Oelwein remained a "railroad town" until the early 1980s when most of the railroad tracks to the East, North and then West directions were abandoned.
The 2009 book Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding (Bloomsbury Press) documents the drug culture of Oelwein and how it ties into larger issues of rural flight and small town economic decline placed in the historic context of the drug trade.