Tracking the DM&E's big dream: Chapter 14

There was a time when the railroad was king in Wyoming, South Dakota and Minnesota.

It was the primary long-distance mode of transporation for grain, people and livestock. Homesteaders founded towns such as Newcastle, Wasta, Philip, Huron,

Semi-trucks share loading space with railroad cars at many grain elevators in South Dakota, such as this one in Huron. Many grain farmers say their costs would increase if they had to ship all of their grain by truck.

Sleepy Eye and Tracy at neatly planned intervals along the line as drop-off and pickup points for merchandise and travelers.

The railroad is no longer king, not even in these tiny ranching and farming communities. Automobiles and the Interstate highway system saw to that. But it's still the cheapest way for many farmers to get their grain to market, and it remains an important, if not critical, economic lifeline for the small towns along the track. And many of them are barely clinging to life as the old-timers retire to Florida or Rapid City and young people move to larger towns for better-paying jobs, grocery stores and racquetball courts.

I suppose it should come as no surprise that most of the small-town residents I talked to along the route from the Powder River country to Mankato are supportive of, or at least indifferent toward, the DM&E and its grandiose dreams. Not when they're being told the likely alternative is no railroad at all.

"You get out here in the Midwest and you've got more time than money," says Cleo Johnston of Huron. "So what's the difference if you have to wait a few more minutes for a train?"

But small towns will not decide the fate of the DM&E project. Nor will ranchers and farmers who live along the proposed route, many of whom fiercely oppose the project. There is clear consensus on that point.

The three-person Surface Transportation Board, the federal panel that regulates railroads, has the obvious clout. It could kill the project as early as this month by ruling in its draft environmental impact statement that the project poses too much of a risk to the environment. That does not appear likely. The board has already given the project a go-ahead from a business standpoint, despite the DM&E's uncertain financing. The panel's implicit mission is to find ways to facilitate interstate commerce, not impede it.

But there are other key players who will have a say in whether the project lives or dies, including the cities of Rochester and Mankato, Mayo Clinic, the Sierra Club, the Lakota Indians and federal and state lawmakers. They could throw repeated roadblocks in front of the project in the form of lawsuits and legislation, waging a years-long battle of attrition.

Project opponents in Wyoming, South Dakota and western Minnesota agree that Rochester is the epicenter of the effort to derail it. They're hoping Mayo Clinic, one of the project's most fervent and best-bankrolled opponents, can use its name recognition and lobbying clout in Washington to get it killed.

"In the end, Mayo is going to have the biggest say in this," says Paul Johnson, co-chairman of the Brookings-based Coal Train Issues Coalition, "because (Schieffer) has admitted that if he's forced to build a bypass around Rochester, the plan is dead."

Schieffer has also acknowledged that the railroad's investors will not wait around forever, and that the rickety, patched-up line cannot safely operate much longer without a major overhaul.

"There is a point when we might not make it to the next year, whatever the next year is," Schieffer told me in October. "We're not the UP (United Pacific). We're a regional railroad with extraordinary day-to-day capital problems."

Time, then, could determine the fate of the Powder River project. The railroad's opponents have lots of it. Maybe Schieffer doesn't.

But he and the DM&E have other assets. They have the tracks, the trains and a vision -- a dream that begins in the coal pits of Wyoming and promises a transformation of the railroad and the region it serves.