Printed in the Hysham Echo Oct. 1, 1925 & August 9, 2013) Print this post