Friends of the South Cle Elum Depot

The South Cle Elum depot stands at the heart of a former Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific division point, established in 1909 as the Milwaukee Road pushed its Pacific Extension through to Tacoma. Division points, spaced every 100 to 150 miles, were where locomotives were serviced, crews changed, and trains were sorted — and South Cle Elum was the last westbound crew change before the climb over Snoqualmie Pass toward Seattle. The yard grew to hold the depot, a roundhouse, turntable, ash pit, water tank, and a crew bunkhouse, joined by an electric substation and operators' houses after the railroad electrified around 1920. When the Milwaukee Road quit Washington in 1980, the right-of-way passed to the state in lieu of back taxes and became Iron Horse State Park in 1985, along the rail-trail now called the Palouse to Cascades State Park Trail. The yard and its surviving buildings — the roundhouse, turntable, and water tank now ruins — were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003, and the depot is operated as a museum for the park's benefit by the Cascade Rail Foundation, whose volunteers keep the memory of the Milwaukee Road in Washington alive.