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Trains run from the Depot NOVEMBER 27 - DECEMBER 20

It’s the story of a young girl traveling by train to visit her grandparents in Duluth on Christmas Eve. The story is performed in the Railroad Museum at the Depot starting with live music and carolers against a backdrop of decorated trains and storefronts. Then take a train ride past the lights of Bentleyville and along the edge of Lake Superior with hot cocoa and cookies. A special guest will visit and have a magical gift for every passenger!

Chosen one of the “BEST Christmas Train Rides in America” by MSN www.duluthtrains.com for tickets or call 800-423-1273

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By Ken Buehler

Huge advancements in technology have always created their own language. We talk on our cellphones about 4G and now 5G networks, as if most of us know what that means. I don’t. Kodachrome gave way to the pixel. Xerox became a verb and all the bells and whistles once referred to a 1950s automobile with every imaginable feature like power windows, seats and mirrors. Now a computer software package with every imaginable option has all the bells and whistles.

But before the advancements of cellphones, digital cameras, computers and automobiles with heated cup holders, what were the bells and whistles back then? They weren’t features. They were great proclamations. Here’s what happened.

The end of the great race across America was nearly over. In a dry basin of sagebrush, surrounded on three sides by mountains, in a part of Utah little known before then, the two armies building the Transcontinental Railroad were final- ly going to meet. Promontory Point was the arbitrarily selected end zone of a high stakes game that both the Union Pacific and Central Pacific were playing to lay as much track as possible before Congress cut off their funding.

The Central Pacific reached there on April 30. However, the Californians would have to wait another week before the Union Pacific crew came into view. By May 7 only 2,500 feet of ungraded land lay between the two railroads. That afternoon CP President, and by then the Governor of California, Leland Stanford, pulled in on his private train for the next day’s celebration. Shortly after his arrival a representative of the Union Pacific told Stanford that the joining of the rails would have to wait three days until the 10th of May.

The delay was blamed on a washout blocking the train carrying UP Vice President Thomas Durant. Turns out that was just half of the story.