Why was Rock Island called a granger road, but Santa Fe wasn't? - Trains Magazine

Murphy Siding

    I could be way off on this, but it seems like the railroads generally called granger roads were Milwaukee Road, CRIP, CNW and IC(?)  Wouldn't a lot of others, like UP, NP, MKT, SSW, KATY, MP<, etc...seem to fit a similar description?  What exactly was a granger road?

Why wasn't Santa Fe a granger?  'Cause it ran from Chicago clear to (and directly) Los Angeles and (indirectly to) the Bay Area.  This "all-the-way" attribute of its route system made it THE pre-eminent transcon* of its day.

Other roads cited by Murphy Siding:

-- UP and NP (and GN, not mentioned) were transcons, not grangers.  Carried some grain, to be sure, but they were in it "for the long haul."  (I know--bad pun). 

UP was the perfect gatherer of overhead traffic from Chicago to Southern California (via its won rails), the Bay Area (via a friendly Ogden-SP connection), and the Pacific Northwest (own rails, again). 

GN and NP competed against each other and UP and (sort of) MILW (see below for added detail) for transcon traffic moving via Chicago and Kanas City to the Pacific Northwest.  Together, they originated more farm products than UP, but it was their transcon traffic that kept them solvent.

--  SSW served as an extension of parent (98 percent owned) SP, itself a transcon, not hardly a granger.

--  MoP derived much of its revenue from its extensive Gulf Coast chemical traffic.  Hardly farm product-dependent.  Call  it maybe one-third granger -- which may be generous.  Which makes it barely a granger at all.  Ditto, the IC, which served heavy industrial customers in Chicagoland and the "Southern Ruhr," between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

--Katy and MKT are one and the same. it was (or they were) certainly granger(s).

--CNW, CRIP and MILW most certainly were grangers.  In every sense of the word.  MILW boasted a line from Chicago all the way to the Pacific Northwest, but transcon traffic density over its line was so low that it scarcely deserved to be called a full-blown transcon, but more a granger with a branch extending out to the Coast.

-- CB&Q was, on paper, a granger.  HOWEVER, it was controlled equally by GN and NP, which were transcons, which made it more like SSW, an eastern extension of its owner Transcons.

Food for thought from a bumpkin from Virginia... 

Couple of notes:

*  Realized this explanation makes no sense unles I define "Transcon."  As used here, transcon refers to a system the line ois which connect a major Midwestern gateway**  with a port city or terminal on the West Coast.

**  OK smart guy, tell us what a gateway is.  More than a mere interchange, a gateway is an interchange between carriers from two different rate territories such as Official and Western Trunk Line.  Chicago, Minneapolis-St Paul, Council Bluffs, St. Louis, Kansas City, Memphis and New Orleans are gateways.  The one-time Oakes ND interchange between CNW and NP is not.  Hopefully, ths convoluted explanation will make the foregoing assertions clearer.