- This is a production of SDPD - All Aboard.

- One of the things that, that I captured my imagination when I was a kid.

These locomotives and cars seemed so big, you know, when you got up close to them, but yet they were so small when they were running through the Black Hills, - Spectacular views and dangerous heights.

What started as a mining operation has turned into so much more.

It's a favorite for most and a pioneering force into what the Black Hills has become today.

- Donors to the Explore South Dakota Fund support the production of local documentaries and other programs of local interest presented by SDPB.

Friends of SDPB appreciates their support of this program.

- The Highline of the Black Hills is supported with your membership and the friends of SDPB.

Thank you.

With help from Team Faith Lewis.

At Lewis Realty in the Black Hills.

You gotta have faith current - 1873, the Dakota Southern is the first train in the Dakota Territory.

It connects Sioux City to Yankton.

1874 Gold is discovered near present day Custer.

In the act of 1877, the US government would seed the Black Hills from the Sioux Nation breaking the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 Lead 1879, the JB Hagen Steam locomotive was developed to haul ore from the Homestake Mine to the Mills 1886.

The Fremont Elkhorn and Missouri Valley is the first line to reach Rapid City.

As the turn of the century was approaching the outside world and railroad companies had their sights set on the Black hills.

- The impact of the railroads in the Northern Black Hills, there's just no way to compare it.

That's what developed the cities of Lead and Deadwood because it brought materials, machinery, and everything else in by rail.

That's when the larger milling operations began.

Home state developed into one of the biggest mining companies, well literally in the Western Hemisphere.

And when you looked at a map of the 1890s, early 19 hundreds of the railroads in the Black Hills, it looked like a bol of spaghetti.

It really did.

There were lines going down every gulch, every canyon up on the ridges, wherever there was a mining operation or some other business.

There was a railroad.

- November 2nd, 1889, the day South Dakota becomes the 39th state.

And the day the Burlington and Missouri, a subsidiary of the Chicago Burlington.

And Quincy begins laying track for what would become the Burlington, better known as the Highline.

- One of the things that was unique about the Highline in the whole Burlington system, which ranged from Chicago to Colorado and the Rockies, and then down into Texas and then also northwest to Billings, was the grades that were experienced in a relatively short distance.

'cause starting at Edgemont, little over 3,400 feet and then you got up to Dumont near Englewood and then dropping down into Edgemont.

That was over 6,300 feet.

And then of course you get down to around 4,500 feet in Deadwood, right down in the valley.

You had to have folks that knew how to build grade out on the prairie, down around Edgemont in that area.

But then also almost three miles into the the climb, you get a 3% grade getting up into the, the Southern Black Hills Trestles tunnels, - Just five miles in Sheep Canyon.

Trestle was the highest on the route at 700 feet long and 126 feet deep.

Some conductors would walk across the trestle before hopping back on the train.

Once it had crossed the Burlington sent seasoned contractors and crews from places like Colorado and Texas to traverse this unique route.

110 miles of track completed in a little over 100 days - And literally thousands of men, teams of horses implements and construction companies.

These days, you can't even imagine getting a permit, you know, in 110 days for 110 miles.

So it was a phenomenal process - From the new town of Edgemont.

The Highline traveled north to its first stop in Minnekahta, then Loing, Pringle, Custer, hill City, Redfern, mystic, Rochford, Neha Dumont, Englewood, Kirk Pluma, and finally, Deadwood Spurs that shot off from the main line, connected even more towns and mines.

The first spur connected minta to the resort city of Hot Springs in 1891.

A second spur connected Hill City to the mining town of Keystone.

This track was crucial in the development of Mount Rushmore.

Highline operations were consistent through the early 19 hundreds in its heyday.

During the thirties, two passenger trains and two freight trains operated daily.

These tracks connected anything from people to lumber to cattle from one town to another.

Many people were, and continue to be impacted by the railroad industry's expansion into South Dakota.

In 2005, the Black Hills Central Railroad, which operates the historic 1880 train, interviewed rail workers and historians.

Many of them grew up when the Highline was in full service and have a special connection to the trains.

Few of them are left today to share their experience.

One of them was Watson Parker.

He was known as the Dean of Black Hills History.

He's written books on ghost towns, gold and deadwood.

He was raised at his family's summer resort near Hill City.

- If as long as you had a train, you could go anywhere, you could go down to Edgemont and get on the railroad and go to the world, the, the fair at St. Louis or San Francisco or Chicago.

And we're talking about two days as as as opposed to two months.

By Oxcart, you, you, you were part of the world once the railroad came and it was a love hate relationship.

We loved the railroad, just, just looking at it was fun.

And I'm sure the rail, the engineer, I'm sure when a small boy was looking at it, had a way of releasing steam and scalding him if you could.

But they enjoyed it.

You'd look at railroads and they brought in services and goods and they gave you transportation.

We knew that.

But we always asked ourselves, why did it have to be so expensive?

We never realized I'd cost money to run a railroad.

Why did it have to have so many fool rules regulating it?

And why did the station agent have to be so grumpy?

- Harry Walker grew up near Pringle in the forties and became a conductor on the high line in 1973.

- I liked it up here on the Highline, especially in the fall when the trees turn colors.

There's a lot of aspirin up there, a lot of colors.

One deal with Pete, I can remember when he brought the engine out here in the morning and supposed to make a run down the siding, blow all the condensation out from the night and he didn't do that.

And so he colp up the train and we left.

Of course going up the hill up there, started working it real hard and it just, just went poof.

And all that stacked gas condensation and everything just up out of the stack, right back down on the cars.

Everybody was black.

You know, it was funny in a, anyway, but there were some people, you know, like this one couple, they had about a 14-year-old daughter and the mother and daughter was all dressed in white, was dressed in white because they're just black.

- Riding the train covered in soot is something Alice Davis Smith remembers.

She came to Hill City to take care of her mother.

- My mother was raised in this area and told me about how important the first trains were to this town.

People would come from all around to go down to the depot to see who was coming to stay at the Harney Peak Hotel.

I remember a trip to Deadwood that we had, I don't know how many on the car, but it was a really good trip.

And the scenes very scenic and we enjoyed it a great deal.

The only thing was, it was an open cars and when we got back we were almost as black as the ace or spades.

- Russell Frank was born in the now ghost town of Mystic in 1921.

He proudly tells everyone that his first girlfriend was a steam locomotive.

- This little village always at noon time was sort of jumping because of the trains coming in and people going down the depot.

The mail had to be put on the passenger trains.

And for a little boy that was a, an exciting type because from time one, I've been in love with steam locomotives.

Of course I had my favorite engines and the freight engines were really large engines.

Unusual, two engines under one boiler.

So that means four cylinders, two sets of drivers.

And when those old gals would whistle out, it was a majestic thing.

- George Davis was a cowboy who grew up in Deadwood.

- Yeah, I worked 38 years taking care of track, fixing broken rails.

Yeah, I've worked on, I guess every mile from Edgemont to Deadwood.

And then I worked on the main line some too.

One time we done something kind of unusual.

The foreman that was here, him and his wife and my wife, we went on a motor car one, I think it was on a night, went from here to Rockford to a dance and back.

Luckily there wasn't a train coming, but they only run about one train a day then.

And so you, and we knew where it was or we was supposed to know.

We rode the track from here to Roxford, went to the dance and came back about two in the morning and really lot, lots of fun.

'cause there's three tunnels from here to, to go to get to Roxford.

- When the crew arrived in Deadwood, they needed somewhere to stay.

That's where Bill Walsh and the Historic Franklin Hotel come into play.

- They would stay at the hotel on Sunday night, Tuesday night and Thursday night.

And there usually was a crew of five or six railroad men.

And they would come in at anywhere from eight o'clock in the evening to 10 to midnight till two in the morning, depending on upon their getting out of edgemont, depending upon not having any difficulties along the way.

Sometimes the steep grade up to the Kirk Power plant was a problem for them.

But generally speaking, they would make it.

And, and at that time I was bartending and they would drink Irish harp beer.

They all drank Irish heart beer.

They all loved to play darts.

They all had their own darts.

And if they didn't show up, if it was a slow night, I would just simply close the doors to dirty Nelly's, leave the keys at the front desk.

And when they came in, they would pick up the keys, go down into Dirty Nellie's, play their darts, drink their Irish sharp beer, and generally have a, a very, very good time.

Before they would go to bed at night and then they'd be up and, and on the railroad at six o'clock.

- Life with the railroad was undoubtedly a spectacle.

But this region's high grades and weather conditions shaped a harsh environment.

There were several accidents that transpired on the high line.

- Railroading is not subject to be taken lightly.

It's difficult in all types of weather.

You know, in the summertime when your rails get too hot, they will separate.

You'll get sun kinks in the winter they crack because it's just, it's steel and something has to give a lot of times when there's fractures and everything.

So railroading was dangerous.

And the guys that did it, some of them had a much more devil may care attitude about it than others.

But it was a very strenuous and a very, it was, you needed to take your time and know what you were doing.

- I remember the, the train went all over the place by, and Bill proven had a little house there, oh, just about the other side of the depot, next to a, next to one of the sightings.

And one, he was sleeping there cheerful.

One night, one of the engines left the track and went right through into his house and nearly came up to his bedroom.

He noticed it, he heard it coming and he went and felt and figured what it was and went away from there.

But it didn't happen very often - For years, the kids in my family couldn't figure out why.

Grandma Strom had only four fingers on one hand.

And finally we asked grandma one day, grandma, why do you have only four fingers on one hand?

She says, well, I got hit by the Chicago Northwestern train in Deadwood and she was walking down Lee Street in Deadwood and got hit by the train.

And whether she fell down and the train ran over her finger, we could never figure out how exactly it happened.

But she did lose a finger in the train accident.

- The Burlington always had larger crews in on the section during summer because that's when they could put tithes in the railroad.

And so they went through Mystic and on past and on a sharp curve, they run right smack into the dinky coming up everybody.

But one man jumped to the left, which was over the bank, but he was a new hand.

And he jumped to the right, hit the bank, it bounced back across the rails and the pony trucks got him in half.

And at that time, my mother, my dad had a boarding house right across the tracks from the mill to feed the train crew and anybody else that happened to be there in town at noon.

And my mother was over there helping the cook get ready.

And us kids of course were over there too, playing not in our regular house.

And she also had to take the mail sack down to the depot to meet these trains.

And she walked down there and says, now you kids stay off the track.

My mother was a flatlander and she did not like fast moving cricks and all this railroad stuff because she knew how I loved those darn engines.

And so yeah, we, we'd do that.

So she went on, we didn't think nothing about it, but pretty quick here she come back and she wasn't, she wasn't running, but she was running faster than she normally would as she walked up the grade and her lips, I can remember that to this day were straight across and behind her was a Rapid Canyon Lines conductor, which was quite unusual.

They were the only train that was in town and they had just got there.

And when she got there she says, you can't get inside right away going in the, going in the dining room.

So we started in and just as we went in, we heard the, we saw the conductor turn into that little box car where the suction has lived.

Him and his family.

He had two kids, a boy and a girl.

They were my my age.

We played together often pretty quick.

There come a scream out of that bunk house.

It is almost as loud today as it was then.

And she run out outside and screamed again and then went back in and the conductor walked back down to the depot.

So, believe it or not, her husband was still alive.

You never have to worry about bleeding to death If you get run over by a freight train, it seals the wound on both sides.

And it had sealed him.

He was cut in half and when they laid him in the freight room, he could still blink his eyes.

He died shortly afterwards.

So that's one of the dismal parts of railroading.

- The blizzard of 1949 was brutal to the area and its livestock.

Railroad crews worked around the clock to dig out engines and plows.

Dynamite was used to open drifts up to 20 feet in height.

Although rail service between Edgemont and Deadwood was shut down for weeks.

There was no long-term damage in that same year.

Something else happened.

- 1949 was the last year of the passenger service on the Burlington line.

Any passenger service in the Deadwood.

And when we had passenger service in Deadwood, you could get on a train in Deadwood and you could go to any place in the United States by train.

You never had to to go any other way.

You never had to go by bus in between.

It was by train all the way.

And I went from Deadwood, South Dakota to San Diego, California all by train.

And I had a line of, my tickets were probably 10 feet long.

By the time we got through the re I also had the return tickets on the thing.

But it was, it was really an interesting thing.

A beautiful ride through the Black Hills - Steam service on the Highline came to an end and diesel was taking over in the fifties.

Later in 1970, the Chicago Burlington and Quincy was merged into the Burlington Northern Railroad.

The company rebranded most of its black, red, and gray locomotives to a cascade green.

Then came the deadly flood of 1972.

The last mile of the keystone spur was washed away leading Burlington Northern, not to rebuild more abandonments and the rise of truck travel were a sign of the highline's demise.

- The biggest thing was the diminishing freight revenues, especially coal, going to the Kirk Power plant there by Homestake near lead.

When that plant was converted over to truck travel or truck shipping, that pretty much spelled the end for the high line because that was the most revenue they were getting 'cause they were getting multiple car loads of coal every week from the Odac mine in Wyoming.

Once they lost that contract and they started hauling coal by truck, that was pretty much the end of the highline.

That's when they filed it for abandonment, because otherwise there were a few cars of raw cyanide still going to the home, stake some machinery, and then further south on the line it custard there was feldspar, but otherwise most of the lumbering had been, you know, taken by truck and it just wasn't feasible anymore.

The railroad had outlived its usefulness.

- 1983, the Highline is declared abandoned at 93 years old.

The first section from Deadwood down to Custer in 83, then Custer down to Edgemont in 86.

- And I, I had the opportunity to ride in in the engine on the last run back down to, I got off at Ratchford and, but it was a great privilege to do that with the Highline crew.

- Highline operations were gone, but questions still lingered.

- Obviously the locals wanted that land for it to be part of their grazing properties or to build homes on or whatever.

I mean, obviously it's one of the best right of ways through the Black Hills.

So I mean, a lot of folks, and even counties and other agencies wanted to use it for roads.

But the company that was chosen to scrap out the line by the Burlington Northern was looking at it simply as a financial win-win by scrapping the rail, the ties, even some of the bridges and everything.

But the prevailing thought by certain folks was to make it into a recreation trail because there was a group founded in, a lot of it was done in Wisconsin called the Rails to Trails Conservancy.

Some of the folks that were riding bikes in the Black Hills and everything else, they got really got behind it.

They asked me to help with some of the photos that I had shot of the trains on there to tell the history.

And that group really started lobbying the state of South Dakota to make this a reality.

And with all their work and tens of thousands of dollars of their own money, they put together a group and an organization that the state of South Dakota recognized.

And by 1989, and then the early eight 1990s, governor George Mickelson at that time got behind it, got the game fishing parks behind it, and it turned into the George s Mickelson Trail that we know today.

- Today the Mickelson Trail averages up to 70,000 visitors a year.

Sections of where the Burlington rolled through the hills can now be experienced in a different way.

- I guess I've always thought if it couldn't be a railroad line, it was nice to have it as a trail that would have really nice interpretive panels, which it does.

And a lot of the history is preserved in those.

What was the railroad like?

What were the people like?

What were some of the catastrophes that occurred on the railroad?

And everything?

As long as it's interpreted correctly or at least interpreted in a fashion that some people are gonna be interested in, it's a win-win.

- While the era of passenger trains in South Dakota has passed, the historic 1880 train aims to keep the experience alive.

Tickets, please thank you so much.

From its start in 1957, the 1880 train has seen countless passengers.

In the summertime, its steam locomotive operates a daily service from Hill City to Keystone.

And in the winter it switches over to diesel for special holiday rides.

Whether it's the shootout, reenactments, or scenic views, many South Dakotans share nostalgic memories of their rides on the 1880 train.

- They like to pretend they're in the 1880.

They tell 'em about the air conditioning open, the windows move once we move and the heating system works the same way.

Shut the doors and windows and breathe heavily.

Look at that, the cowboy car's almost empty.

Ah, - Being a host on the train is just lots and lots of fun.

Of course, riding the train, the novelty of riding a steam train between Hill City and Keystone, the novelty kind of wears off.

But the people are just such fun.

We meet people from all over the country, foreign countries, the people really are fun to, to be with every day.

- If we didn't have the railroads and somebody would invent them today, the government would fall all over itself to build railroads all over the country.

And it's a great pity.

We don't have them.

They, they were an enormous part of our heritage for I suppose 150 years.

They tied the country together.

They, they opened up the west.

There wouldn't have been any west without the railroads.

And the memory of what these things did and how they did it is important.

- It's an experience that one person can have or a whole family can have.

It.

There's something common about it.

There's something that we all can experience in our own way, shape, or form about the power, the history, and just the, the fun of railroading.

And luckily we still have it here in the Black Hills.

- Yay.

Good job.

Some little girl, I stopped up here after, after the train had come in and a little girl says, Hey, there's that old man that waved us on the train.

I said, boy, she sure was right.

There's that old man.

- Of course, in those days you could buy a, a, a candy bar that would cost you 50 cents today for a penny.

And so it, it was a genuine sacrifice when you put a penny on the railroad track.

I always wanted to put a silver dollar on the railroad track, see what would happen to it.

But I never had a silver dollar.

I could spare that much.

- The best part I liked was working the telegraph wire.

I would just love to get on a wire with some of their old telegrapher and just burn up that wire.

I, - One time we did that and my brother and I and another guy were, were skiing and Johnny got off the train to, to get some wine and the train took off without him.

So, so that was another adventure that we had.