If You Knew the State of the Art


Loweth, Montana lies some 1380.9 miles from Chicago at the crest of the Belt Mountains.  In some sense, it's just a place on a map with an old two-lane blacktop running through it.  But Loweth was was state of the art.

"From Harlowton to Avery three mountain ranges of the continental divide are crossed, with summit elevations of 5788, 6322 and 4150 ft.  Heavy grades and a large proportion of curvature are encountered, the maximum grade being 2 percent for 21 miles..."   [1]

It has been suggested, by the author if no one else, that the people who settled the Milwaukee's West were tough and dedicated in ways not often encountered today.  The weather was extreme with brutal colds and summer heat.  Some spots were arid country, existing in rain shadows of the mountain ranges that the Milwaukee crossed.  Yet people settled and lived in these harsh and beautiful places.  And it was to these places that the Milwaukee went as well.  Loweth exists as a reminder of the technology that it brought to these lands, and a memorial to those who built, worked, and lived here at the crest of the Belt Mountains.

On this summer day, it is the sounds of cattle slowly wandering nearby that break the gentle stillness of summer winds and rustling grasses.  But decades ago, the substation was operated by a family of employees who lived just next door.  Beneath today's hooves, the foundations of the operator bungalows rises just above the grasses and shrubs.  People lived and worked here as trains lugged by on the mainline - working hard in both directions.  This was home, even in the midst of the snowy and brutal cold, the occasional Chinook winds, the spring rains or summer droughts.  


Under their care was a centerpiece of the Milwaukee's Lines West.  Substations converted the AC power to 3000V DC (later 3500) to feed the electrics that prowled the grade.  The electrification was prominent in advertising and represented the "best" of the day.  The proof is in the fruit of the effort:  electrification across the Belt Mountains remained in operation from 1916 to 1974.  It was so good that it displaced and outlasted the steam locomotives (yielding impressive reliability improvement at the same time [1]) and then soldiered on through the first and second generations of the diesel locomotives that replaced them.  

The system was built to last; it was tough like the people that settled here to work these lands and this railroad.  Even while the cattle graze nearby, the insulators atop the old substation still thrust clean and straight into the blue skies above.  This was a way of life, and this was state of the art.


1) "Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway Electrification" Engineering News-Record, 1920, 85, No 23.  

Comments

oamundsen@aol.com said…
Very, very nice Leland! "Place" and what once was is hard to reconcile with what now is...has always been an attraction and a mystery to me. Your photos are alive with the very atmosphere of these sites, some fine day I must see for myself. Thanks.
2/13/2014 01:24:00 PM
SDP45 said…
I had someone ask me about Roxboro, WA the other day. I really wanted to tell them it was where a substation was planned on being built, had the gap been electrified. They would not have understood. People today just don't care much about history.

Dan
2/18/2014 07:17:00 PM
Pat, Marcus & Alexis said…
This is a great photo!

1/11/2015 07:34:00 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Buried

Image
 Location:  Near Bear Mouth, MT 1603 miles west of Chicago The daylight is fading away in the photo above - in the space that has been cut by the Clark Fork River.  Here one finds the Milwaukee heading to Bearmouth, MT, making its way steadily west.  Still marking the path is the former NP (Montana Rail Link at the time this photo was taken) and not far away, empty tunnels that lie in unchanging darkness.  The searchlight signal of the old NP shows a high green along the steel rails still present, a lonely sentinel in a sad and lonely place. The signatures of Milwaukee were fading even during the time of this photo, now itself 20 years old.  The gravel road preserves what was the right-of-way but telegraphy and other markers were quickly falling even then.   Traveling along I90 is now a trip through forgotten history and gravesites.  Where bridges once crossed the old transcontinental, fill has taken their place.  No more insulator panels that guard the roads above from the electrical
Read more

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

Summer Skies and Fading Paint

Image
On the way out of Deer Lodge, the Milwaukee Road rolled west by a fuel rack and two depots that bounded it north and south.  To the south of the rails was the freight depot, shown above and below.  Note the telegraphy pole that rises through the roof at the west end.  One can scroll back through the decades online and find it, always present, rising right through the eve of the old freight house.   Those decades weren't kind to the old house either.  The white paint has washed and faded away, the wooden shingles are increasingly missing.  When these pictures were taken in the early 2000s, the end was very near.  To the north of the former main, the passenger depot has taken on a new life as a church, but no such rebirth has come to the old freight house.  Under the hot Montana sun, the remaining paint continues to fade away and soon the house, the loading dock, and the telegraphy pole that always seemed to rise through the roof will vanish from under these blue skies. To the north
Read more