I was hoping someone would come up with another North/South route, one that almost existed.
Before Amtrak, one could still board a UP train in LA and go all the way to Butte.Don't know when GN discontinued service on their Butte line, but a trip to near the Canadian border must have possible at one time. The line I was thinking about would have involved UP's Pioche, and Wells branches. The big gap of course would have been between Pioche and Ely Nevada. Traffic patterns in the US overwhelmingly favor East/West haulage, still it is fun to speculate on what sort of economic/geographical conditions, would have had to have prevailed to have fostered the growth of more western N/S routes. Yeah, I know, nuclear waste!