June 23, 2015
The Day the Trains Ceased to Roll

As I traverse the back roads (a great deal lately), my mind tends to wander. As you might recall, that can sometimes be a bad thing.  Other times it might lead me to certain realizations and recollections that warm the heart.  I was thinking just the other day about the railroad and how it played a vital role in every community here on the prairie. Back in the day that is.  

You may recall that the last train rolled through Slayton in August of 1980.  Before that, the railway was an important part of life in these parts.  It was a lifestyle.  Commodities were easily shipped in and out of the area on the railway that ran every day, rain or shine.  Timely shipment was guaranteed and produced.  Then came the time when the railroad was deemed inefficient for one or another reason and its demise was eminent.  Train traffic halted, rails ripped up and ties pulled out of service.  

The trains were silenced. 

After that time, things changed irrevocably.  The local newspaper reported in the summer of 1980:  "Rotted ties and a dirt road are all that's left of the railroad lines that once went through Currie."  The profile of the prairie was forever altered.

I miss the railroad greatly.  I recall falling asleep on cool summer evenings with my windows flung wide open (we didn't have air conditioning back in the days when I was a youngster), and lolling off to slumber hearing the far distant rumble and clanking of the railroad cars just to the south of town.  Music to my ears.

Perhaps that is why now in my new place of employment so near to my roots of childhood, I require my office window to be open while sitting at my desk, because just off in the near distance there is daily, hourly, train traffic working its way past. In fact, if i crane out the window, I can see the train cars inching across the overpass on their destination to who knows where.

That has always been a fascination to me:  watching a train on its journey - or racing it along the highway on a parallel destiny.  The colorful, mysterious graffiti glinting along the tracks like sidewalk chalk art.  Oh the stories those cars could tell if only we knew the rest of the story, of those on the other end of the line...

The decision to remove the railroads from many of southwest Minnesota towns must have been a difficult one indeed.  Because in its wake, that left countless railroad right of way land parcels to deal with.  "The right of way have been built up and, as such, are not easily converted back to productive farmland without considerable effort," Southwest Regional Development Commission transportation planner Rich Holte said in a 1980 newspaper interview.

The land, he went on to say, would most likely be sold in many cases to farmers owning adjoining land along the railroad tracks.  But once acquired, the farmer was confronted with a "cleanup mess":  removal of rails, railroad ties and anything else of value would have to be done.  Rock or cinder bedding material had to be removed or buried deep enough so as to allow the growth of crops. In short, it took a lot of work to restore the land to any usable form.

The best use of those old railroad beds, I believe, is to leave them alone.  Transform them into public spaces such as done in northern Minnesota on the Paul Bunyan trail and what has been the dream in southwest Minnesota with the Casey Jones trail.  That way we can all continue to use, to enjoy and to appreciate the once vital vein of transportation: the mighty railway.  And believe me, the view from the train track is remarkable.  Oh to have been a railway worker back in the day.....the sights we would have seen and the places we would have gone.