A Town, and a Park, Built By and Intertwined With the Railroad

Any city or town of significant size in America’s interior that is not located on a navigable waterway was built by, and so located because of, the railroad. By and large, cities and towns located along linear pathways in the West and Midwest are arrayed along rail lines, either existing or former. And the railroad still provides an economic lifeline to many of these places, primarily through freight movement, but also—for those lucky enough to have Amtrak service—through passenger connectivity.

There are fewer towns that better exemplify both the past and present impact of the railroad than Whitefish, Montana — the third stop on this year’s Millennial Trains Project (MTP) journey’s transcontinental itinerary. This was MTP’s first time stopping for 24 hours in a city smaller than 100,000 residents, and the welcome we received is evidence of the kind of impact that train journeys with a purpose can have in smaller communities. Our three private cars were set off and parked on a stub-end siding three blocks east of the depot. Thanks to being a division point on 19th-century magnate James J. Hill’s empire, the Great Northern Railway, Whitefish became a small trade center and hub for loggers, farmers and ranchers to send their products to market by rail. The fact that the Great Northern cleared trees from the land that became Whitefish, leaving only stumps, gave it the nickname “Stumptown” (a moniker also claimed by our point of origin, Portland—the two locales don’t seem to fight over it).  

Today, thanks in part to its proximity to Glacier National Park (itself also established by the Great Northern as a way to drive passenger traffic, and the only major Western national park that is still served directly by passenger trains), tourism is a key driver in Whitefish’s economy, and a fair number of those tourists (especially from the Pacific Northwest) arrive via Amtrak. It is by far Amtrak’s busiest station in Montana, with 66,614 passengers boarding or alighting there in fiscal 2012. A testament to visitors’ impact is that Whitefish’s historic depot offers a host of visitor information and is one of very few Amtrak stations with a rental car company desk inside the station, indicating that Hertz finds it lucrative to serve those arriving by train. 

The Great Northern’s founder “was an early ecologist and advocate of diversification and conservation of natural resources,” according to Bill Yenne in his book Great Northern’s Empire Builder, part of MBI Publishing’s “Great Passenger Trains” series. He brought to Montana several innovations in agriculture. On Saturday evening in a park along the Whitefish River near the town center, the MTP group heard from three couples who are similarly breaking new ground in the production and distribution of food: the owners of a natural foods store, ranchers who raise grass-fed beef, and free-range egg-producing chicken farmers. Each spoke of themselves as representative of a small cadre of people from different walks of life and other parts of the country (mostly the West Coast) who have moved to Montana and found fulfillment living off the land and engaging in small-scale food production. The natural foods store owner connected MTP’s on-board chefs with local growers and the egg farmer provided eggs that were served on the train for breakfast the next morning.

About half of the MTP participants used Saturday as an opportunity to visit Glacier Park, most for the first time. My vanload was headed by David Bragdon, a transportation policy veteran who now heads the Transit Center, a small nonprofit think tank in New York City, and is also well-traveled by train and a student of railroad history (and a long-time Trains subscriber). It was remarked during our visit that, in 1925, one in three visitors to Glacier came by train. By 1950, only one in 25 did. Now, the figure is probably one in several hundred. Despite the number of cars that fill the park’s roads and parking lots in the summer (the lot at Logan Pass was at capacity during our visit, with people constantly circling around looking for someone to vacate a spot), the park remains very accessible to those arriving without a car, thanks both to Park Service-operated shuttle buses and the privately operated, iconic 1935-built Red Buses (a.k.a. “jammers’”), which also serve the three Amtrak stations adjacent to the park. Vehicles similar to the Red Buses, distinctive for their open-able roofs, once allowed visitors to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks arriving by train to explore the parks’ interiors, but they only remain in service at Glacier. Could that have something to do with the presence of direct train service, which Yellowstone has lacked since the North Coast Hiawatha’s discontinuance in 1979?

As we traveled eastward across northern Montana, after awaking around 6:00 AM to enjoy the views along the Flathead River and across Marias Pass in early morning light (the Builder left Whitefish an hour and a half late), Bradgon spoke of the relevance of transportation policy and planning to making communities and regions that are attractive places to live and conducive to a wide variety of small businesses. The old way of planning and getting around cities is failing, he said, and new ways are just now being invented or re-invented, so this is an exciting time. He drove home the central point often made by passenger rail advocates: that the current face of our transportation system resulted largely from federal policy, where for decades a municipality or state looking to build new roads got 90% of the cost covered by the federal government, while those that even wanted to preserve existing rail services had to fund it themselves. Given that imbalanced policy, the outcome we see across the country is predictable. 

Nevertheless, change is happening because states and localities are taking more of a leadership role and beginning to innovate. Smartphones and GPS technology is also allowing for more demand-based models for transit and ridesharing to take hold. A new frontier in the public sector is cross-agency and cross-departmental work on issues, breaking down the old bureaucratic silos. There is also an unprecedented amount of data available to planners and public officials, but technology does not serve useful ends, Bragdon insisted, unless it is used by enlightened people who prioritize meeting people’s needs and providing for public health, safety and welfare. By and large, these trends bode well for the growth and development of passenger train and rail transit systems, especially as policymakers began to take a holistic approach to moving people and goods without the siloed governance structures and strict public-private separation that have long stymied efforts to put rail on a more level plane with other modes.