Lost Rail

Before taking leave from the Midwest and pursuing the abandoned transcon of the Milwaukee Road, I knew the Santa Fe's own road west quiet well.  Well, to be completely accurate, I knew the BNSF Transcon through Illinois quite well.  A decade ago there were still quiet a few traces of ATSF to be found, however.  Warbonnets were found with some regularity, some even "unpatched" and wearing their original Santa Fe numbers and heralds. Edelstein Hill was a favorite spot of mine to watch trains roll out on the high iron.  This grade up out of the Illinois River Valley was harsh, and steepest on the line anywhere east of the western mountains.  The surrounding Midwestern landscape was typical but beautiful.  Fields of corn in the summer gave way to winter browns and then white winter snows as temperatures plummeted.  These pictures are just a few taken one winter afternoon during an Illinois snowfall.  One of the most striking things about fresh s...

Many, many miles ago, it was a dry and hot summer in the Eastern Montana Badlands.  The land was baked in the heat of the arid day.  I had come this way to see what was left and to track the remains westbound across the state, following the old Milwaukee Road along the course laid out many years before.  It was a day about as far removed from December as possible, and yet, a day that was inexorably linked nonetheless.    December 6, 1960 saw the Milwaukee Road file an ICC "train off" petition for it's famed Olympian Hiawatha.  There would be no more Super Domes to the Emerald City, and the remnants of the service would be cut back to Deer Lodge before a complete annulment.  There would be no more scheduled passenger service over some of the best engineered railroad on the continent, maybe the world.  The rising Saddle Mountains from the Columbia River basin, the Cascades, the Bitterroots, all would be left to the haunts of freight trai...