Railroads like to write their own histories so they can leave out all the scandals, swindles, bankruptcies, and other messy details. But this one — a reprint from Western Pacific‘s employee magazine — is pretty honest. George Gould, who controlled the Wabash, Missouri Pacific, and Rio Grande, decided to break Southern Pacific’s monopoly to the Bay Area. Incorporated in 1903 (thus celebrating its 50th anniversary in 1953), Western Pacific reached Oakland in 1909 but ended up costing almost twice the original estimates, not only sending it into bankruptcy in 1915 but leading Gould to lose the rest of his railroad empire.
Click image to download an 18.6-MB PDF of this 44-page booklet.
Another tycoon, Arthur Curtis James, took control in 1926. Since he already had a lot of stock in and was on the board of the Great Northern, connecting the two on a line from Bend, Oregon to Keddie, California seemed natural. Finished in 1931, this line turned Western Pacific into a north-south carrier as well as an east-west one. But the railroad was unable to attract as much business as Southern Pacific on either route and it went into bankruptcy again in 1935.
This booklet contains numerous black-and-white and four-color (or colorized in the case of the cover) photos. Unfortunately, the black printing of the two-color photos on the inside back cover is about two-thirds of an inch too high, leading to ghost images of the trains in those photos.