The Day the Trains Stopped

In nineteen sixty, the last passenger train pulled into the West Yellowstone depot, and the economic foundation that had built the town for fifty-two years disappeared. Train service had been declining for years as the private automobile took over American travel. The Oregon Short Line had carried tens of thousands of visitors per summer in its peak years during the nineteen twenties and thirties, but by the late nineteen fifties the numbers had dropped to a fraction of that. The railroad ran its branch to West Yellowstone at a loss rather than a profit, and it eventually stopped.

The railroad's exit left the depot campus and its surrounding buildings without a clear function. For a few years the future of the physical infrastructure was genuinely uncertain. The dining lodge and dormitories sat largely idle. The depot itself changed hands several times before eventually becoming the Museum of the Yellowstone.

What saved West Yellowstone was the same force that had ended the railroad era: the American love affair with the car. The postwar highway boom and the surge in summer automobile vacations had already been building a car-based tourist economy alongside the railroad since the nineteen forties. New motels, gas stations, and auto-oriented businesses had been expanding on Canyon Street for years before the last train arrived. When the trains stopped, those businesses absorbed the visitors who had been arriving by rail. The town did not require a decade of reinvention. It had already been quietly becoming what it is today, a highway and snowmobile gateway built around the world's first national park, with the old depot sitting as a historical artifact in the middle of it.