Starting in 1942, Great Northern’s annual reports had dedicated the centerfold pages to some specific theme: the latest Empire Builder, some industry or region, or some specific aspect of freight service. The 1959 report is something of a transition as the centerfold has a theme, but it isn’t obvious what that theme is without seeing the page before.

Click image to download a 15.2-MB PDF of this 28-page report.

“Two new states and a seaway inaugural stimulate growth on both ends of Great Northern’s main line,” says a headline on page 11, the page before the centerfold. The seaway is the Saint Lawrence Seaway, which opened April 25, 1959.

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Hayden, Stone was a securities firm that, after a series of mergers and acquisitions, is part of American Express today. This report appears to have been commissioned by the Great Northern to provide potential investors with an independent review of the company’s value. Although not an annual report, it came with a collection of annual reports and contains similar information, so I’m listing it as one.

Click image to download a 13.0-MB PDF of this 32-page report.
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Most of it deals with freight, of course. One of the two paragraphs about passenger service says, “Under the ICC formula, Great Northern’s passenger operating ratio for 1956 was 193.86% and its operating deficit was $23,965,884. However, on an out-of-pocket cash basis, management believes that its passenger service is provided on much more favorable terms. The Company’s crack train, the Empire Builder, grosses around $5.35 per train mile (out-of-pocket costs about $4.50 per train mile) and its secondary train, the Western Star, grosses about $3.90 per train mile with out-of-pocket costs of some $3.45 per train mile. Management feels that since the Great Northern must operate passenger service, its service and equipment should be of the best, especially if it is to generate goodwill and create additional freight traffic. Toward this end, the Empire Builder has been completely equipped with new cars twice since the end of World War II, and continuing this policy, new dome cars were placed in service in 1955.”

Someone has “photoshopped” a wide-angle image of a GN F7 on top of a photo of the west entrance to the Cascade Tunnel. I’m only an amateur graphics artist, but the image is almost painful for me to look at. There really is a signal by the tunnel entrance, but the signal in this picture also looks heavily edited.

Click image to download a 17.5-MB PDF of this 28-page report.
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The centerfold celebrates the opening of Gavin Yard, “Great Northern’s new 6-1/2 million dollar electronic freight classification yard.” It was named for Frank Gavin, GN president until 1951 and still chairman of the board at the time the yard opened. It seems strange for a railroad to name something after a living officer in the 1950s, but this is the railroad whose predecessor named its first locomotive after its first still-living chief engineer and later erected a larger-than-life statue of a later still-living chief engineer at the summit of the rail operations.

Leslie Ragan’s painting of the dome-laden Empire Builder wraps 1-1/4 inches around the back cover of the 1955 report. Incongruously, the rest of the back cover shows an iron ore strip mine in the Minnesota hills, no doubt on Great Northern Iron Ore Properties trust lands.

Click image to download a 17.7-MB PDF of this 28-page report.

The Great Northern Iron Ore trust was created by James J. Hill who, on the advice of Louis Hill, had invested about $5 million in mineral lands in Minnesota. It turned out the lands were worth about $500 million. Hill felt uncomfortable profiteering from his railroad’s inside access to local resources and he would have simply sold the land to the railroad at his cost. But the Interstate Commerce Commission forbade railroads from owning their customers, so he created the trust and gave shares in it to GN stockholders. Since he was a major stockholder, he still made lots of money, but so did everyone else who owned stock in the railroad.

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