The Lind Hole Track These Days

Guest post by Ryan Reed. 

The Lind Hole track these days... The first picture is in-between the mainline junction and Jantz Road. The town of Lind itself is off in the distance. Walking the grade from Jantz Road to Lind is effectively impossible because it's become so overgrown. I attempted to walk it a few years ago and found the culvert EE921. Funny thing, I thought I was bushwacking down the grade, saw the culvert, and realized I was actually off by 15 or 20 feet. 

At the end of the track, there is indeed some forgotten rail left. It's the only Milwaukee rail left in the entirety of Lind Coulee.

Milwaukee 201 At Lind

Courtesy of Blair Kooistra.

Blair says:

"Another view of the chase Chris Haaland and I made of train #201 across the west end of Milwaukee Road's "gap" in Eastern Washington on August 29, 1978.
We started the day following #200 out of Othello and stayed with it as far as Roxboro, then hung around for #201 to show up. Here's the hottest of the 2 or 3 daily westbound train crossing the big steel bridge and high earth fill over the former Northern Pacific at Lind, Washington. A nice cut of auto racks for the Kent auto yard are on the head end."

Baumgart Elevator At Lind Views

Photographer unknown.

Undated Lind View

Photo by Don Lahr.

 

Post 1980 Lind Bridge View

Photo by Sue Sackmann.

NP Crab Creek Survey-Lind To Ellensburg

 

Lind Station Map

Courtesy of Mark Borleske and the Cascade Rail Foundation.

NP Lind Cutoff Bobs Up Again

From the "Spokesman Review."

November 14, 1909

 

1910s New Towns And Business Opportunities

 

Columbia Basin Special For Election Day

Courtesy of Gary Dunn.

Development of the Crab Creek Valley

From the Ellensburg "Dawn."

May 24, 1907

“Stonehenge”

Guest post by Frederick Manfred Simon.

May 20, 2017

Like a postmodern American Stonehenge – silent – proud – pillars – rising as if a portal into another world crumbling yet will not bend to time though its intended task of lifting swifting elegant trans-con passenger trains and heavy-long freights across and over the Lind Coulee that beaks westward into the expansive Kansas Prairie to what must have seemed as terra incognito: the American West some hundred years prior present. Herculean was the 1905 Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad board blessed 2,300-mile Pacific expansion completed in Olympian speed: just three short years at the cost of nearly two billion today-dollars labeled in retrospect as an “egregious” adventure by certain modern railroad scholars. Maybe. Certainly, the Milwaukee’s future, at the time, was burning as brightly as the setting sun over the Pacific itself. A vision forged into a reality shortlived unbeknownst its heads. Fortuna was not favorable to the bold Road. Unforeseeable events; the erratic, unpredictable evolution of the industry; draconian regulations; notwithstanding critical lapses in sound management contributed to its slow, steady, decline, and untimely death. And still, the mystery of its mystique affects and attracts us like Neolithic Druids paying homage…wondering what was and what might have been.

Lind Bridge View

Photographer and date unknown.

Lind Diamond Jubilee

How They Move The Region Grain From Farmer To You

From the "Spokesman Review."

January 28, 1962

1973 BN Consolidated Annual Station Earnings-1

Courtesy of Aaron Schwarz.

“A Bridge Too Far”

Guest post by Frederick Manfred Simon.

March 25, 2017

The annals of Milwaukee Road history are voluminous, even hyperbolic on its rise, heyday and eventual demise, and even today, a hundred-years-on, the mystique of The Milwaukee still lives. Just outside of Lind, Washington one can still “see” standing, like a stoic wraith, the iconic concrete abutments of the 833’ deckless span, and there, pay homage to the great, gone-but-not-forgotten, latent westward comer. By the 80’s, its vicissitudes too many and too heavy to carry, the Road, in a desperate fit of self-preservation, amputated its atrophying Pacific limb to no avail eventually and quite imminently dying a mutilated and agonizing septuagenarian death. On this homage with my son Alexander, two BNSF trains meet “under” what is left a bridge too far: one of many along the once proud Route of the Hiawatha and Olympian. 

NP Surveys New Route

From the Wenatchee "World."

December 29, 1909

NP Will Shorten Line

From the "Spokesman Review."

October 28, 1905

2014 Milwaukee Road Pillar Demolition Time-Lapse

First photo was from about 7:15am. Last one was about 12:45pm.