The Redwood Water Tank was built by the Wyoming Central Railway in 1886 to store water for the steam engines that pulled trains, first being filled by a windmill and later by other kinds of pumps, and it is one of only six remaining in the nation. The Sioux City and Pacific Railroad surveyed the route from Chadron, Nebraska, to Fort Fetterman in Wyoming Territory in 1883, then organized the Wyoming Central Railway, a Wyoming corporation required by law to build or own a railroad in the territory, in 1886. As the railroad and its facilities were constructed, they were leased to the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad Company, a subsidiary of the Sioux City and Pacific Railroad. Frank Lusk was a director and the local agent for the Wyoming Central Railway, headquartered in Lusk, the only post office on the route, and he was also an agent for the Pioneer Townsite Company, which established depot locations and platted the townsites of Van Tassell, Node, Lusk, Manville, Keeline, Lost Springs, Shawnee, Orin, Douglas, Glenrock, and Casper. Livestock shipments, mining supplies, and a source of coal drew the railroads west in a highly competitive business, and the rails were instrumental in western settlement and helped unite the continent into one nation. By 1903 all of these railroads had been consolidated into the Chicago and North Western Railroad, which halted service through Wyoming in 1971; in the 1980s the Union Pacific Railroad, a competitor for more than a century, obtained this portion of the Chicago and North Western as a route for coal trains from the Powder River Basin.