Ralph Budd - Early Life

Early Life

One of six children of John and Mary Budd, Ralph was born on a farm near Waterloo, Iowa on August 20, 1879. After graduating at nineteen from Des Moines’ Highland Park College, he began railway service as a draftsman in the Chicago Great Western’s divisional engineering office.

In 1902 Budd joined the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad for the construction of its St. Louis-Kansas City line. It was on the Rock that Budd met one of the deans of American railroad civil engineering, John Frank Stevens. Stevens' was already well known for his location of the Great Northern Railway's line across Montana's Marias Pass, and would soon go on to plan the Panama Canal at the behest of Theodore Roosevelt. Budd followed Stevens to Panama, working on the engineering of the Panama Railway.

He followed Stevens again in 1910, this time to Oregon. There, Stevens was working for his old Great Northern boss, James J. Hill, on constructing the Oregon Trunk from the Pacific Northwest into northern California. This route, composed of the Spokane, Portland and Seattle, the Oregon Trunk Railway, the Western Pacific Railroad, and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, was finally pieced together in the 1930s. It gave the Hill Lines a route into the heart of California and became known as the "Inside Gateway." His work with Stevens brought Budd to the attention of Hill, who left confidential instructions that after his death, Budd should be appointed president of the Great Northern.