By Mondell Keck | The Brookings Register
BROOKINGS — I’ve been fascinated by trains and railroad tracks ever since I was a wee 5-year-old lad in Flandreau. Im pretty sure it crystallized the day Mom stopped the car we were in for a freight train that was slowly rolling through a crossing on dilapidated tracks that had seen better days.
Slow it may have been, but loud it certainly was, what with an airhorn that couldnt be missed, especially as it approached the crossbuck-protected crossing on South Bates Street that Mom and I were at. It wasnt much one locomotive and maybe a string of eight to 10 rail cars, along with a caboose but to little me, it was a noisy giant. As a bonus, Im pretty sure the engineer and conductor both waved to us as the train passed by!
This was in 1979 and, as it later turned out, it was probably one of the last trains to rumble through Flandreau. The tracks were owned by the bankrupt Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad commonly known as the Milwaukee Road and were abandoned and torn out in summer 1980.
In the years afterward, I would explore the abandoned railroad grade in and around Flandreau sometimes with a friend or two, but oftentimes just me following the now-empty roadbed, imagining what it must have been like driving a train along those tracks during their 100-year history in Flandreau, Egan, Colman and Trent.
How many pioneer families traveled those rails, laid in 1880 thereabouts? How many soldiers went to war and came home from war via those rails? How much gandy dancer sweat went into maintaining the tracks, trestles and bridges? How many farmers relied on those rails to get their livestock and crops to the markets?
In short, I imagined those rails were imbued with stories accumulated over a centurys time.
I also brought home trinkets the salvage crews left behind railroad spikes, tie plates, nuts, bolts, joint bars, those sorts of things and would pile them into mounds of rusty metal. Im sure it kind of annoyed my grandpa on occasion he was the main lawn-mowing guy, after all but, hey, I was a kid charged with preserving Flandreaus railroad history! Important stuff! Ah, the imagination of an 8-year-old in 1982, right?
By then I was living in Brookings, followed shortly thereafter by seven years on an old farm between Brookings and Volga just north of U.S. Highway 14. Finally, in 1989, my family moved to Sinai.
Brookings and Volga never lost the Chicago and NorthWestern rail line threading their communities (now operated by the Rapid City, Pierre and Eastern Railroad). Sinai ended up like Flandreau, though, with its Burlington Northern-owned formerly Great Northern tracks being torn up in 1982 thereabouts.
I maintained my love for trains and tracks throughout that time. Among the cherished memories is a Sioux Valley grade school field trip to Huron, where my classmates and I were able to visit the railroad roundhouse there, something Brookings nor Volga ever had (or Flandreau, for that matter).
As I got older, I even joined rail gangs no, not the criminal kind where I, rather ironically, too, worked first during the summer of 1993 as a salvager on the old C&NW line between Sioux Valley Junction (just south of U.S. 14 between Brookings and Volga) and Watertown that was being abandoned by then-owner Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern Railroad. It served several towns, including Bruce. I spent more than a few lunch breaks at The Ridge while helping to tear up the tracks through town. Later in the 1990s, during my college years at South Dakota State University, I spent another summertime working with a maintenance gang on the DM&E tracks in the Tracy, Minnesota, area.
Both jobs were hard work, even with machines assisting in the effort. That only deepened my appreciation for the men and women who still do those tasks to this very day, when my love for trains and railroads must share time with my other passions, such as reading, writing and gaming.
Am I still a railfan, as the parlance goes? I think so, but a more casual one. There are railfans whose passions certainly outclass mine, and more power to them. Still, even now with the Brookings Register, I get to indulge in that first of my joys hence the photo of the railroad depot in Brookings that accompanies this column. The tracks arent that far from the newspapers office, and its easy to hear the rumble of the trains as they zip through town far faster now and on far better tracks than in the 1980s and 1990s.
Nor will I soon forget interviewing an RCP&E crew a few years ago in Brookings for a railroad safety story in the Register and being able to ride in their locomotive from Aurora into Brookings. It was a graceful trip aboard a powerful steed and, honestly, I was kind of giddy, too.
Why? Because it took me back to my childhood in Flandreau, and that first train. I wasnt quite the engineer, no, but it was close enough. And, yes, Im certain I waved to the people in their vehicles as our locomotive rolled through the crossing on 22nd Avenue South.
Who knows? Maybe there was a 5-year-old boy or girl in one of those cars, waving back. And so, with that thought in mind, I close this column with a smile and maybe a tear in my eye, too.
Contact Mondell Keck at [email protected].
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