Winter Travel

In the thirty years since this map was made, a few branch lines are gone and railroads have changed, but it is largely the same. The newest map was only available in PDF. Source ND, Public Service Commision.

I just finished a white-knuckle drive from Beach, North Dakota to Williston. The roads were coated with a sheet of partially melted snow and ice and it was snowing--just another day of winter travel in North Dakota. From late October to early May, one has to switch to "tentative" mode in regard to travel. Every trip is tentative based on ability to drive according to weather and road conditions.

Anyone who has spent any time on the Northern Plains has had existential, white-knuckle experiences of creeping along on icy roads or through whiteout conditions and accumulating snow. In fact, it is almost an annual event to endure such conditions just to get from A to B. I could relate more experiences than I care to remember.  One especially memorable event was driving in a whiteout the hundred miles from Mobridge, to Aberdeen, South Dakota. Creeping along for hours on ice covered roads with heavy snow accumulation, we were never so glad to get to Aberdeen. As a result of the roads being blocked, we spent two nights in a hotel there before we were able to travel again. Such is what passes for normal winter travel around here.

 During Thanksgiving this year, we got in the car to drive the six hours to the eastern side of the state to visit family. It is never certain until the last minute whether or not such travel will be possible, so thankfully the weather behaved. In December, we boarded the Amtrak to go travel a thousand miles to Oregon. Such a trip would be impossible by car to all but the best mountain drivers. While driving would be possible under the best conditions, the risk of running into bad roads or weather somewhere along that distance in northern latitudes is almost assured. Taking the train, as long as we could get to the train, the only thing that would stop it would be the heaviest mountain snow. In essence, it is easier to take a train halfway across the continent than to just drive across the state, but it wasn't always that way.

I just finished John Taliaferro's excellent biography of the conservationist, naturalist and American Indian advocate George Bird Grinnell. He was one who in the late 19th and early 20th century traveled repeatedly to all parts of the country via the most high-tech transport of the day: railroads. As an amateur history buff, I am always amazed at how easy it was as far back as the 1880s to get from places such as New York, all the way to even the smallest and most isolated places out here in our neck of the prairie. Hopefully we can get there again. Recently, I was talking with a local resident of Beach who told me how he used to take the train to college and back in Dickinson in the 1960s. I can think how pleasant that would be to have an option to stressful roads we have around here half the year. Not so long ago, yet seemingly so far away.

The old Beach train depot that unfortunately sat on BNSF railroad land and was demolished in 2010. It is always a shame to see sturdy old brick buildings demolished and not renovated. Beach is host to a lot of great historic architecture, much of it still in use, so I was sad to see that this depot was gone just as a new age of rail seems to be dawning. Likely, if it didn't sit in railroad right of way, the very historically minded people of Beach would have preserved it. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons

In a decade old blog post , a rail vlogger made an interesting map of proposed passenger rail additions. His basic level of service would really unlock the potential of this travel alternative for most people around the state. I like his idea of a connection between Bismarck and Minot and renewing connections with Regina and Winnipeg.

Trains don't worry about icy tracks, whiteout conditions or all but the heaviest hard packed snow and extreme cold weather. It isn't so long ago that we had connections that give people options to driving from even the smallest North Dakota towns. We traded a largely privately funded (most with huge initial subsidies), weatherproof transportation network available to most, for a publicly funded network centered on individuals having to own devices that cost tens of thousands, that while needed, becomes a poor form of transportation for half the year for both people and goods. For all year it is a poor form of transportation for those unable to afford a car or unable to drive, not to mention the climate and pollution on many levels of our car based culture. How nice it would be to still be able to jump on a train to Bismarck or Fargo in the half the year that driving is a game of Russian roulette instead of putting one's life on the line just to go from one place to another.