The Empire Builders
A Sponsored Western Built Around a Railroad
Radio Rides the Range: A Reference Guide to Western Drama on the Air described The Empire Builders as possibly "the first western drama on radio" and "certainly one of the most unique." That's a claim not many old-time radio shows can make. It ran on NBC-Blue from January 14, 1929, to June 22, 1931, fully sponsored by the Great Northern Railway — one of the most literal cases of a show and its sponsor being the same thing. The title came straight from the railway's premier passenger train, the Empire Builder, which was itself named after Great Northern founder James J. Hill, widely known as the "Empire Builder of the Northwest."
The show was a railroad Western in the truest sense. Stories were set against the backdrop of travel along the Great Northern's routes, covering the states the railway actually served — California, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington — and ranging in era from the mid-1700s to the 1930s. A narrator figure called the Old Timer, played by Harvey Hayes, introduced each episode with characteristic chuckles and folksy language. Episodes mixed romance and music with frontier adventure, drawing on both real historical figures and fictional characters. This was railroad-country storytelling: American pioneer narratives, Pacific Northwest history, the kind of material the Great Northern's passengers might have recognized from the landscape rolling past their windows.
Three Seasons on the Air
The show ran for three seasons — January to June 1929, September 1929 to June 1930, and September 1930 to June 1931 — approximately 103 Monday evening broadcasts in total. Production started at NBC's New York studios, then moved west in the fall of 1930 to the new NBC facilities at Chicago's Merchandise Mart, the largest building in the world when it opened. The first Chicago broadcast aired September 29, 1930, with an episode titled "The Phantom Trail."
The cast that assembled in Chicago included Don Ameche, Bernardine Flynn, Lucille Husting, and Bob and Betty White — the latter being Betty Reynolds White (no relation to the later television actress), who was 26 when she joined the show, taking the role of Martha Blaine in "The Phantom Trail." The final Chicago season effectively launched the entertainment careers of both Ameche and Flynn, who went on to considerably more prominent radio and film work in the years ahead.
Wyllis Cooper's First Major Assignment
The scripts were written by Wyllis Cooper — born Willis Oswald Cooper on January 26, 1899 — who was working as an advertising copywriter in Chicago in the late 1920s when he took on the show. It was his first major radio assignment. Cooper later became well known as the creator of the horror anthology Lights Out (1934–1947) and Quiet, Please (1947–1949), and his work on Empire Builders was an early step in what became a pioneering radio drama career. The connection between a railroad Western and the man who would later define radio horror might seem unlikely, but Cooper's early work here shows he was already thinking seriously about what the medium could do.
The Armistice Day Broadcast
The one episode held in the catalog is titled "Armistice Day Reunion," and it aired November 10, 1930 — the evening before Armistice Day itself. It's worth distinguishing from an earlier, unrecorded broadcast: a 1929 episode by Cooper titled "Armistice Day — a story of Over There" aired November 11, 1929, and no recording of that one survives. They are two separate productions.
The 1930 "Armistice Day Reunion" was a notably elaborate production. NBC policy at the time forbade the use of recorded sound of any kind during broadcasts, which meant every sound effect had to be performed live. For this episode, the production team mounted two machine guns on the roof of the Merchandise Mart and fired blank cartridges during the broadcast. Special sound effects equipment for this single episode cost nearly a thousand dollars. The Great Northern Railway also supplied actual locomotive bells and steam whistles for use across the series, all performed live per NBC's requirements.
Why It Ended
The series ended on June 22, 1931, and the reason was straightforward: the Great Depression made the expense of a high-class weekly network program impossible to justify. A fall 1930 conference of western railroad representatives had already reached a collective agreement that none of them would take on expensive radio advertising sponsorships — though an allowance was made for the Great Northern's existing NBC contract, letting the show run through its final season to June 1931. When that contract expired, the show ended.
Of the roughly 103 broadcasts the series produced, only a small number of recordings survive. The OTR Catalog lists seven known recordings in existence.