What Is the Train Station in Yellowstone? The Duttons’ Darkest Secret, Explained

When someone tells you to go for a ride at the Train Station on Yellowstone, you run in the other direction. Over the course of five seasons, the “Train Station” gained an infamous reputation accompanied by a feeling of dread. That’s because nothing about the Train Station involved an actual train.

The term is a code for the hiding ground of the Dutton family’s most ominous deeds in the neo-Western drama series, serving as a safe spot (at least, for the Duttons) for their problems to disappear. Let’s just say that when someone is taken to the Train Station by the Duttons or any of the Yellowstone ranch’s branded cowboys, it’s the last trip they’ll ever take. But associates of the Yellowstone aren’t the only ones who know about this secretive piece of land. In fact, the Duttons weren’t the first ones to use it to hide criminal activity and keep law enforcement off their tails.

The Train Station on Yellowstone, Explained

The Dumping Ground for the Duttons’ Secrets

The first on-screen appearance of the Train Station is in Yellowstone Season 1, Episode 4, “The Long Black Train.” The title of the episode also happens to be another name for the Train Station. When one of Yellowstone’s cowboys, Fred Myers, picks a fight with Jimmy Hurdstrom, John Dutton instructs Rip Wheeler to take Fred to the Train Station.

While it may seem he presumably meant an actual train station to fire Fred and exile him from the ranch, it’s revealed that the Train Station is an eerie rural canyon on the border of Montana and Wyoming. At the bottom of the canyon are a century’s worth of dead bodies that the Duttons and their branded cowboys have killed and disposed of, now including Fred.

Because it’s an unpopulated area, the canyon allows the Duttons to get away with several acts of murder without getting caught. “No one lives within 100 miles,” Lloyd tells Walker. “It’s a county with no people, no sheriff, and no 12 jurors of your peers.” It’s a place where the Duttons have created a loophole around the law because there are no residents to make up a jury, government or police.

The only ones who do know within the Dutton circle are sworn to the Yellowstone for life, forcing them to live and work on the ranch until the day they die to prevent any dark secrets from getting out. Such is the case with Rip in a Season 5 flashback, who accidentally killed a fellow cowboy named Rowdy when he was a teenager. John had Rip branded as a safeguard when they dumped Rowdy’s body at the Train Station.

John Dutton: “It’s the trash can for everyone who’s attacked us. It lays in a jurisdictional dead zone in a county with a population of exactly zero. Hence, no jury of your peers, and no court for a change in venue. Why are you so surprised? Where did you think the men who attacked you in your office and attacked our ranch went? You’re shocked we found a way to circumvent the consequences of defending ourselves? I’m shocked we need a way. But we do. We always have. And unless we’re willing to walk away from one hundred and twenty years of our family bleeding into this ground, we always will.”

It’s likely there are dozens, if not hundreds, of bodies lying at the bottom of that canyon. But only seven victims were shown on Yellowstone: Rowdy, Fred, Wade Morrow, Clint Morrow, Chester Spears, Garrett Randall and Jamie Dutton. The latter was the final person in the series to take the Long Black Train, but probably not the last in the show’s universe if Kayce, Rip and Beth get back into their old murdering habits in their spinoffs.

The only person who’s ever been spared on-screen from their fate at the Train Station was Walker, who was originally sentenced to death by Rip for not participating in the fighting and other work on the ranch. But Kayce secretly spared Walker and warned him not to return to Montana.

Where Did the Train Station Come From?

The Real and Fictional History Behind Yellowstone’s Long Black Train

The Duttons aren’t the only ones who know or use the Train Station. According to Lloyd, “Everyone from three states around dumps their secrets off that cliff.” Further, he claims that the West was won because of the bodies at the bottom of the canyon, which could allude to the Duttons’ settlement of the land in the late 1800s or the general colonization of the land during the 18th and 19th centuries.

The first person to visit the Train Station chronologically on-screen in the Yellowstone universe wasn’t even a Dutton. In the prequel series 1923, the Duttons’ biggest enemy, mining tycoon Donald Whitfield, had the body of a sex worker named Christy dumped in the canyon when she was accidentally strangled. The Train Station didn’t just come from the mind of creator Taylor Sheridan. In real life, there’s a murky gray area in the Idaho section of Yellowstone National Park known as the Zone of Death, where someone could theoretically commit a crime, like murder, and not be convicted.

Like the Train Station on Yellowstone, the Zone of Death doesn’t have enough citizens to form a jury, thus possibly making the Sixth Amendment inapplicable. People have gone missing in the area, but there have been no proven felonies as of 2025. Sheridan’s take on the Zone of Death is certainly one that hypothesizes what would happen if people could really get away with murder in real life. But honestly, wouldn’t even one person have discovered the Train Station at some point in a century or two it’s been used as a graveyard?