Gas Stop On The Hi-Line - Shelby, Montana

"Go back to sleep. The hour is small.

     A freight train between stations

Shook you out of sleep with all

        Its lonely ululations....

The hour is small. Resume your rest. 

        Tomorrow will be kinder. 

Here comes a freight train nosing west, 

        Pulling the dawn behind her."

- From Lullaby Near the Railroad Tracks by A. E. Stallings

Read the full text of this lovely train poem here.

Rest and Motion - Missoula, Montana

"When by the discipline of His Divine guidance,
 we know Him,
 and He going with us
 gives us Rest,
 then Time and Eternity are merged
 and lost
 in that amazing vital relationship. 

The union is one not of mystic contemplation,
 but of intense perfection of activity,
 not the Rest of the placid peace of stagnation,
 but the Rest of perfect motion..."

- Oswald Chambers (1874-1917), from Christian Disciplines

Restless For - Missoula, Montana

"The restlessness and the longing, like the longing that is in the whistle of a faraway train. Except that the longing isn't really in the whistle—it is in you."

-Meindert DeJong, The Little Cow and the Turtle

Train Station Re-Creation - Historic Fort Missoula, Montana

"...The names of the stations begin to take on meaning and my heart trembles. The train stamps and stamps onward. I stand at the window and hold on to the frame. These names mark the boundaries of my youth...."

- Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

(Don't look too closely at the nameplate on this building, lest you experience a letdown. While the old Drummond, Montana, train station building has found a new life at Fort Missoula, the pictured building is of more recent vintage, but still is an important feature on the Fort grounds.)

Freight Train - Missoula, Montana

"Quite possibly there's nothing as fine as a big freight train starting across country in early summer, Hardesty thought. That's when you learn that the tragedy of plants is that they have roots."

 - Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

Train Tracks Crossing the Clark Fork River - Missoula, Montana

"Now train tracks, hour upon hour, were leaving always to the past, to the land falling away behind the West." - Ivan Doig (1939-2015), This House of Sky, p 110

Hi-Line Freight Trains - Shelby, Montana

"Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him."
 - Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969)

Detritus - Missoula, Montana

"Trains cross the continent in a swirl of dust and thunder, the leaves fly down the tracks behind them: the great trains cleave through gulch and gully, they rumble with spoked thunder on the bridges over the brown wash of mighty rivers, they toil through hills, they skirt the rough brown stubble of shorn fields, they whip past the empty stations in the little towns and their great stride pounds its even pulse across America." - Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938)

Corresponding Lines, Missoula, Montana

"Mossbawn, my first house, was beside the railway. 
And along the railway, there ran telegraph wires. 
And along the telegraph wires, there used to run raindrops. And we used to think the telegrams were sent in the raindrops. 
So this is called "The Railway Children."

When we climbed the slopes of the cutting / We were eye-level with the white cups / Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires. 
Like lovely freehand they curved for miles / East and miles west beyond us, sagging / Under their burden of swallows. 
We were small and thought we knew nothing / Worth knowing. 
We thought words travelled the wires / In the shiny pouches of raindrops, / Each one seeded full with the light / Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves / So infinitesimally scaled / We could stream through the eye of a needle."
- Seamus Heaney, Poet and Much More (1939-2013), from an NPR interview 

Read and listen to the full story here.

Stationary, Missoula

As America’s transportation systems changed, small western train depots often were closed down. Many fell into disrepair or were torn down, while others have been converted to house new enterprises. The really lucky ones exist as well-maintained reminders of where we've been. 

In 1982, the old Drummond Depot was transported from Drummond, Montana, to its present Fort Missoula site, where it houses a railroad history exhibit. Click here to read more and view before and after photos.