The brick building on the left, with the loading dock, at one time housed the offices and warehouse of the Montana Liquor Control Board. For decades, every bottle of spirits legally sold in the state passed through this building, and was stamped:

Unloading cases of liquor from railroad cars was heavy, noisy work for the warehouse men, who worked on the platform in all weather. The railcars were unloaded on the west side, the trucks were loaded on the east. The walls of the warehouse lunchroom were cheerfully papered with pin-ups fom girlie magaznes, something which would no doubt be forbidden today.

Looking south along the old Great Northern Railway right-of-way, 1999, before the development of the Great Northern Town Center. The building with the zig-zag roofline is the Helena Branch of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, occuping the site of the old G. N. Depot. Untold numbers of people and tons of freight traveled over this ground.

The Lyndale overpass seen from the Great Northern right-of-way, 1999. The overpass consisted of two side-by-side bridges (1935 and 1962). Along the tracks beyond the overpass, there was once a notorious hobo "jungle" where transients camped. Its reputation was so bad by the late 1940s, that some Helena citizens protested the building of Memorial Park in its present location because of its close proximity to the "jungle".

About the 1947-1949 Freedom Train, from freedomtrain.org:

"The 1947 - 1949 Freedom Train was conceived as an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of American citizenship at a time when the nation was finding a new and central role in world affairs. Americans had experienced a decade of pre-war economic Depression. They made sacrifices in foreign lands throughout World War II. They were entering an age of post-war prosperity with opportunities unknown in all of human history. And they were unsure of the reassurances at the sudden dawn of the nuclear age and Soviet expansion into countries just liberated from fascist oppression in Europe and Asia.

"With President Harry Truman in the lead, some in the national government believed Americans should pause and reflect, to experience a 'rededication' to the principles that founded their country.

"President Truman loved trains, and his use of the 'whistle stop' campaign train still epitomizes this icon of the electoral process. Attorney General Tom Clark and his staff proposed a train that would travel to communities in every state of the nation, taking with it dozens of 'documents of liberty.

"The Freedom Train was temporary home to America's most precious documents and other unique treasures, including the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, one of the 13 original copies of the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, the Iwo Jima flag, the German and Japanese surrender documents that ended World War II, and much more.

"The Freedom Train's displayed cargo included a precious original of the Magna Carta, written in the year 1215 as the first guarantee of the individual Rights of Englishmen that a King could not deny."