Montevideo Station: The Milwaukee Road's Minnesota Terminus

The brick depot standing beside the tracks in Montevideo is the last building in town the railroad ever built, and it dates to nineteen oh one. The Milwaukee Road, formally the Chicago, Milwaukee, and Saint Paul Railway, ran its lines through western Minnesota in the late eighteen hundreds, stitching together small grain communities along the Minnesota River valley. Passenger service through Montevideo ran for nearly seven decades before finally ending in nineteen sixty-nine, a casualty of the automobile age.

The Milwaukee Road itself collapsed into bankruptcy in nineteen seventy-seven, a major railroad failure that cost the line most of its route mileage. A group of civic volunteers formed the Milwaukee Road Heritage Center here in nineteen ninety-two to rescue the depot from oblivion. Today the site holds a two-hundred-ton crane, vintage passenger and freight cars, a nineteen thirty-nine diesel switcher, and a working model railroad layout that re-creates the busy yards of Montevideo at the height of the Milwaukee Road era.