The Yellowstone Valley Railroad is a

shortline railroad :''Short Line is also one of the four railroads in the American version of the popular board game Monopoly, named after the Shore Fast Line, an interurban streetcar line.'' A shortline railroad is a small or mid-sized railroad company that opera ...

in northeastern

Montana Montana () is a state in the Mountain West division of the Western United States. It is bordered by Idaho to the west, North Dakota and South Dakota to the east, Wyoming to the south, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columb ...

, also crossing into

North Dakota North Dakota () is a U.S. state in the Upper Midwest, named after the indigenous Dakota Sioux. North Dakota is bordered by the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba to the north and by the U.S. states of Minnesota to the east, So ...

. It operates two branch lines leased from the BNSF Railway in 2005 - Snowden to

Glendive Glendive is a city in and the county seat of Dawson County, Montana, United States, and home to Dawson Community College. Glendive was established by the Northern Pacific Railway when they built the transcontinental railroad across the northern ...

and Bainville to Scobey - connected by

trackage rights Railway companies can interact with and control others in many ways. These relationships can be complicated by bankruptcies. Operating Often, when a railroad first opens, it is only a short spur of a main line. The owner of the spur line may ...

over BNSF's Northern Transcon between Snowden and Bainville.

History

The northern segment, from Bainville to Scobey, was constructed by the Great Northern Railway (GN), opening to Plentywood in 1911 and Scobey in 1914. Interstate Commerce Commission, 133 I.C.C. 1 (1927): Valuation Docket No. 327, Great Northern Railway Company et al. A further extension was built to Opheim and later abandoned. The other line was built as a pair of branch lines connecting Sidney to the GN at Snowden and the Northern Pacific Railway (NP) at Glendive. The Snowden-Sidney piece was completed by the Montana Eastern Railway, a GN subsidiary, in 1915, and the remainder by the NP in 1912. Interstate Commerce Commission, 25 Val. Rep. 397 (1929): Valuation Docket No. 959, Northern Pacific Railway Company et al. Effective August 15, 2005, the YSVR leased both of these lines from the BNSF Railway, successor to the GN and NP.Yellowstone Valley Railroad
accessed February 2009

References

External links

Yellowstone Valley Railroad
{{DEFAULTSORT:Yellowstone Valley Railroad Montana railroads North Dakota railroads Watco Railway companies established in 2005 Spin-offs of the BNSF Railway