- P.O. Box 1319, Livingston, MT 59047 - 406.222.2300

The Livingston Depot Center's 2010 museum season will run from Saturday, May 29 through approximately September 06, 2010 (dates are slightly different each year.) We're open Monday-Saturday 9-5 and Sunday 1-5.  Admission is very modest ($0 for adults, $0 for kids and seniors 62+) -- and free to members.  Our exhibits this year are:

Special Traveling Exhibition: On The Road Again Coming in 2010: Sweat & Steel"
Railroad workers paintings by Livingston artist, David Swanson

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Rails Across the Rockies: A Century of People and Places

Railroads played a critical role in the growth of the American West and modern Montana. Three of the five transcontinental railroads ran through this state.  Rails across the Rockies is our primary museum exhibit, telling the story of regional railroad history in a variety of sub-exhibits. For most of its first century, the U.S. was a society hugging the Atlantic Coast and spreading tentatively west of the Appalachians, but after the Civil War, interest in the sparsely populated West grew as railroads, the newest technology in transportation, inched toward the Pacific. In 1869, the first transcontinental railroad crossed the nation through its center, and the journey from East to West became a relatively safe and comfortable trip of a few days instead of the once arduous cross-country horse trek or lengthy voyage around South America.

             

Now the race was on to tie the rest of the remote West to the centers of population. In 1883, the Northern Pacific Railroad connected its eastern and western divisions, west of Livingston, forever binding Montana to the population centers in the Midwest and on the west coast. Between 1883 and 1909, two more transcontinental rail links crossed Montana. The railroads needed to fill both their passenger and freight trains and thus came to place a high priority on convincing settlers to move west, as well as on finding and promoting tourist destinations. Livingston was a key center for the Northern Pacific, both because it lay midway between the NP's endpoints at Seattle and St. Paul and because it was the first railroad gateway to Yellowstone National Park. Livingston also sat at the beginning of the Rocky Mountain passes the NP's workers had paid so dearly to cross.

 

                

Once the railroad entered the mountains, the problem of steep grades, tunnels, and snowbound passes replaced the relative ease of crossing the Great Plains, both in construction and in operations. As you pass through these exhibits, you can begin to appreciate the extraordinary people who by skill, brawn, and often sheer will power created one of the greatest engineering feats in human history, -- the rails across the Rockies.