The Keystone run-around. The Black Hills Central Railroad's depot at Keystone, SD is located at the bottom of a narrow, rocky canyon, which is barely wide enough for the railroad, Old Hill City Road and Battle Creek. Back in 1972, the famous flash floods in the whole region around Rapid City basically wiped out what was the old Chicago Burlington & Quincy branch line here....and just about everything else as well. At that point, the CB&Q basically abandoned the right-of-way. It was almost 30 years before the Warder family, the current owners of the Black Hills Central, were able to build back into town as a tourist railroad. The current station platform at Keystone is a rather robust-looking concrete structure that looks to have been designed to weather any future floods. Here, the trains pull in, discharge passengers and the locomotives take on water before running around to the west end of the consist, for the bunker-first run back to Hill City. In this image, Conductor Fred rides the pilot of Locomotive #108 as she backs down the run-around track on the first trip of the day.
