News

The town of Bill, Wyoming is on one of the busiest train lines in the world in terms of tonnage. It's also a crew-change station for the Union Pacific railroad. At 2 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon, railroaders roll into town looking for a place to sleep.

Nonetheless, since WW II the town has had only a handful of residents, "Two or five residents, depending on whether you counted pets," according to Dan Barry in the NYT . "But recent developments have increased the population to at least 11, so that now Bill is more a dot than a speck, and could be justified if one day it started to call itself William."

Those developments are manifest in the town's newly built 112-room hotel and a 24-hour diner.

Day and night, those trains, creating a consuming sound undeterred by special curtains and thick walls. It is a sound of money being made, lights turning on and the disturbed earth rumbling at your feet. It is the sound of a dot called Bill, too busy to sleep.

Are there any lessons here for railroaders in HumCo?

Image from the NYT