Little train on the prairie

At the end of last week’s post, Riding the rails, I included a picture my wife took of me staring out the window of the Empire Builder, camera in hand, watching the countryside pass by.  This week I thought it would be nice to show some of the things we observed while traveling across the Northern Great Plains.  All of these photos were taken through the thick, tinted, and rather dirty glass of a moving train car.  So, you may see some reflections, blurring, discoloration, etc.  Since I was unable to attack the outside of my window with Windex, I attacked some distracting spots later with Photoshop.


You expect to see lakes in Minnesota.  They’ve got to put those 10,000 bodies of water somewhere.  But, the lakes don’t stop at the state line; North Dakota was also once under the glaciers.  The area around Devils Lake, North Dakota, has quite a few lakes.  In fact, that part of the state has been faced with rising lake levels and flooding for quite a few years (see Where the Roads End in Water: The Lake That Won’t Stop Rising).  The photo at the very top of this page was taken in that part of North Dakota.

Moving further west, the lakes disappear, the trees disappear, and fields of wheat begin to appear.  North Dakota farmers grow huge quantities of wheat, battling Kansas for the largest producer in the country.  Some fields stretched as far as I could see.  Very few houses were visible in these rural areas.

The route across North Dakota and Montana closely follows US Highway 2.  There are some moderate sized cities along the route in North Dakota, like Fargo (114,000) and Minot (46,000), but once in Montana the largest city on the route, Havre, has a population of only about 10,000.  The real sky scrapers in this part of the country are the grain elevators.  They’re always situated along rail lines or near harbors so the Empire Builder passes quite a few.  There’s something strangely majestic about these tall structures standing alone in the flat, sparsely populated landscape.

North Dakota, of course, had been riding the wave of an oil boom fueled by fracking and high oil prices for the past decade or so. Most of this activity has taken place around Williston, one of the stops along our route.  The precipitous drop in oil prices in the past couple years, however, has resulted in a crash.  The population of Williston peaked in 2014 and has been dropping off since then.  Signs of the boom are all around the route, oil wells, storage facilities, rows and rows of shiny new tank cars on railroad sidings.  As the oil industry struggles in North Dakota, that newer source of electrical energy generation, wind power, is starting to be developed in Montana.

As the train made its way across Montana, mountains began to appear in the distance, peeking up over the fields.  As the sun moved lower in the sky, they began to take on a hazy, mysterious look.  This was the first hint that we were finally getting close to our destination.  We were leaving the prairie and closing in on Glacier National Park.

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