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Livingston Model Railroad Club

Livingston Museum Association

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.    

Film in Montana

Successor to the popular "2001:  A Montana Film Odyssey", this updated collection displays and narrates the surprising wealth of filmmaking history in the area, from well-known successes like "The Horse Whisperer" and "A River Runs Through It" to smaller productions and commercial shoots.   Filmmaking in the state has attracted interest from economic as well as artistic angles and become an active element at nearby Montana State University.  This exhibit spans a host of productions and talented workers to reveal a surprisingly significant ingredient in regional culture.  
 

The Livingston Depot in History and Architecture

Two Rivers:  Downstream

     Complementing the main exhibits for the 2006 bicentennial of Clark’s passage along the Yellowstone is the special exhibit “Two Rivers: Downstream” by native Montana artists Jody Menge and Robert Spannring.  This multimedia presentation  examining the course of the rivers through past, present, and future and asks us to examine their relation to us and ours to them.  

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