What’s next in the push to restore southern Montana’s passenger rail service

This story is excerpted from the MT Lowdown, a weekly newsletter digest containing original reporting and analysis published every Friday. Last week the Federal Railroad Administration announced that it awarded a $500,000 grant to the Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority to explore the feasibility of restoring passenger rail service along the North Coast Hiawatha route, which passed through many of Montana’s largest cities along its Chicago-to-Seattle route before the service was scrapped four decades ago. The planning grant will allow the authority, which formed in 2020 under an obscure,