While driving through the tiny town of Plummer, Idaho today, I noticed that the St. Maries River Railroad's Switcher was in town, but that Union Pacific's Plummer Turn had not arrived yet (the two trains exchange cars in Plummer before returning to their points of origin). With the exchange being a tad later than normal, and with an unusually long train for the return trip to St. Maries, I decided to drive down to the trestle over Benewah Lake in Heyburn State Park. Beneath a sky filled with smoke from wildfires all across the Northwest, a single ex-Milwaukee Road GP9 gingerly eases a 27 car train of empty lumber cars off the bottom of the 1% downgrade that this train has been slowly descending for the past hour and across the trestle. This bridge is on the former Milwaukee Road main line, where there were once several freight trains and passenger trains per day, including the famous "Olympian Hiawatha" streamliner.
