Montana is a big, empty state...but not as much as Amtrak may have you believe. Amtrak doesn't come close to any of the 'major' cities...Missoula is 2.5-3 hours south of the Whitefish station, which makes it significantly closer than places like Bozeman, Helena, Butte, Billings, etc. to an Amtrak station. Honestly I think it's part of the reason the hockey culture there is almost non-existent, there's very few Montanans that live close enough to Canada for there to be any real amount of cultural cross-over. Unfortunately for the state the only passenger rail skirts the border.
Curious why Amtrack chose that route. At some point Montana had to have decent passenger service connecting the 'major' cities.
The train was stuck in Shelby for 5 hours and the bar across the street became jammed. The barmaid kidded we haven't been this busy since the Dempsey fight