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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.