25-06 Remington

A top varmint cartridge turns 50

- Jim Matthews

The .25-06 Remington turns 50 years old this year. Introduced by Remington in 1969, the .25-06 was kicking around as a wildcat cartridge known as the .25 Niedner since the 1920s before Remington standardized the cartridge.

The .25-06 was wildly overbore with the powders available in that era, but Adolph Otto Niedner started chambering the round in 1920 in his rifles, even though it could only achieve about 100 fps more velocity than the .250 Savage. When I was a kid, there were still a lot of old-timers around who called the .25-06 the .25 Niedner. The popularity of the round as a wildcat really didn’t start to take off until the introduction of IMR-4350 powder in 1940. Prior to the introduction of that slower-burning powder, the .25-06 had a middling reputation because it didn’t do much more than the .250 or the far more popular .257 Roberts wildcat round. That was evident even to Remington, which made the .257 Roberts a factory round in 1934 – 35 years before it started chambering the .25-06.

After World War II, and once shooters started using slower powders in the .25-06, its popularity steadily blossomed. Remington became the first company to legitimize a .25-caliber wildcat round based on the full-length .30-06 case, and the .25-06 became instantly popular and remains an enormously popular factory chambering today.

Most current rifles in this chambering are sporter-weight guns intended to serve for both big-game hunting and the occasional poke at varmints. However, there has always been a dedicated crowd of varmint hunters who recognized that the .25-06 sat at – or at least very near – the top of the hill when it came to long-range shooting.