Lost Rail

The big black trestle, the one that spans I90 just east of Kititas and Ellensburg. Or the one that sits close to the top of Ryegrass summit on the way up from the I90 crossing of the Columbia River at Vantage. It has a name you know. Its name is Renslow. If you take a few minutes and get off the interstate you can drive up the old two-lane highway that parallels the interstate through this part of Washington and go visit the old girl. I think the old two-lane might be a remnant of US 10, but I'm not sure. Renslow trestle still sits just where she has for a long long time, back all the way to when The Milwaukee draped electrical wire along its Rocky Mountain and Cascade crossings and proclaimed itself as being "Electrified to the Coast." A ticket purchased in Seattle would loft eastbound travelers up and over the Cascades, out into the Kititas valley, and over Renslow Trestle on their way to the Rockies and the plains that lay beyond them. Today she remains as more of...

The first day I visited Pullman, WA in late January of 2002, I found Rosalia half way between Spokane and Pullman on US-195. Laid out across the small valley were the concrete arch bridges that carried the Milwaukee's Western Extension not just over the small creek and Steptoe Battlefield, but over the old Great Northern (Spokane and Inland Empire) and Northern Pacific as well. The Extension was constructed in record time with a record price tag and the bridges at Rosalia still reflect that high degree of engineering and building. With its conquest of The Bitterroot Mountains behind it, The Milwaukee set out across the rolling landscape of Palouse country, through small towns like Tekoa where the skyline is still dominated by an enormous black trestle spanning the valley there, beyond Pandora, where views of Steptoe Butte can be seen around the high hills of grain country. Through Rosalia and Malden, Pine City, Rock Lake, and out into the Washington Scab Lands. In central Was...

In the waning hours of a hot July day, I parked the truck next to I90 on a small fisherman's access to the Clark Fork River. Drexel, was the name listed on the exit sign and after quieting the large Suburban and letting it rest in the shade, I wandered down the short distance to the bank of the River. I had arrived at my destination, but saw nothing except forrest and some power lines that were still strung through the area, paralleling I90 just a short distance away. 25 years ago, on the other side of the small river America's final transcontinental railroad packed up its bags and went back to the Midwest, where it had come from 70 years before. It had left behind it a thousand miles of towns, people, and history that now appeared to be overgrown in the Montana woods that surrounded me. I could feel the history as the sounds of the rushing water filled the air and I knelt down and prayed. I thanked God for bringing me to this place, seeing me through nights with little sleep, ...

One of the most profitable portions of the entire Lines West was the line into central and north-central Montana. Departing the east-west mainline at Harlowton and heading north, The Milwaukee found itself in the heart of Montana's grain country where it met the Great Northern which had already staked a claim years before. Building from Lewistown west over giant trestles that span Spring Creek and Judith Gap even to this day, The Milwaukee set out across the plains toward Great Falls. Although these lines were feeders to the main at Harlowton, the original vision was one of a second mainline running east-west across Montana north of the original. Large stations were built along the line at Lewistown and Great Falls in anticipation of a traffic boost that never came and the lines were left with only their north-south connection to Harlo. Today the connection to Harlo is lost and the second main line (seen above as it rolls lazily through Denton, MT) is gone west of Geraldine where ...

Chicago's Union Station is a busy place, especially around the holidays. Passenger trains from the local regions intermix with the last long-distance trains that come from such far away places as L.A. or Washington D.C. People on their way to visit family for Thanksgiving or Christmas still bustle through the giant Great Hall, where the granite and tall columns can still impress even in this age of micro technology. Passenger trains still deapart Chicago and head north on The Milwaukee's old mainline to Milwaukee, WI; a line that still sees a lot of freight traffic and quite a few passenger trains too, some still called Hiawathas. Chicago's Union Station was labeled as MP 0.0 for The Milwaukee's line to the West Coast. The miles kept adding all the way to 2192.7, the location of Tacoma, WA. Beyond the Dakotas, through the Montana plains, high atop the Rocky Mountains, over the incredible St. Paul Pass, out across the Washington Palouse country and high desert, over the ...

Is it possible that things can be put on your heart on purpose? That there is some reason we love the things we do, or feel compelled to search out and seek the unknown? As a young kid, my family lived in Vancouver, BC and we'd drive across Washington to visit relatives in Sand Point once a year or so. I have vivid memories of staring out the window of our old Suburban at the tall curved trestles on the west side of Snoqualmie and then straining for a view of anything on the east side of the pass. I always suspected, but as a five or six year old never knew, that the huge trestle over the interstate east of Ellensburg was the same railroad and somehow I seemed to know it wasn't used anymore. It seemed so huge, so towering, and even in the mid-eighties, somehow sad. It wasn't until years later that I would come into contact with the story of The Milwaukee Road. America's final transcontinental, and the first and only to be wiped off the face of the west. After moving to ...

On The Milwaukee Road, east of electrification lay the flat plains of Montana and the Dakotas. In 1980 near a small town in eastern Montana scrappers began their work to undo what had been done 70 years before. The passenger trains had been gone since 1967 and had not traveled to the Pacific Coast since 1961. Freight trains with fast schedules had continually evaporated since 1974 and the reliable power that headed them had been shepherded off to other parts of the troubled empire as the seventies closed. To look at photos of SD40-2s leading trains across the Montana plains in the last couple years of service is shocking: the track looks as rough as on some little used branch line. The line had come full circle: expensive and well-engineered to begin with and derelict and accident prone at its death. In eastern Montana, near the town of Terry, today's saga begins. This is where the Western Extension's removal starts and goes all the way to Tacoma. The original milepost still ma...