Back to Montana

On Leap year day - February 29 - Tammy and I returned home.   Since we were taking the train we were able to stay up late the night before and then catch up on our sleep on the train.

The train arrived at the Minot station a little early.  As seen below the train showed the effects of traveling through a winter storm in eastern North Dakota.  By the time we got to Havre, Montana the ice/snow mix had melted off.

Since this is the off season for travel the train had plenty of empty seats.  In the coach class cars I walked through it appeared that almost half the passengers were going to Williston, ND.  That opened up a lot of seats for the crowd in Williston getting on the train.  The photo below shows much of the crowd in Williston waiting for the conductor to issue them a boarding pass and then tell them which train car to get on. From my vantage point I could see quite a number of boarding passes were written for Whitefish.  Williston is no longer a sleepy quick train stop.  Almost a dozen people had earlier gotten on the train in Stanley, ND.  In the pre-oil days hardly anyone ever got on the train in Stanley.  I don't think Stanley even has a ticket agent at the station.

Fracking sand was stacked along the train tracks.  Here is a small stack in Williston.

Once the train entered Montana the conductor announced that smoking and public drunkenness would not be tolerated on the train.  Any smokers or drunks would get kicked off the train at the next stop.  This is the first time in my many decades of riding the train that the train officials have announced that public drunkenness would not be tolerated.  The profile of the typical passenger has changed now with all the workers riding between western ND and western Montana.  I don't know how big a problem drunkenness is now.  Later I noticed only one guy on the train who looked to be drunk.


Here are a few photos of the Sweetgrass Hills in Montana.  It was dark by the time we reached the Rocky Mountains.

The train was on time when we reached Whitefish. It was a very smooth train trip this time.


Once Tammy and I got home we found the house to be cold.  When we left I had turned the furnace's thermostat down to 55 degrees but a thermometer inside the house now read 40 degrees. It wasn't just that the air was cold in the house, everything felt cold to the touch.  Fortunately nothing in the house froze.

The furnace's thermostat had acted up in the past - though it worked fine the day before we left - and it seems as if thermostat hadn't triggered the furnace for some or all of the time we were gone.  Once I "jiggered" the thermostat and got the furnace to come on, it ran a long time.  Tammy wasn't happy at how cold the house was.  She sat bundled up in coats and sweaters in front of the furnace while she checked her email.

The next morning the thermometer read 45 degrees.  Definitely time for a new thermostat.  I got up earlier than Tammy and lit a fire in the woodstove.