If you've ever boated the northern portion of Castle Rock Lake, you've probably seen it.
A long railroad crossing stretches across the water between the Juneau County and Adams County sides of the Wisconsin River. Trains still cross it today, but the history of this crossing goes back more than a century.
In fact, here's the part I love:
The railroad was here nearly 40 years before Castle Rock Lake existed.
What we now see as a railroad crossing over Castle Rock Lake began as a railroad crossing over the Wisconsin River.
Adams County waited decades for a railroad
It's hard to imagine now, but Adams County was once the last county in Wisconsin without a railroad running through it.
For decades, local leaders tried to change that.
Railroad routes through Adams County were proposed as far back as the 1850s. Another proposed route appeared in the 1870s, and in 1892–93 the Chicago & North Western surveyed a possible line from Princeton toward Necedah by way of Friendship.
That early survey proposed crossing the Wisconsin River just south of the mouth of the Big Roche-A-Cri Creek at a location then known as Carmon's Rock in the Town of Strong's Prairie.
But like several railroad proposals before it, nothing was built.
Then the railroad finally got serious
In 1909, Chicago & North Western survey crews returned.
One crew worked east from Carmon's Rock while another worked northwest from Oxford. By November 1909, agents for the Milwaukee, Sparta & North Western Railroad, a C&NW subsidiary, were acquiring options for the right-of-way.
Construction began in 1910.
The new route was a major undertaking. C&NW wanted a faster and more efficient route across Wisconsin because its existing route through Madison, Baraboo, Elroy and Sparta involved difficult grades and had become less suitable for increasingly heavy railroad traffic.
The new route became known as the Adams Cutoff, or sometimes the Air Line.
And one rather large obstacle stood in its way:
The Wisconsin River.
They built a temporary bridge first
This is one of the coolest details I found.
Rather than waiting for the permanent bridge to be finished, construction crews built a temporary bridge across the Wisconsin River.
Materials and steel were brought by train from Necedah and assembled into a structure strong enough to carry heavy freight trains.
By February 1911, track had been laid across the temporary bridge and into Adams County.
That was a huge moment locally.
On March 4, 1911, the Adams County Press announced that the county could no longer claim the distinction of being Wisconsin's only county without a railroad.
The permanent steel bridge followed
While trains and construction equipment could use the temporary crossing, crews continued building the permanent structure.
The historical account describes it as a steel-truss bridge, completed by the end of the summer of 1911.
Track laying east from the Wisconsin River began on May 15.
Crews were reportedly laying approximately two miles of track per day as they worked toward Friendship. The tracks reached the new railroad yards south of Friendship on May 27.
Imagine that scene for a second.
This was 1911. Adams County had waited decades for a railroad, and suddenly crews were coming across the Wisconsin River and laying track at two miles a day.
People actually came out to watch.
Schoolchildren were even given an afternoon off so they could see the tracks arrive.
The railroad helped create the City of Adams
There's another piece of local history tied directly to this project.
The railroad didn't run directly through the established Village of Friendship.
Instead, C&NW built its huge railroad yard about a mile south.
The yard site was substantial. Historical accounts describe crews leveling a strip roughly two miles long, with space for as many as 24 tracks, along with plans for a roundhouse, powerhouse, water tank and coal facilities.
Development followed the railroad.
The community surrounding the new railroad operation eventually became the City of Adams. The Village of Friendship's own history notes that the separate community formed in 1912 as railroad workers moved into the area.
So this bridge didn't merely carry trains across a river.
The railroad it belonged to fundamentally changed Adams County.
Regular train service began in December 1911
By December, the route was ready.
Historical records differ by about a day on the precise beginning of service, but contemporary local-history accounts place regular service around December 11–12, 1911.
One account records the first morning freight leaving the Friendship depot at 6:00 a.m. and arriving in Milwaukee at 10:45 a.m.
For a county that had spent decades watching railroads bypass it, that was a pretty dramatic change.
And eventually some VERY famous trains crossed here
The Adams route became an important C&NW connection between Milwaukee/Chicago and the Twin Cities.
Beginning in 1935, that included the legendary Twin Cities 400.
The train's name came from the original marketing claim of traveling roughly 400 miles between Chicago and the Twin Cities in about 400 minutes.
A 1941 timetable shows the train stopping in Adams at 6:09 p.m., then reaching Wyeville at 6:38 before continuing toward Eau Claire, St. Paul and Minneapolis.
Passenger service on the Twin Cities 400 continued until 1963.
So while you're sitting on the pontoon looking at that railroad crossing, you're looking at a route once traveled by one of C&NW's premier passenger trains.
Then somebody built a lake around it
Okay, that's simplifying things a bit. 😂
But essentially, yes.
When the railroad crossing was constructed in 1911, the landscape looked very different.
Wisconsin River Power Company says the land that would eventually become the Castle Rock Flowage consisted of farmland, prairie and forested knolls divided by the meandering Wisconsin River.
Construction on Castle Rock Dam began in the late 1940s.
The river channel was closed on November 9, 1949, and Castle Rock's first generating unit went online August 1, 1950. As water backed up behind the dam, the Wisconsin River expanded over the surrounding lowlands and created the approximately 16,600-acre Castle Rock Flowage.
The Wisconsin DNR notes that the new flowage covered much of the land where the communities of Germantown and Werner had existed.
But the railroad remained.
That's why today it appears as this remarkable railroad crossing stretching across the lake.
The railroad is still active
The old Chicago & North Western system eventually became part of Union Pacific after UP acquired C&NW in 1995. The former Adams route continues to function as part of Union Pacific's Wisconsin railroad network.
There's also evidence that portions of the original route were engineered with future expansion in mind. Historical railroad documentation says much of the line was built wide enough to accommodate a second track, even where only one track was initially installed. Photographs and rail-history accounts specifically describe the Castle Rock/Wisconsin River crossing as a once-double-track bridge.
And trains aren't the only reason locals know the bridge.
Wisconsin River Power Company actually lists the railroad bridge crossing as one of Castle Rock Flowage's locally known fishing hot spots, because the underwater structure attracts fish.
So after more than a century, the crossing is still part of life on the lake.
The part of Castle Rock Lake history hiding in plain sight
That's what makes this one of my favorite landmarks on Castle Rock.
You can boat underneath or alongside the railroad crossing and think you're looking at something that was built because of the lake.
It wasn't.
The bridge belongs to an entirely different chapter of Central Wisconsin history.
Railroad surveys here date to the 1890s.
Construction finally began in 1910.
Trains crossed the Wisconsin River in 1911.
The railroad helped give birth to the City of Adams.
The Twin Cities 400 later traveled this route.
Then, almost four decades after the railroad arrived, Castle Rock Lake formed around it.
And more than 115 years after the railroad first reached Adams County, trains are still crossing this part of the Wisconsin River.
That's a pretty incredible piece of history to be looking at from the boat.