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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by Murphy Siding Dave: I believe the Milwaukee ended at Chamberlain, on the Missouri River at the time-big river/no bridge. Evarts was a place a few miles south of what became Mobridge, where the Milwaukee had the same situation-big river/no bridge. At the time, I think CNW went all the way up to Belle Fourche, S.D., maybe all the way to the bentonite mine at Colony, Wyoming. It's doubtfull that the PCE would have taken off from western S.D., skirted the Black Hills and headed west to Gillette Wyoming. The countryside from the S.D. / WY state line is rugged, big,rolling hills. It would difficult to build a line there now. 100 years ago, it would have been darn near impossible. I-90, west of Sundance, WY has hills so steep as to be difficult for cars and trucks to climb! A railroad there then, or now would be unlikely. [/quote] According to my atlas, the Belle Fourche river and the original CNW line paralleled each other heading northwest to Colony, wherein the CNW ended and the Belle Fourche turns to the southwest into the PRB within 20 miles of Gillette. The ex -CB&Q (BNSF) line runs west/northwest through Moorcroft on to Gillette. Moorcroft is on the Belle Fourche. So it should have been relatively easy to run a rail line from just north of the Black Hills into the PRB near Gillette by simply following the Belle Fourche river. Then it could have easily paralleled the CB&Q on into the Billings MT area. If the CNW line to Colony existed at the time of the Milwaukee PCE startup, and if Rockefeller had somehow managed to make the PCE a joint effort between Milwaukee and CNW, logic says they would have started the joint PCE from whichever railroad had the farthest westward extension already. I do wonder whether such a line would have headed west/southwest into northern Wyoming, or whether it would have headed northwest into Montana and Miles City. The original alignment of U.S. Highway 212 at one time headed north/northwest into MIles City rather than it's current alignment heading due west to the Crow Reservation. I know that sometimes highway planners from the early 1900's used old railroad surveys (if not actually parallel to railroads) to plot the alignment of the original U.S. Highway system, and I wonder if the highway 212 planners had used a survey of a CNW line to Miles City as their basis for the original 212 alignment.
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