A 1906 depot with a Venetian tower, a ceiling hidden for 45 years behind acoustic tile, and a city that bought it for ten dollars.

A prairie town took the name Hill's Yard whether Jim Hill liked it or not, and for ninety years its shops built and mended the engines that ran the Great Northern.

A telegram named Tacoma the terminus in 1873 and Seattle took it about as well as you'd expect, then spent thirty years proving the railroad wrong.

A promise made to Chief Kamiakin in 1853 didn't survive the season, and thirty years later the same railroad picked up a whole town and carried it four miles north.

A mob of 1,500 rounded up Seattle's Chinese residents for forced deportation in February 1886, three months after Tacoma showed the coast how it was done.

Two-thirds of the crews that built the western line were Chinese. They closed the last gap in Montana, and the country left them out of the painting.

For eighteen days in April 1894 a ten-month-old union stopped James J. Hill's railroad cold and won back nearly every dollar he had cut.

Hill and Harriman fought for the Northern Pacific until it hit $1,000 a share and dragged the whole market down with it.

He raised millions without telling anyone what he was buying, took the Northern Pacific by ambush, and lost it four months after the golden spike.

Half blind and broke at eighteen, he laid the only transcontinental built without public money, and the only one that never went bankrupt.

The only water-level door through the Cascades, and two railroad kings raced to own both banks of it.

A head-on collision on a single Massachusetts track in 1841 gave us the modern org chart. The AI boom is about to test it.

Before the tunnel, the Great Northern climbed Stevens Pass on eight switchbacks, backing over the summit at four percent.

Bored 7.8 miles through granite in three years, the 1929 Cascade Tunnel took Great Northern's trains down off the killing slopes for good.

In 1887, at least 31 Chinese gold miners were murdered in Hells Canyon. No one was ever convicted.

Seventy-two hours after Wellington, the Selkirks took 58 more men — the deadliest week the high iron ever knew.

March 1, 1910 — an avalanche swept two Great Northern trains into a canyon, killing 96. The deadliest avalanche in U.S. history.

Dynamite, sharpshooters, and hand-to-hand combat as two railroad titans warred up Oregon's Deschutes Canyon.

Alone in a Montana blizzard, John F. Stevens found the pass that completed a transcontinental dream.

Two crews bored a mountain from opposite sides, racing for a $1,000 prize and the future of Puget Sound.

How the Northern Pacific turned an Idaho spud into the most famous meal on American rails.