GREAT FALLS, Mont. — A Montana short line is suing a utility company over a November 2021 wildfire that caused significant damage to the railroad.
Central Montana Rail, an 84-mile railroad based in Denton, Mont., is suing NorthWestern Energy over damage from a fire that largely destroyed the town of Denton, as well as a 172-foot timber trestle and 5.2 miles of track, the Billings Gazette reports. The railroad’s headquarters building was also damaged beyond repair.
The lawsuit, transferred this week to U.S. District Court in Great Falls after originally being filed in state court, alleges negligence on the part of the Sioux Falls, S.D.-based utility, and that NorthWestern is liable “for all economic damages … and actual and tangible restoration costs” resulting from the fire. An investigation found that grassland was set on fire by a NorthWestern power line.
Damage was in the millions of dollars, and the loss of rail service while the line was repaired brought significant financial hardship to grain farmers who rely on the Central Montana to transport their crops, the Gazette reports.
The railroad operates on trackage acquired by the state when Burlington Northern ended service in 1983. Most of the railroad’s route was built as part of the Milwaukee Road’s line to Great Falls; the southernmost portion, to Moccasin, Mont., where the Central Montana interchanges with BNSF, was a Great Northern branch line.
First off: “Most of the railroad’s route was built by the Milwaukee Road’s line to Great Falls;” Tremendous proofreading by the team at TRAINS!
Twice in the article, TRAINS attributes content to the Billings Gazette, so I guess the fact that the Gazette article is fantastically inaccurate kind of gets them off the hook. But it also lets everyone know that TRAINS (in this case) isn’t doing any actual reporting.
From the Gazette article:
“Denton-based Central Montana Railroad operates a short line track in Judith Basin, Fergus, and Choteau counties.” There isn’t a Choteau County in Montana. The name of the county is spelled: Chouteau. Montanans know that the town of Choteau is the county seat of Teton County (northwest of Great Falls).
“Central Montana Rail is no stranger to struggle. In 2011, Judith River flooding severely buckled one of the railroad’s key trestles. The damage meant Central Montana couldn’t run the length of its 87-mile track. For years, the train’s operation kept grain elevators in Denton and Geraldine open, which in turn kept the elevators’ host communities relevant to Central Montana’s farm economy.
Repairing the track cost millions of dollars. Without the railroad, farmers lost 30 cents a bushel trucking wheat and barley to elevators in Moore or Moccasin with rail service to coastal grain terminals in Washington. The region produces about 3 million bushels of grain annually. The railroad’s half-dozen 1950s-era locomotives move much of the crop. The crew is from Denton.
The rail line Central Montana operates on was one part of the Northern Montana Division of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Pacific Railroad, which the Milwaukee Road abandoned in 1980 as it went bankrupt. BNSF took over Milwaukee’s routes and serviced the Central Montana region briefly but abandoned the route after a couple of years. The state acquired the track in 1983 when BNSF pulled out.”
What really happened:
BNSF deeded the trackage to the state in 1984, not 1983. The line was never abandoned. The impetus for the change was a wooden bridge just east of Spring Creek Jct. that was unsafe and would have cost millions to replace. A cheaper alternative to serve Lewistown was to build a new railroad (some of it on abandoned Milwaukee Road right of way) from BN’s Great Falls-Laurel main line (at a station called “Sipple”, just like one on the Milwaukee Road in the same area) to Moore. BN kept the part of the line from Moore to Lewistown. As a result of an alternate route to Lewistown then being established, the Moccasin-Spring Creek Jct.-Geraldine section was turned over to the State of Montana to operate as the Central Montana Railroad. As an aside, the Moore-to-Lewistown trackage was abandoned in 2003 with the nearest “railhead” for Fergus County being at Moore.
Part of the agreement was that, basically, BN (later BNSF) would subsidize every car of grain originating at Geraldine and Denton for movement to BN/BNSF interchange at Moccasin with the shippers in effect paying the same rate as cars originating at Moccasin on BN/BNSF.
The state never upgraded the railroad to accommodate 143-ton cars. Eventually BNSF was paying about $1,000 (if varied by year) per car (132-ton max) to CMR to move to interchange. In 2009, BNSF took CMR to court demanding their specifying their Rule 11 tariff (basically the cost of moving the cars to interchange) and they refused to do so, so it went to an arbitration panel which ruled BNSF didn’t have to pay the per-car subsidy. By this time, (2009) shipments of grain off the CMR were already dropping to about 500 cars annually (too few to support any short line, not to mention one with as many high bridges, tunnels, and slipout problems as this railroad). The reality was that farmers were already trucking their product to area shuttle grain train facilities at Moccasin/Grove (starting in 2001), Carter (2008) and Moore (2009). In addition to not being able to load 143-ton cars, all the traffic is basically backhauled up to 87 miles southeast (from Geraldine) to Moccasin before heading northwest on the parallel BNSF route to Great Falls. In the 3+ years the railroad was out of service at the Judith River bridge (2011-2014), additional shuttle facilities were constructed at Tunis and Kershaw (near Fort Benton). That “The railroad’s half-dozen 1950s-era locomotives move much of the crop” hasn’t been true for two decades at least. Nearly all grain shipments ended when the per-car subsidy ended as a result of the 2009 arbitration ruling, and none have occurred since the Judith River bridge was opened in late 2014. Since then, the only real revenue for the railroad has been car storage, including many cars which are trapped west of the bridge which was destroyed by the 2021 fire. The cost to reopen the Judith River bridge was $4 million from federal and state grants, promoted heavily by the governor. The local economic development organization (in Lewistown) applied for TIGER grants at the time also claiming the railroad was needed for grain movement. Evidently, the DOT knew this was a lie and denied their request on two occasions. The main force behind fixing the bridge was to keep the beloved “Charlie Russell Chew-Choo” dinner/event train operating from west of Lewistown to Denton, but this operation hardly pays for the cost of maintaining the route.
One last excerpt from the Gazette story: “The CMR, as the railroad is known, indicates in its lawsuit that the state won’t repair the track damage done by West Wind Fire.” Some more elaboration on this would have been nice. While it is now obvious that the line should have been abandoned in 1980 or 1984 rather than to have been the money pit it has been since, it also shows that the State of Montana was never interested in providing the financial resources to give the line a chance to be viable. With loaded traffic (from Geraldine) needing to move nearly 90 miles in the opposite direction of destination and a 1.5% ruling grade (more than on BNSF all the way from Moccasin to West Coast ports) again loaded cars, viability never was possible to begin with, so the state is either negligent in creating the shortline to begin with or starving it to death, take your pick.
Even if the railroad gets money to rebuild the burned bridge to access stored cars, the part of the route from Arrow Creek (west of Denton) to Geraldine has so many slipouts that it can’t even be used for car storage and will never see a train again.
Thanks Mr. Meyer for the additional information. Very good reading and interesting.
Are we seeing 3 – 5 wooden bridges burned a year?