Black Hills Central...

I rode this train once as a kid. Still got my ticket stubs. Was awesome!....

PRESERVING THE RAILS: THE BLACK HILLS CENTRAL RAILROAD KEEPS THE STEAM ENGINE EXPERIENCE ALIVE

DEADWOOD, SD -- In the middle of the 20th century, railroads found stiff competition in the form of the automobile and freeways. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, the last passenger railroad in the Black Hills has to contend with a new rival: video games.

"It's really hard to market in a world of Nintendos. Kids aren't always real interested," says Meg Warder, president and general manager of the Hill City-based Black Hills Central Railroad, commonly known as the 1880 Train. "Across the board, in tourism, marketing is a real nightmare, especially for young people. So we have to try different slants, like seeing the American West in two hours. With some other tourist trains, the trips are longer, sometimes four hours or better, and it's a harder sell. We've found that we have to be the ones to accommodate visitors."

It was the desire to cater to area visitors and to preserve steam locomotive culture that gave birth to the Black Hills Central Railroad in 1957. Two Chicago businessmen - William Heckman, a public relations guru, and Robert Freer, a locomotive engineer - began the project in the mid-1950s. Their industry connections and marketing ingenuity proved to be a successful combination. The railroad received national media attention even before the first train left the Hill City station, helping to make it an instant success. The 1880 Train has been serving passengers ever since, making it the oldest continually-operating tourist train in the nation.

Although the train became a favorite stop for regional visitors, by the late 1980s the railroad was in disarray. When Warder's parents bought the business in 1990, the future of the railroad seemed bleak.

"Basically, the engines weren't going to run through the next season until someone put money into them," she explains. "The first season we had to have a fleet of busses on call so they could go and pick people up when the train broke down, it was that bad."

Now, just a few months shy of its 50th anniversary, the Black Hills Central Railroad is a success once more. In fact, more than 100,000 people ride the 1880 Train between Hill City and Keystone each year, making it one of the most popular tourist trains in the country. Even Hollywood has given nods to the railroad, drafting its locomotives into service for television programs including Gunsmoke, General Hospital and, most recently, the Steven Spielberg epic miniseries Into the West. The producers of the 12-hour program opted to film the locomotive in New Mexico, which meant a long overland trip for a vintage engine and passenger car.

"We had one of our staffers there with them the whole time to take care of it and make decisions," Warder says. "We'd have to tell them things like, 'No, you can't run it 100 miles an hour.'"

The railroad's occasional encounters with fame don't interfere with its regular runs. But while the train's two-hour trip between the two former mining communities appeals to families on vacation eager to experience history and scenery, the railroad has been successfully attracting attention from railroad buffs and local residents with special events. In September the railroad held its second annual Wine Train Into the West, an autumn excursion featuring selections from the local Prairie Berry Winery, and this August will see a tribute to the popular children's character Thomas the Tank Engine.

"We're hoping to have over 20,000 people for the event, especially kids between two and five years old," Warder says.

To keep up with its growth, the attraction added another locomotive to its engine house last summer, bringing the railroad up to five engines (three steam engines and two diesels). Warder explains that the vintage equipment needs near-constant maintenance, which requires a crew of devoted mechanics - mechanics that don't exactly fit the stereotype.

"In the past year or so, we've hired on about five people in their late twenties and early thirties who have no railroad experience, but they're excellent mechanics and enthusiastic, very energetic," Warder says. "We feel like we have our own training program, a way to keep the legacy of steam engines alive, because the people who know a lot about that era, frankly, are dying off."

Warder largely credits her staff for the success of the 1880 Train, noting that over the years they've had to deal with forest fires, floods, washed out track and high-maintenance equipment.

"Guys will come into the shop starting at 3:30 in the morning, and they'll stay until after midnight, sometimes until 2:30," she says.

But not every challenge has to do with natural disasters or vintage locomotives.

"It's pretty much a guy's world," Warder explains. "It's very interesting being in your early thirties and female and being in the tourist train industry." - Dustin D. Floyd. Deadwood Magazine

 

some more fun reading...

PROGRESS CROSSING: FOR THE BLACK HILLS, THE COMING OF TH RAILROAD SPELLED THE END OF AN OLD ERA AND THE BEGINNING OF ANOTHER

DEADWOOD, SD -- As the sun rose on the windswept plains of southwestern South Dakota on the morning of December 29, 1890, 500 soldiers of the U.S. 7th Cavalry surrounded 350 Lakota men, women and children along Wounded Knee Creek. As the soldiers attempted to disarm the encampment of American Indians, a gun discharged and the government troops opened fire. As an approaching snowstorm blew the smoke and dust aside, almost 150 Lakota and 25 cavalrymen lay dead. Known later as the Wounded Knee Massacre, it marked the last major conflict between the Sioux and the U.S. government -- and the end of an era for a displaced native people.

At nearly the same time, just 130 miles to the northwest, the scene was entirely different. A jubilant crowd gathered at the bottom of a pine-clad gulch, loudly cheering the arrival of the first long-range passenger locomotive in Deadwood as a band began to play the Star-Spangled Banner. For the first time, the city was connected to the outside world by a set of iron rails. The age of the stagecoach had drawn to a close, and the era of the steam engine was about to begin, bringing with it new technology, cheap goods and a boost to commerce.

The near-simultaneous events spelled doom for one culture and prosperity for another, although there were some who believed the coming of the railroad was anything but a happy occasion. The Black Hills Daily Times reported on the following day that the arrival of the train in Deadwood "gladdened the hearts of thousands," and described how a crowd of 2,000 waved their handkerchiefs and shouted, "What a glorious sight!" But Estelline Bennett, a Deadwood journalist and historian who witnessed the event as a child, later wrote that "the essential qualities that made Deadwood a flaming frontier town went out with the old stagecoach or were ground to dust under the wheels of the incoming railroad train -- in that one day the merry young mining camp bloomed into a surprised town with civic and moral obligations."

Buffalo Bill Cody, however, had a more optimistic perspective. "A town is like a baby," the Western showman told Bennett. "It either grows up or dies. But Deadwood, you know, was young so long it never will quite forget its youth."

In fact, although Deadwood was one of the largest settlements in South Dakota, the boomtown stayed a stagecoach community for nearly 15 years, and it was one of the last major Black Hills towns to have rails laid up to its streets. But the railroad had been making incursions into the region for years, and even Deadwood, isolated as it was at the bottom of a steep gulch, had long known that the steam locomotive would soon be at its doorstep.

The Boom

The first tracks came across the eastern borders of Dakota Territory in 1872, but railroad-building all but ceased the following year, thanks to economic troubles caused by the Panic of 1873. As the effects of the recession began to wind down - and with Deadwood mining operations in full-swing -- the railroad made a quick comeback. The Homestake Mining Company ordered a five-ton locomotive in 1879 for hauling ore and supplies around Lead. Dubbed the J.B. Haggin, the engine was brought to the mine by a team of oxen from Bismarck. Today, the first locomotive in the Black Hills rests about three miles from where it was originally used, and still fascinates visitors today on the main floor of Deadwood's Adams Museum.

As gold mining operations at Homestake continued to grow, more locomotives were ordered and more track was laid. Even though the railroads continued their growth in the eastern half of the territory, the Black Hills remained isolated from the rest of the country, a veritable island. A federal ruling in 1884 that prevented railroads from reaching the Black Hills from the east -- across Lakota lands -- didn't help.

But the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad had rail lines in northern Nebraska, which the company quickly exploited to their advantage. In 1885 the railroad reached Buffalo Gap, and in July 1886 the first train pulled into Rapid City, passing the newly-founded towns of Fairburn and Hermosa. Two years later the rails were within 10 miles of Deadwood, terminating in the small hamlet of Whitewood. It took another two years for the railroad to blast its way up narrow Whitewood Canyon and into the infamous gold town.

In the meantime, the Deadwood Central Railroad began construction of a line between Deadwood and Lead. It was completed in early 1889, and began an incredibly popular light rail service.
According to Bennett, the children of Deadwood resident Fee Lee Wong were so enthralled with the small train that they "insisted upon going every day." The Chinese merchant decided the best solution was to hire "an old Chinaman to take them back and forth until they tired of the sport, but that wasn't for weeks."

As Deadwood celebrated the inauguration of regular railroad service on the Fremont and Elkhorn, a rival railroad was already pushing its way into town. The new route of the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad would stretch from the southern Black Hills, starting at a new company-built community called Edgemont, through the high reaches of the mountain range, past Custer, Hill City and Mystic, and down into Deadwood. A Burlington passenger depot was built near the intersection of Sherman and Deadwood Streets, while the Fremont and Elkhorn erected a station only a half-block away on the banks of Whitewood Creek.

The growth of mining, and the Homestake in particular, ensured that railroads in the Black Hills grew at a steady clip. Thanks to the amount of coal, wood and supplies going into the mines -- and the amount of gold coming out of them -- Pluma, Lead and Central City were the site of spectacular railroad junctions. Passengers benefited from increased service, too, as new lines were created and existing routes were upgraded. The transition from steam locomotive to electric trolley service between Deadwood and Lead in 1901, for instance, was incredibly progressive for a city that was on the edge of the American frontier only 25 years earlier; in fact, New York City didn't close its last horse-drawn streetcar line until 1914.

Railroad companies completed other feats of engineering in the Black Hills, including the Crouch Line west of Rapid City. This 30-mile-long railroad followed the crooked canyon carved by Rapid Creek to Mystic, crossing 110 bridges along the way. Locals would joke that the bends of the line were so sharp that the engineer in the locomotive could hand chewing tobacco to the brakeman in the caboose.

The Decline

The railroad's heyday didn't last very long in western South Dakota, however. Although coal mines in nearby Wyoming kept the railroads busy, the decline of mining and the rise of the automobile was anathema to locomotives in the Black Hills. Although there was still growth in the regional railroad industry into the 1920s -- to which Rapid City's 11-story Hotel Alex Johnson, built by the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad in 1928, stands testament -- there were already signs of decline, particularly in the northern Black Hills. The populations of Deadwood and Lead began to wane as gold mining played itself out, and the beloved electric trolley line between the two cities was abandoned in 1927. Two trolley cars were converted into cafes that served each town for several years, but they were demolished in the 1960s.

The onset of the Great Depression and the subsequent World War didn't help the railroad, either. Passenger service between Deadwood and Edgemont was cut in the fall of 1949, and other passenger service in the region followed suit as post-war America embraced the automobile and the highway. In the fall of 1960 passenger trains came to a halt between Rapid City and Mankato, Minn., and on Aug. 24, 1969, the last long-range passenger train departed the Black Hills.

The following decades saw freight trains in the Black Hills grow shorter as well. On November 8, 1983, the last train rolled out of Deadwood, bound for the southern Black Hills on the Burlington Northern track. The line still exists today, although most of it is now the Mickelson Trail, the result of one of the most acclaimed rails-to-trails projects in the country. Observant visitors can still spot remnants of the iron track leading away from the trailhead and further into Deadwood, bulging up from underneath asphalt parking lots and gravel alleys.

Many other remnants of the railroad still remain in the Black Hills, however. Although Deadwood's Burlington and Missouri River depot was demolished in 1950 and replaced with a bust of Wild Bill Hickok, the 1897 Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley passenger station still stands, restored and servicing the city's visitors as an information center. In Rapid City, more than one railroad building - from depots to warehouses - are now home to bars and restaurants along Omaha Street downtown.

However, the most visible sign of the railroad presence in the area is the Black Hills Central Railroad, also known as the 1880 Train. Begun in 1957 as a tourist train on the line between Hill City and Keystone, the 1880 Train is the longest continuously-operated tourist train in the country, and continues to cater to Black Hills visitors today.

Without a doubt, the railroad impacted the development of the region for many years, and while its influence has decidedly waned, the rumble of locomotives continues to echo throughout the canyons and forests of the Black Hills. For passengers, the practical reasons for riding a train are few -- and yet thousands of people pile aboard old steam trains in Hill City each year, moved by sheer fascination. As Estelline Bennett noted, it's little wonder, since a train is a community experience: "An automobile goes all at once -- not gaining momentum smoothly and majestically like a locomotive, and it has no retinue of cars following its curves, its accelerandos, and retardandos. Even an airplane flies alone, but a locomotive always has a following." - Dustin D. Floyd, Deadwood Magazine

 

There have been many "plans" made. They haven't followed through with them. If money becomes available, I think they will go foreward with them. It just depends on the financial situation. Just like other "mom and pop" operations, they want to pay the existing bills before taking on any more debt. At least they have reliable equipment they can depend on.

 

Costner got his casinos built and they are making money. Don't hear much of him anymore.........

 

Last I heard Costner was still working on plans to build a RR from Deadwood to Whitewood, then on DM and E to Rapid City. I don't know if this is connected but there is a turn table sitting in a field just out side of Whitewood. Also heard a rumor that they are working on the passenger cars for Costner's RR in the roundhouse in Chadron, NE. (please note I said rumor)
Adam

 

Hey Bro,

Know I told you most of this over the phone but thought everyone else might like to hear it.

After discussing the Deadwood railroad with my brother (Adam), a while back I decided to do some more research on it and see what was going.

Costner’s original idea of the Dunrail railroad has gone through a lot of changes and issues since it’s inception in the early 1990’s. First off Dunrail no longer exists, It was taken over by The Black Hills Transportation Inc in late 2003 see article.

http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/articles/2003/11/22/news/local/news07.txt

However at the time Costner still had a share in the company. Since this article was written Terry Kranz passed away. However Mr. Kranz was definitely the one behind the push to get the railroad built. From what I’ve read Kranz was a rail fan. He was part of the building of the model railroad layout in Deadwood. Which is very nice. See link

http://www.greatesthobby.com/wgh/directory/publiclayout_info.asp?recid=108&type=4&mode=view


I also found in an article (that I can seem to find anymore) that Kranz and Costner didn’t always see eye to eye. Costner wanted to be a little more neighbor friendly, and was concerned about the way things were progressing with the Whitewood to Deadwood right of way, and disputes with local landowners. (again don’t know where I saw that and don’t mean to offend anyone, so take it as you will) The disputes with landowners however has been mostly resolved I believe. See articles.

http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/articles/2005/11/18/pmedition/news/news02.txt
http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/articles/2005/12/14/news/local/news01.txt

However I also saw an article that stated that Costner’s parents attended a meeting about a development outside of Spearfish, SD, at Interstate 90 Exit-17 (it wasn’t clear as to whether they were there as official representative of Kevin Costner or not). They stated that due to the disputes with landowner on the Whitewood/Deadwood right of way, Costner was no longer interest in building that railroad and was opting to build a narrow gauge line between Deadwood and Exit-17. ( again I can’t find the article so take this with a grain of salt). The problem I see with that is that there is no other rail access to this area and the railroad would be isolated.

So with or with out Kevin Costner (I don’t know which it is) the BHT seems to be going ahead with plans. See links.

http://www.deadwoodrailroad.com/
http://www.blackhillsrailway.com/

There is a map of the Project on the first link. The second link talks about the roundhouse in Chadron. (I was in that roundhouse like 20 years ago on a grade school field trip, I got to ride across the turntable on an old GP but I don’t remember what model.)

This project is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. One I live in Black Hawk, SD and the trains would run with in earshot of my house, on the DME between Rapid City and Whitewood. Would be kind of cool to here steam engines rumbling by (if they run steam). And also if the rail line eventually went in between Whitewood and Deadwood, I believe the scenery would rival that of the 1880 train route in the central Black Hills (which is really nice in itself).

Well I’ve said enough (or way to much). Hope this information is useful.

 

Hmm my first response to this didn't post, so if it shows up later ignore this one. Anyway I'll keep it short the railroad seems to still be a go, as the Deadwood, Black Hills & Western Railroad. The parent company is Black Hill Transportation Inc. here is their website.

http://www.deadwoodrailroad.com/

Don't know how much Costner still has invested in this.

 

The Deadwood, Black Hills and Western Railroad (can find their web page if you google it) will start service from Rapid City to Sturgis in mid 2007 (including trains during the world famous Strugis Motorcycle Rally). Still haven't built track between Whitwood and Deadwood. The case for right of way is currently going to the South Dakota Supreme court, after being ruled in favor of the railroad in lower courts. Not sure how much Costner is invested in this project anymore.

 

woops guess they finally decided to post my other posts, sorry for the repeats.

 

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