RailsWest: Council Bluffs and the Railroads That Built the West
Near Omaha, Iowa
Council Bluffs was where the transcontinental railroad began, and the old Rock Island Line depot that now houses the RailsWest Railroad Museum is one of the last physical traces of the rail empire that once crossed every track in town. The original depot was built in eighteen sixty-nine, when the Rock Island was one of the dominant carriers in the Midwest, and the current brick building replaced it in eighteen ninety-nine. At its busiest, the depot was shared by the Rock Island and the Milwaukee Road, two railroads that together served the entire middle of the continent.
Passenger service ended around nineteen seventy-one, and the Rock Island's freight operations collapsed entirely by nineteen eighty. The building sat vacant for five years before the Pottawattamie County Historical Society leased it in nineteen eighty-five. Today the museum preserves eight railroads' history, displays Railway Mail Service artifacts, and runs an extensive model railroad layout.
Outside sit Union Pacific Locomotive Eight Fourteen and a Burlington Route locomotive, under the open sky of the bluffs.
