Tracking the DM&E's big dream: Chapter 13

Livestock trucker Kenneth Anderson, a former mayor and longtime city council member in Tracy, Minn., is among those who are skeptical the coal train project will ever be built.

It's mid-afternoon as I cross into Minnesota on U.S. 14. Plots of wheat, soybeans and corn dot the flat landscape in neat squares. Farmers are finishing up the harvest and depositing grain in trucks that will haul it to one of dozens of elevators, nearly all of them situated along railroad tracks.

For every two or three active farmsteads in this part of the state, it seems, there is one abandoned one. Dark, paintless houses, rusting windmills, topless silos -- all being slowly reclaimed by the earth.

A few hundred yards off the highway, a farmer is turning the soil in a wheat field. A flock of blackbirds hovers over the plow waiting for newly exposed worms and grubs.

My next stop is Tracy, one of the many small Minnesota cities along U.S. 14 to have given their blessings to the DM&E project.

Schieffer has spent hundreds of hours traveling up and down the line, often in a restored Pullman passenger car called the Pioneer, attempting to gain approval for the project from town councils, ranchers, farmers and other property owners.

Along the way, he has promised everything from fire hydrants to underground tunnels for cattle to cross from one side of a bisected ranch to the other.

Tracy, a farm town of about 2,000 people, is probably best known for the tornado that roared through town in 1968, killing nine people and flattening much of the town. At 74, truck driver Kenneth Anderson is one of a dwindling number of Tracy residents who still remembers the tornado and its aftermath. This afternoon he's dressed in coveralls and a seed cap and is herding hogs at the town's Swift stockyards into a semi trailer.

Anderson, who served 21 years on the Tracy City Council and four years as mayor, says many residents are worried about the safety of children who must walk or ride buses across the tracks to get to school. He's also concerned about the dozens of grain and livestock trucks that cross the tracks, especially in the fall.

At the same time, Anderson is skeptical the DM&E project will ever get done.

"How old are you?" Anderson asks, sizing me up. "Do you think you'll live long enough to see that coal train go through?"

About 35 miles east on U.S. 14, just outside of Sleepy Eye, the afternoon light is starting to fade and Rick Losleben has just finished up a day in the fields harvesting corn. Of all the people I talked to who make their homes near the DM&E's existing line, it's Losleben who lives closest to the tracks. You have to cross the tracks from the highway to get to his family's house 40 yards or so from the line.

Every day, six or seven trains clatter by Losleben's house at 30 to 35 mph.

"I'm not sure why Dad built the house so close to the tracks," says Losleben, who grew up in the two-story white frame house and moved back in five years ago after taking over the farm from his father. "In the summer, when we've got the windows open, I can't even answer the phone when the trains go by. It's worst when they hit that horn at 3 in the morning. That's pretty annoying."

Of all the complaints Schieffer has had to deal with over the past two years while promoting the Powder River project, the train whistle is by far the most common, he says.

People don't like having conversations interrupted or being awakened in the middle of the night by the whistle, which is required by law in many places to warn pedestrians, motorists and livestock that a train is coming. And the number of whistles will at least quadruple along the route if the project is approved.

"I know it's a quality of life issue," Schieffer says, acknowledging there's little he can do about the problem. "You could go whistle free. But then you're exposing yourself to liability."

The autumn light slips into darkness as I head east through Mankato and toward Rochester. On either side of the highway the headlights of combines and tractors are burning holes into the night, as farmers race to get their corn and soybeans in before the next rain.