BNSF’s Marias Pass: A Railroad Superhighway

SHELBY, MONTANA -- June 2018 The northernmost railroad crossing of the continental divide in the United States, Marias Pass was completed by the Great Northern in the 1890s, and has served ever since as a busy corridor for both freight and passengers - with the lauded Empire Builder still passing through each day under the Amtrak banner. Under BNSF, traffic on the line has only grown, with huge volumes of intermodal and bulk commodities such as grain mixing in with the manifest freights, sometimes pushing fluidity to the limit.