The Grade That Goes Nowhere

By Editor

Western Montana, 1980-Present

I walked a section of the old Milwaukee Road right-of-way last autumn, in the country west of Missoula where the Clark Fork River bends south toward the Idaho line. The grade was still there, cut into the hillside at a precise 1.7 percent, as level and purposeful as the day the surveyors laid it out in 1906. The rails were gone. The ties were gone. The overhead wire and the gallows frames that held it were gone from this section, though they still stand in places closer to the tunnel. What remained was the grade itself, a shelf of disturbed earth running through the larch and ponderosa, going somewhere that no train has gone since 1980.

What does it mean to build a thing and then abandon it?

The Milwaukee Road spent seventy years and an incalculable sum of money building its Pacific Extension through Montana and Idaho and Washington, and then it abandoned the western portion in 1980 because the freight revenue could not service the debt, and the debt could not be reduced, and the company that had built the last transcontinental railroad in the United States filed for bankruptcy and sold what it could and walked away from the rest. The rails were pulled up and sold for scrap. The stations were demolished or left to weather. The towns that had grown up along the right-of-way, the division points and water stops and section houses, lost their reason for existing and shrank or disappeared.

I have read that the Milwaukee Road was a financial mistake from the beginning, that the Pacific Extension was built through country that could not generate sufficient traffic, that the electrification was an expensive solution to a problem that could have been solved more cheaply. These judgments may be correct. They are the judgments of men who measure things in freight ton-miles and return on capital, and by those measures the Milwaukee Road was indeed a failure. But the grade through the larch forest does not feel like a failure. It feels like a road that someone built carefully and used faithfully and then stopped using, which is a different thing.

The grade asks nothing of you. It does not demand that you understand the financial history of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad. It asks only that you walk along it and notice what is there: the cut through the rock where the blasting powder did its work in 1907, the fill across the draw where the graders moved earth from one place to another, the curve that follows the contour of the hillside at a radius that a locomotive could navigate at speed. Someone calculated all of this. Someone drove the stakes and ran the levels and made the decisions that resulted in this particular path through this particular country, and then other men built what the first men designed, and then trains ran on it for seventy years, and then the trains stopped.

The forest is coming back. The larch seedlings are finding purchase in the disturbed soil of the grade. In another generation, you will not be able to see the cut from the river below. The grade will still be there, under the trees, but you will have to know where to look.

What is the life of a railroad? Seventy years, in this case. What is the life of the grade it left behind? Longer, certainly. What is the life of the mountains through which the grade was cut? The argillite and limestone of the Bitterroot Range were laid down at the bottom of a sea more than a billion years ago. The grade is a recent event. The abandonment is more recent still.

I walked to where the grade disappeared into a rockslide that had come down sometime after the rails were pulled, and I stood there for a while, and then I walked back the way I had come.

See also

• Milwaukee Road, history and abandonment
• Route of the Hiawatha, the rail trail built on the abandoned right-of-way near St. Paul Pass
• Milwaukee Road electrification, the Rocky Mountain Division