State of the Art

Milwaukee Road Substation Number 2. Location: Loweth, Montana.


If you were to travel west along the Rocky Mountain Division from Harlowton it wouldn't take too long to find Substation 2. Beyond the abandoned depot at Martinsdale, through the small town of Lennip, and up a winding grade to the crest of the Big Belt Mountains lies Loweth and Substation 2. Next to the substation lie the foundations for the operator houses built for the people who lived and worked in the shadows of the lage brick building, but today the residents are cattle and a few trees that have grown up inside the old concrete foundations. Still, the substation itself is an imposing figure as it sits solemnly at the crest of the grade, still tall, still square, still proud even in its silence. The name above the window is hardly readable, and the windows have been shredded by vandals and time but it doesn't take much to let the mind drift back to a different year, when the old Substation was state of the art.

Seeking a solution to slow transit times and mountain ranges that were unexpectedly costly to pull freight over, The Milwaukee turned to electrification in the late teens on a scale that had not been seen on any western railroad past or present. Over 450 miles were electrified through Montana and Idaho, another 200 across the Saddle and Cascade ranges in Washington. It was truly state of the art and, depending on who you ask, either bankrupted the company which would never fully recover, or saved it from extinction as long as it could. The electrification itself was promoted in ads that extolled the benefits of fast and smooth electric engines and luxurious travel unlike any other transcontinental railroad could offer.

Too many, it must have seemed that electrification was The Milwaukee Road. The huge four or five unit electrics, the long freights, the elegant and powerful Little Joes, the miles and miles of wooden catenary poles that looked like an interurban line, and at the heart, the people and the large brick substations that converted AC power to DC and fueled the electrics that roamed the rails. The Milwaukee was "America's Resourceful Railroad" and it proclaimed it on the sides of all of those bright yellow grain hoppers it purchased in the early 70s.

But what started with a bang and title "State of the Art" ended quietly when the last boxcab electric lowered its pantograph in Harlowton, MT in 1974. The broken windows of Substation 2 are quiet reminders of the price of progress. Slowly nature is taking The Milwaukee's Lines West back, but in some places, the heart of the old line still stands in tribute and defiance of what seems inevitable.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Place Where She Only Sleeps

Image
 Location: MP 1566.8 Grant-Kohrs Ranch Not far from Deer Lodge, headed west on the transcon we arrive here, at Grant-Kohrs Ranch where the Resourceful Railroad only sleeps.  Instead of empty right of way and scattered gravel, steel rail still binds the land in this place that is unlike the many other hundreds of miles along Lines West.  Across the Grant-Kohrs Ranch, on federal Park lands, the railroad only seems to rest and slumber while waiting for a new time to come.  Against the backdrop of Montana clouds that hold no rain, the catenary poles can still be found here standing against the endless skies.  The lineside poles that mark an era of railroading now gone still hold to the right of way.  It is not hard to imagine them whipping by outside the windows of an Olympian under the electrified power of a Quill or Joe.  Perhaps an XL Special could easily whisk across the scene above as though decades had never passed. Things don't seem so forgotten or beyond hope in a place like th
Read more

Rock-a-bye bye bye?

Image
There are footnotes to history and there are chapters. Dependent on your perspective, sometimes those footnotes deserve a book unto themselves. As the economy sagged in the seventies, railroads were hit hard. The East saw a general collapse in the form of Penn Central. As the seventies wore on, the PC would be combined with several other bankrupt roads to form Conrail, a government backed corporation who's sole goal was to save rail transportation in the eastern half of the country. Collapse worked its way through the western lines during these years as well. The Milwaukee Road pulled out of the West just over 30 years ago at the beginning of March. Bankrupt and reeling, its retreat to the Midwest would last only a few more years until its absorption by Soo Line. Its competitors in the West and Northwest managed to hang on, but healthy balance sheets were not to be found in the board rooms of the Cascade Green lines in those years. The Rock Island had a long flirtation with
Read more

Hidden in the Trees

Image
 MP1613.1, Ravenna, MT.  Substation 9  I once met the man who owned the old Substation at Ravenna.  In one of those strange twists of history, so I'm told, it was supposed to be torn down and sold for scrap as the bricks had value.  But the original sale didn't work, the scrapper never came and it remains standing near the howling roar of I90 to this day. I90 is just one part of  the U.S. system that moves upwards of 90% of freight by truck and highway.  But tucked in amongst the tall pines like a mirage, Ravenna looks out blankly towards that interstate and shouts quietly back about a different time. The year was 1972 and General Electric had put together a unique proposal: completion of the electrified railway portion of the Milwaukee Road.  In a formal proposal, offered by GE itself ("Proposal for the Completion of the Electrified Railway Operation of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad Company") via the Locomotive Products Department, the proposa
Read more