Harlowton: Where the Wires Began

In nineteen sixteen, the small Montana town of Harlowton became famous among railroaders across the world. This was the eastern end of what Thomas Edison called an unmatched technical marvel.

Harlowton exists because of a railroad called the Jawbone, officially the Montana Railroad, organized in eighteen ninety-four by a Helena attorney named Richard Harlow. Harlow wanted to link Helena to the Musselshell Valley, and he had more ambition than money. The railroad's nickname came from his tendency to mortgage everything on talk and credit. The line staggered forward through the central Montana grasslands, reaching the Musselshell country and establishing a depot at the settlement that would be named for its founder. In nineteen oh eight the Chicago, Milwaukee, Saint Paul and Pacific Railroad, known as the Milwaukee Road, bought the struggling Jawbone and incorporated it into its transcontinental system.

The Milwaukee Road was building toward the Pacific Coast, and its route crossed the Rocky Mountains twice. In those mountains, steam locomotives were brutally inefficient, burning enormous quantities of coal to haul heavy freight trains through steep grades. The railroad's engineers proposed electrification: stringing overhead wires and using electric locomotives drawing power from Montana's rivers. It was a technological gamble of enormous scale.

Harlowton became the eastern terminus. The section from Harlowton through the Rockies all the way to Avery, Idaho, was turned over to complete electric operation in late nineteen sixteen. It was the longest electrified mainline railroad in the United States, covering nearly four hundred forty miles. General Electric built the locomotives. Montana Power Company supplied the current. Engineers from around the world came to study it. Thomas Edison, who knew a thing or two about electricity, inspected the installation and reportedly declared it an unmatched technical marvel.

The Milwaukee Road ultimately abandoned the electrification in nineteen seventy-four, stripping the wires as the railroad slid toward bankruptcy. The Milwaukee shut down its transcontinental line entirely in nineteen eighty. Harlowton, population under one thousand today, still keeps a small museum devoted to the railroad that briefly made this Musselshell Valley town a dateline in engineering history.