Perched along the south shore of stump-studded Rattlesnake Lake, Cedar Falls was really two settlements: Seattle City Light plopped down a slice of residential city living right out of the turn of the century, with substantial homes, front yards with large trees, a park, and ornate electric streetlights for its employees who maintained the nearby Chester V. Morse dam and powerplant. Right next door was the Milwaukee’s Cedar Falls, a depot, brick power substation, bunkhouse and beanery, and perhaps a dozen frame houses situated between the transcontinental mainline and the branch to Everett.

With little else in Cedar Falls besides the railroad, its comings and goings took top priority--certainly that was the case for the young paperboy who delivered the morning Seattle Post-Intelligencer in the late 1950s. Jerome Bretschneider was scion of signal maintainer Andy Bretschneider, living in the company homes near the west switch. Each morning, the flurry of railroad activity in Cedar Falls threatened to distract him from his appointed rounds: locals from Enumclaw and Everett worked around each other in the yard, setting out loads for finished Weyeaheuser lumber for the east and gathering up empties, then scooting back down their branches before the arrival of #262, the lone scheduled eastbound transcontinental freight, which made a quick pickup, cut in its four-unit boxcab helper, then left town. Cedar then returned to quiet for the rest of the day.

By the late 1970s, Cedar Falls was a much quieter place than it had been a decade earlier. Electric operations ended in 1972, and with it the helper assignment, Locotrol diesels taming the mountain grade. The Enumclaw branch had since been abandoned and trackage right swaps with Burlington Northern now found trains to Everett running over the old NP Sumas line out of Renton and BN’s North Bend local using the Milwaukee east of Maple Valley. The yard, once filled with loads awaiting movement east, was used mainly for empty storage and tonnage reductions on eastbound trains. But in the depot, little had changed: long-time agent-operator Jim Irvin still worked days, roadmaster Cecil Geelhart still ran the section crews. And the afternoon operator looked awfully familiar: Jerry Bretschneider, the one-time paper boy, had been a Milwaukee employee since 1968 and a train order operator at Cedar Falls since 1973. The best part was, Andy Bretschneider was still the Cedar Falls signal maintainer. Father and son, working side by side, keeping the railroad running.

There were certain benefits to life in Cedar Falls, and its isolation had a lot to do with that. It was as if one was back in time thirty years before, in a little corner of the Milwaukee Road that the head office in Chicago forgot about. Few folks bothered to drive into Cedar Falls, so visitors were rare--apart from the occasional teen-aged railroad photographer who insisted in car-camping on the depot platform, necessitating a 3am visit from the local sheriff. The daily yard check gave Jerry a chance to get out, smoke his pipe, and take in the clear mountain air amid the incredibly beautiful emerald green foothills of the Cascades. The Milwaukee Road was too poor to go hog-wild with technology, so here still existed railroad offices without computer terminals. In a late 1970’s Cedar Falls context, "PC" referred to the Pacific Coast Railway, certainly not Microsoft (which didn’t even exist yet): the best Milwaukee Road could offer for "information services" were IBM punchcards and teletypes, and "Carscope," which promised that it would locate the freight car in question. . . . within minutes.