Editing Northern Pacific Railway (section)

===Direct to the Puget Sound===
[[File:Northern Pacific Railroad switchbacks near the summit of the Cascades, 1887 (TRANSPORT 177).jpg|left|thumb|Early Northern Pacific switchbacks on [[Stampede Pass]]. (1887)]]
[[File:Locomotive at tunnel near Stampede Pass, ca 1888 (MOHAI 6383).jpg|thumb|A Northern Pacific [[4-4-0]] on [[Stampede Pass]]. (1888) ]]
Villard's fall was swifter than his ascendancy. Like Jay Cooke, he was now consumed by the enormous costs of constructing the railroad. Wall Street bears attacked the stock shortly after the Golden Spike, after the realization that the Northern Pacific was a very long road with very little business. Villard himself suffered a nervous breakdown in the days after the driving of the Golden Spike, and he left the presidency of the Northern Pacific in January 1884.

Again, the presidency of the Northern Pacific was handed to a professional railroader, [[Robert Harris (NP)|Robert Harris]], former head of the [[Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad]]. For the next four years, until the return of the Villard group, Harris worked at improving the property and ending its tangled relationship with the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company.

Throughout the mid-1880s, the Northern Pacific pushed to reach Puget Sound directly, rather than by means of a roundabout route that followed the Columbia River. Surveys of the [[Cascade Mountains]], carried out intermittently since the 1870s, began anew. [[Virgil Bogue]], a veteran [[civil engineer]], was sent to explore the Cascades again. On March 19, 1881, he discovered [[Stampede Pass]]. In 1883, [[John W. Sprague]], the head of the new Pacific Division, drove the Golden Spike to mark the beginning of the railroad from what would become [[Kalama, Washington]]. He resigned months later due to impaired health.

In 1884, after the departure of Villard, the Northern Pacific began building toward Stampede Pass from Wallula in the east and the area of Wilkeson in the west. By the end of the year, rails had reached [[Yakima, Washington]] in the east. A {{convert|77|mi|adj=on}} gap remained in 1886.

In January of that year, Nelson Bennett was given a contract to construct a {{convert|9850|ft|mi km|adj=on|sigfig=2}} [[Stampede Tunnel|tunnel under Stampede Pass]]. The contract specified a short amount of time for completion, and a large penalty if the deadline were missed. While crews worked on the tunnel, the railroad built a temporary [[Zig Zag (railway)|switchback]] route across the pass. With numerous timber trestles and grades which approached six&nbsp;percent, the temporary line required two [[Northern Pacific Railway M class|M class]] [[2-10-0]]s—the two largest locomotives in the world (at that time)—to handle a tiny five-car train. On May 3, 1888, crews [[Tunnel hole-through|holed through]] the tunnel, and on May 27 the first train passed through directly to Puget Sound.