Find a hotel in Colstrip, Montana. When steam locomotives were in their heyday, crisscrossing Montana, hauling passengers, freight, mail and other goods, the coal to fire those locomotives came from an area in southeastern Montana that has become synonymous to coal mining. Even the name, Colstrip, is a combination of the word "coal" and the process used to extract it from the ground "strip mining." A Montana Power subsidiary started mining the coal in the late 1960s, and at that time Colstrip consisted of about 60 houses, two churches, a school, a grain elevator. Today, Colstrip is a thriving community in the shadow of the huge electric generation plants.
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