James Hill, John Stevens, and the Eight Switchbacks
Near Stevens Pass Area, Washington
The pass you are crossing is named for John Frank Stevens, a self taught locating engineer who, in the winter of eighteen ninety, pushed into these mountains to find a way through for the Great Northern Railway. The railroad was the creation of James J. Hill, a one eyed empire builder from Saint Paul, Minnesota, who was determined to lay a transcontinental line to Puget Sound without the government land grants his rivals had enjoyed.
Stevens found the low saddle that now bears his name, and Hill drove his rails toward it. The first crossing, completed in eighteen ninety three, was a desperate piece of engineering, a set of eight switchbacks that zig zagged up and down the steep grade, so tortuous that trains crawled and crews dreaded them. In nineteen hundred a first tunnel, about two and six tenths miles long, replaced the switchbacks.
But even that line sat high in avalanche country, and after the Wellington disaster the railroad went deeper still. Much of this early grade was built by hand labor, including many Japanese immigrants.
