News

We now have Safety First logos as applied to caboose gates as both 8-inch diameter mouse pads and 4-inch diameter drink coasters.  For many years Great Northern applied this Safety First logo in Scotchlite to the end gates of cabooses. The monogram drawing is dated December 1954. Now you can have one of your own in miniature. Both the mouse pads and coasters are made of rubber and polyester fiber, which feels soft and will not wrinkle easily no matter how it is rolled. The anti-slip rubber base will firmly grip any flat surface and will not easily move around....

The GNRHS Company Store now offers the Wayzata, Minnesota, depot in HO scale. The model is made by Hidden River Models. A brief history of the relationship between the railroad and the town is given below for your enjoyment.  The first train came to Wayzata on August 24, 1867 when the town was the end of the line of the St. Paul & Pacific Railroad, predecessor of the Great Northern Railway. The first depot was located four blocks east of the present depot, near Broadway Avenue. The town grew up on both sides of Broadway. By the 1880’s the railroad...

Your store has added two new-to-us books by Dale Jones of the Spokane area. Great Northern Railway in Black and White is a 92-page landscape format soft cover book that contains over 125 images, almost all from the Spokane Division between Troy, Montana and Spokane Washington. Snowsheds and Train Orders - Marias Pass Operations 1950s - 1980s is a 132-page landscape format soft cover book that contains over 150 photos concentrating on the west slope of the pass and the snowsheds there. It also includes an atlas of avalanche history at every snowshed. Check them out for further details.

The Great Northern Railway Historical Society Company Store is pleased to offer this HO scale kit of the world-famous Izaak Walton Inn at Essex Montana. This kit was designed using blueprints from the Great Northern Railway Historical Society's archives.  The Izaak Walton Inn at Essex MT, now a recreational hotel, was built by the Addison Miller Company on land leased from the Great Northern Railway to house the three helper crews, up to nine snow fighting crews and three or four Division Officers often assigned to snow fighting duties in the winter. Opened in 1939, it was the last of...

Thanks to John Westley and John Greene we have HO models of Heater Cars 6 and 7 now in the store! Great Northern used heater cars with passenger trains running though the New Cascade Tunnel completed in January of 1929. Trains transiting the 7.79-mile-long tunnel could not use steam power because of toxic gas ventilation problems, and the Z-1 and Y-1 electrics ordered for tunnel service did not have steam generators, so steam for heating and hot water had to be provided by “steam heater cars”. See GNRHS Reference Sheet 358, March, 2010 for more background. Increasing passenger traffic during...