Bad Rumors
The reason shooting soothsayers of that rustic era were asking “why?” was because the new .280 Remington was wedged between two of the most popular big-game calibers of all time: the .270 Winchester and the .30/06. Did the .280 have something to offer that these immensely popular calibers did not? A comparison of ballistic tables certainly doesn’t indicate that the .280 had any special magic. Its listed velocity for a 150-grain bullet was 2,810 feet per second, a not-exactly-breathtaking 10 fps faster than the .270 with same weight bullet, and a fairly significant 160 fps slower than the .30/06 with 150-grain factory loading.
As it happened, about the time of the .280’s introduction I’d discovered that I could get away with reading gun magazines in my high school classes simply by encasing them in a large notebook and gripping a pencil as if I was diligently taking notes. Thus while Miss Crookshanks waxed romantic about Shelley or Keats, I could immerse myself in the wisdom of an O’Connor or Page. This pursuit made no contribution whatsoever to my grades but it somewhat prepared me for the hardscrabble years that were to follow.
According to what I learned during those classroom studies, the .280 was on the fast road to wherever it is that cartridges go when they die young. In my own innocent judgment it was a wallflower that lacked the glamour of the much-touted .270 or the purposeful dignity of the .30/06, which is to say it never made the Top 20 list of rifles I planned to own when fortune came my way. Similar conclusions were reached by legions of hunters and shooters everywhere. The .280’s prospects were further reduced when word got around that Remington purposely “loaded it down” so the gun could be safely chambered for its recently introduced Model 740 autoloading rifle. This curse dogged the .280 for years and is occasionally repeated even today.
Several years ago I became intrigued by this chapter in the .280’s history and checked out the “loaded down” rumor with a few of the older heads at Remington. As with many rumors from the shooting industry, there’s a grain of truth to this one, but the real facts I gleaned tell us a lot more
Unlike earlier autoloaders such as Remington’s M81, which were limited to mild cartridges such as the .30 and .35 Remington, the M740, which was introduced in 1955, was designed for rip-snorting calibers such as the .30/06. It was a successful rifle and would have been even more so had it been chambered for the .270 Winchester, but it wasn’t. And the word going around at the time was that the M740 couldn’t handle the 270’s pressures. And here’s where the strange saga of the .280 gets particularly interesting.
Not counting some of Remington’s interoffice politics, personal opinions and jealousies regarding the .270 during the 1950s, I learned that the M740 and .270 actually did not make a good match. Not necessarily because of the .270’s high pressures, but because the M740 tended to be finicky about what it was fed, its gas-operated system being reliable only when adjusted to rather specific pressure levels.
The .270 loads of the day, I was told, tended to develop varying pressure levels, which in turn could have resulted in the M740’s erratic operation. Thus the .280 was not so much “loaded down” as loaded to specific pressures compatible with the M740. Apparently, it isn’t often noticed that the M740 was also chambered for Remington’s new .244, a hot round that, like the .270, generated pressures over 50,000 PSI. In 1960, when the M742 replaced the M740, it too was catalogued sans the .270.

Name Changes
This sudden glamorization of the .280 was not lost on the potentates at Remington, who now realized there was life for the caliber well beyond the limitations imposed by autoloading rifles. Something that would give the .280 a new lease on life, they reckoned, was to glamorize it with a new name. Just calling it the .280 sounded so, well, ordinary. After all, it was a 7mm, so why not give it some continental pizzazz by calling it the 7mm/06? This made pretty good merchandising sense because Remington had already done well for itself by adapting two popular wildcats: the .22-250 and .22/05. So why not a 7mm/06? It was also a legitimate claim because wildcatters had, in fact, been necking .30/06 cases down to 7mm for decades.
Accordingly, there was a run of M700 rifles and ammo marked 7mm/06. Problem was, the .280 wasn’t a true 7mm/06. During its development the shoulder length had been increased by about five hundredths of an inch as a safety measure so it couldn’t be fired in .270-caliber rifles. But now, if an unsuspecting handloader fired necked-down ’06 cases in Remington’s rifle, there’d be a potentially dangerous headspace situation. So the 7mm/06 name was quickly discontinued and the rifles and ammo were recalled. Some rounds are still in circulation, however—and are considered genuine collector’s items.
Still determined that the .280 needed a more glamorous name, Remington rechristened it the 7mm Express. This has a pretty nice ring to it, but again there were unintended consequences. The 7mm Express tended to get confused with Remington’s 7mm Magnum, another potentially dangerous situation. So the folks at Remington gave up on the name change and the .280 has been that ever since.