Born in Pasco, (Wash.) in 1908, Bjarne was the first of six children to Norwegian immigrants who met and married in the U.S. His father, an employee of the Northern Pacific Railroad, uprooted the family and moved them to eastern Montana, where he filed a homestead claim near Terry, (Mont.) in 1910. By 1922, drought, crop failures and grasshopper plagues finally forced sale of the homestead and a return to Pasco. Bjarne graduated from Pasco High School in 1928. After high school, Bjarne followed his father into work for the Northern Pacific Railroad. He began as a section laborer and gradually worked his way into management. His work included stops in Pasco (Wash.), Glendive (Mont.), and finally Spokane (Wash.) where he retired in 1973 from the Burlington Northern Railroad Company as a highly respected expert in track work.
Created in 1897 following the bankruptcy and reorganization of the Oregon Improvement Company, the Pacific Coast Company converted the track of the Columbia and Puget Sound Railroad to standard gauge and in 1916 changed the name of that railroad to the Pacific Coast Railroad. The Pacific Coast Railroad operated freight and passenger trains between Seattle and several mining/lumbering centers in the western Cascade mountains some forty miles to the east along three main branch lines. In 1951 the Great Northern Railway Company (U.S.) purchased stock control of the Pacific Coast Railroad and took over operations. The Pacific Coast Railroad continued to exist on paper as a subsidiary of the Great Northern until 1970, when it disappeared in the merger that created the Burlington Northern.
The National Railway Historical Society was formed in 1935 to preserve and document railroad history. The Pacific Northwest chapter was formed in 1955 in Portland, Oregon, and is one of more than 170 local chapters of the NRHS.
Palmer Coking Coal Company is a producer, supplier, and retailer of a wide selection of sand, gravel, topsoil, beauty bark, red cinder, lava rock, and other construction and landscaping products. It is a family-owned and operated business incorporated in Durham, Washington on August 14, 1933. The company no longer mines coal, In the company name, �Palmer� comes from the generally forgotten town of Palmer-Kanaskat, Washington (near Durham), located in east King County. Coking refers to a type of coal which could be partially �cooked� to extract impurities. Coal was the mineral mined during the Great Depression, when thirty or more companies competing for market share in a declining industry around Seattle. During the 1950s Palmer acquired a land base which allowed expanded mining opportunities in Black Diamond, Ravensdale and�Franklin, Washington. Diversification into other extractive products soon followed: red cinders, clay, silica, timber, sand, gravel, and topsoil.
Howard’s lifetime passion for trains and photography began at an early age when his father took him to the Illinois Central Railroad Station to see locomotives and to take photos with his Donald Duck camera. In 1959, during college, he worked one summer on a Great Northern (GN) surfacing gang in Minneapolis. Later he worked on the Illinois Central and the Milwaukee Road. After his military service he worked for the GN as a leverman, as ticket-seller in the Minneapolis depot; and as a brakeman out of Willmar. His railroad career continued into the Burlington Northern (BN), from which he retired. It also led to photographing steam locomotives throughout the US, Central and South America. He developed, printed, and sold many of his black and white photos. He also wrote articles to accompany them which were published in trade magazines such as TRAINS.
Jim Pendley has worked for the Union Pacific Railroad and then as a locomotive engineer for the Burlinton Northern Santa Fe Railway. He is a model railroad enthusiast living in Ellensburg, Washington.
Daniel R. Perkins was born in South Bend, Washington to Paul and Eva Ford Perkins. He worked for the Burlington Northern, later in real estate investing. He moved to Eugene, Oregon and married Betty Brown in 1980.