Black and Whispery

In my mind, I can see them: the pictures taken so many years ago of snow-blown dead freights struggling across the Central Washington desert. Some with lashups of tired old GP-30s and U-boats. Others stopped short of their goal when crews ran out of hours to be operating the train. The cold wind seems to blow right out of the pictures along with the icy needles of the driving snows.

Here at Taunton, you can find old pictures of trains sitting and waiting for a relief crew to arrive and ferry them to Othello. Sometimes they'd sit for a long, long time. These photos come from the Milwaukee's final winter in the west. It has been rumored that the winter of 1979-80 was a harsh one. The Railroad had been in bankruptcy since late 1977 and the gradual slippage of its condition throughout the early seventies had worsened considerably. Perhaps that winter felt all the more cold and heartless because of the railroad that ran through it and the sad and dilapidated state it found itself in. Somehow, operating with junk, the people made the line run until the early spring of 1980 but then it was over for good.

A few decades later, there's a lot that looks the same around Taunton. The rails are still here amongst the weeds and the old substation still stands as one of the few that remain. The skyline hasn't changed - the dry Saddle Mountains still dominate the horizon line. And while it seems that not much has changed, in some sense, everything has changed. The quietness of the line can attest to that as can the ominous clouds that have rolled off the Cascade range in the skies above. The clouds are black and whispery, just like the scene they overlook below.

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

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

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