Photo of the Week #004

Tunnel #3 on the Highline of South Dakota

Looks like I forgot again this week to post a photo until Tuesday night, oh well.  Anyways, this week it's a pretty simply photo, but one which is special to me.  The photo above is Tunnel #3 on the Edgemont-Deadwood CBQ branch known as the "Highline".  The tracks were tore up in the 1980's, but the route remains as one of the most impressive "rails to trails" projects in the nation.  114 Miles of black hills wilderness, 4 tunnels, 120+ bridges, and small communities along the former route are what visitors are greeted to when taking this route.

Tunnel #3 is the most impressive because it has a bridge outside each entrance as the creek wraps around the large shale outcropping to the left of the photo out of frame.  The trains, of course, didn't have the luxury of making extremely sharp turns and the rock outcropping was too deep to safely make a cut, so a tunnel was installed.  Three other tunnels are found on the Route, #1 and #2 are South of Mystic and #4 is North of this one.

"So why," you may ask, "is some abandoned railroad track so special?"  Well, the answer is actually quite simple.  The Highline through the Black Hills is quite simply one the most pleasant railroad routes I've ever seen. There are no towering Mountains like Colorado, no deserts like in the Southwest, no skyscrapers, and no large water crossings.  What is this route does have is very well balanced scenery.  Granite outcroppings and low mountains are mixed with meadows, small wheat fields, old mines and logging camps.  If there was every a railroad paradise, the Black Hills are it.

Not to mention that the CBQ ran Mallet locomotives through the Hills along with a slew of other engines going back from the Moguls and Americans of the 1800's to SD9's in the 1980's.  There's real history in the Black Hills, a history that is under-represented in the story of American railroads.  It's a shame too, because if any state had to represent the history of the country, South Dakota would be it.

Of course, this is still just a picture of a tunnel, one piece of a much larger story.

The photo was taken at pretty typical settings for daylight: 17mm, f/8, ISO 100, 1/50th second.  No tripod necessary, although I would like to have one with for morning and evening photos.

Until next time!

--James Willmus