1965 Wilson Creek

May 11, 1965

The town of Wilson Creek is nothing more than a wayside station, since the Great Northern removed the intermediate terminal in 1924, moving it to Wenatchee. Long gone is the roundhouse, which stood across the track to the right of the concrete grain elevator.  Where the grain elevators stand used to be the site of a large coaling chute, seen here. Imagine the drama the night it burnt down in the 1910s. More drama was had in early 2016 when the 2 adjacent grain elevators burned down, as seen here.

The depot can be seen, to the left of the cut of cars on one of the remaining yard tracks. While it was long gone at the time, this was the point of a nasty derailment BNSF had in 2010, seen here.

Along the bottom left, the curving channel of a redirected Wilson Creek can be seen. The city put up with a meandering creek through the middle of town for years, complete with seasonal flooding, before the channel and a dike was put into place. Here is a flooding view from 1957. It drains into Crab Creek, which is flowing just beneath the bluff across from the grain elevators. This creek passes underneath the tracks as it flows westerly, and towards the upper right center of the image you can see the channel to the right of the tracks.

It seems there is a car or two on the siding just beyond the point where the creek can be seen along the tracks. This is the spot of the old wye track, seen here, going off to the left of the main. The property had just been sold in this view and soon a couple of steel grain tanks will be built on the site, with no sign of the wye remaining today.