by Andrew Cox/photos by the author
Seattle’s waterfront dates to the late 1880s, when the city was just a small lumber and mineral town on the shores of Puget Sound. In the early years, Seattle grew slowly with few settlers reaching the unknown waterfront town, tucked away in a remote corner of Washington Territory. Logging camps in the western Cascades used the Duwamish River, Mount Rainier’s western drainage, to shuttle timber to a developing waterfront market. In 1897, however, the Klondike Gold Rush in Alaska and Canada’s Yukon Region completely changed the trajectory of Seattle’s development. Similar to the effect that the California Gold Rush had on the rise of San Francisco and Sacramento, Seattle’s waterfront exploded into a metropolis that served as a jumping-off point for prospectors hoping to strike it rich on the frontier. Suddenly, a prosperous city resided on the tide flats of Elliott Bay where the Duwamish River flowed into Puget Sound, and with it came the railroads.
The turn of the century could not have been any better for railroads that began gobbling up access to the waterfront. By 1911, Seattle hosted two downtown depots serving four transcontinental railroads. Northern Pacific and Great Northern shared a depot on King Street while The Milwaukee Road and Union Pacific built an ornate station just a block east. All four had dedicated trackage, with NP dominating the waterfront. Just a few blocks west of the two downtown depots, and down a very steep grade, NP and GN jockeyed for trackage along Seattle’s Railroad Avenue district, serving several docks and wharfs. Northern Pacific built a yard and port access on marshlands south of downtown, now known as SODO (SOuth of DOwntown). Just north of downtown, GN built a large yard and roundhouse between Magnolia and Queen Anne neighborhoods, calling it Interbay Yard. Union Pacific set up shop a few miles south of downtown at Argo Yard which has remained under UP control to this day.
ABOVE: Harbor Island offers an unusual opportunity to see BNSF and Union Pacific working side by side. Take this cold morning of February 5, 2024, for example, as BNSF spots loads at Shell Oil while UP shoves reefers for PCC Logistics and custom loads for the Alaska barge. The cement hoppers are just along for the ride, as they’ll be switched at Ash Grove Cement just off the island.
The growth of Seattle’s waterfront coincided with the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, causing several West Coast ports to modernize and expand their ability to handle anticipated surges in marine traffic on a global scale. The two world wars further spurred growth in Puget Sound with the addition of shipyards and steel mills, all served by the railroads. During summer 1964, GN would contract with Alaska Railroad out of Whittier, Alaska, to provide the nation’s first permanent rail-barge interchange between Alaska and the lower 48. To this day, Alaska Railroad operates weekly barge service to Seattle, making it the longest rail/barge transfer in the U.S.
By 1970, the great consolidation of America’s railroads was in full swing. In Seattle, GN and NP — along with Chicago, Burlington & Quincy and Spokane, Portland & Seattle — had merged to form Burlington Northern. The Milwaukee Road was on its way out, and had shifted its traffic to Tacoma; it would abandon its western route altogether in 1980. Three miles south of downtown, Union Pacific was still working its own trackage at Argo Yard, a small blip in the far northwest reaches of UP’s western division. The Emerald City, which had once hosted four of the nation’s premier railroads, was now blanketed in a sea of Cascade Green and just a touch of Armour Yellow.
ABOVE: The afternoon barge job has just started work on Harbor Island, delicately shoving its first cut of cars onto the barge under cloudy skies on November 1, 2023. The unique vantage point is thanks to a pedestrian overpass connecting Vigor Shipyards to its employee parking lot.
In the 21st century, BNSF has emerged as the primary operator in the Pacific Northwest. Seattle continues to host a thriving network of international trade, making it the ninth-largest port in the world. In 2022, the port of Seattle handled 3.4 million “TEUs” (20-foot container equivalent unit), 20 percent of which moved by rail. Seattle’s geographic positioning on the globe provides the shortest distance from seaports in Asia to the continental U.S. It is also the shortest distance between a West Coast port and Chicago, where both domestic traffic and marine traffic splinter off to markets farther east. It’s not just container traffic that keeps the Seattle waterfront humming; Seattle ports moved 3.5 million metric tons of agricultural products for export in 2023, consisting mostly of grain and soybeans, much of which was brought to Seattle on unit trains.
Harbor Island
In 1907, Puget Sound Bridge & Dredging Company embarked on a world-record-setting project in the southwest corner of Elliott Bay and metropolitan Seattle. Over the course of two years, the dredging company would forever change the geography of Seattle’s waterfront by splitting the Duwamish River into separate eastern and western waterways. Twenty-four million cubic yards of dirt from regrading projects in the city and dredged material from Seattle’s tide flats would create Harbor Island, at the time the world’s largest man-made island.
ABOVE: A mild winter’s sunrise casts long shadows across Harbor Island and BNSF organizing a cut of freshly delivered barge cars on January 15, 2025. Next, the railroad will deliver a fresh cut of loaded petroleum tanks to both Shell and ARCO tank farms seen in the distance on both sides of the yard.
Early industrial and commercial use of the island consisted of fish processing facilities, shipyards, and industries such as flour mills, grain elevators, lumber yards, and cold storage, primarily located on the island’s eastern shore. Commercial and industrial development continued after the 1940s, including oil terminals, shipyards, rail transfer terminals, and sand and gravel transfer stations. The first industry to occupy the island was Fisher Flouring Mills, which began milling grain in 1911. Served by NP, the towering grain silos of Fisher defined the western half of Harbor Island’s skyline. At the time, it was the largest grain mill in the western U.S., and was known locally for its scones and quality malt for scotch. The mill even had ties to famous Northwest bootlegger Roy Olmstead, who supposedly used Fisher’s milled grain to produce his infamous hooch.
Today, Harbor Island trackage is served by both Union Pacific and BNSF. The busiest location on the island is the 196-acre Terminal 18 that runs almost the entire length of Harbor Island’s east side and is jointly operated by both railroads. The 420-acre island is home to about 50 active businesses, six of which are served by rail. Two petroleum tank farms, Ray-Mont Logistics, Westway Feed Products, and Pacific Coast Container (PCC) complete the industrial leads. The large and very active Vigor Shipyard on the northwest corner of Harbor Island sadly no longer takes rail service at any of its leads. However, it does provide services for Washington state’s world-class fleet of passenger and car ferries…