Reply To: Freight operations just before the merger

[Ted Ferkenhoff]

Steve,

St Louis to Pueblo is a large stretch of railroad, encompassing 7 crew districts in the late ’70’s. Rough count about 10-11 locals and roadswitchers covering this territory. Most of the traffic was overhead, moving between Pueblo, KC and StL. I hope you are trying to select a portion or one subdivision to focus on, otherwise it is close to “boiling the ocean”.

1. For on-line industries, and guessing what “more interesting” translates to, here are the more significant traffic generators for the time period you are looking at…..Starting on the east end at St Louis, and going west:
a. Lime plant at Pacific, MO – switched by the St Louis-Jeff CIty local, probably spent the most time at this location during tour of duty
b. Union Electric coal-fired power plant Labadie, MO – received unit trains of Illinois coal from the east, and Utah and Wyoming coal from the west
c. Central Electric Co-op coal-fired power plant Chamois, MO – a small plant, received blocks of cars set out by the local and/or a through train
d. Jeff City had a fascinating group of industries along the remnant of the Bagnell Branch.
West of Jeff City, we have two mainlines, Sedalia Sub and River Sub, that were mostly directional running with some exceptions.
e. Sedalia featured the MP shop complex, and a Kelsey-Hayes steel-wheel plant (opened 1978).
f. General Motors auto distribution ramp at Lee’s Summit
g. Allis-Chalmers equipment plant on the Pixley Spur in Independence.
h. Over on the River Sub, Lake City Army Ammunition Plant at Lake City
In Kansas City proper, after turning the corner at Southwest Jct from the Sedalia/River Subs onto the Kansas City Sub…
i. Armco Steel plant. Not a large integrated plant with blast furnaces, but shipped many cars/day of grinding balls, grinding rods, wire rod, railroad spikes, and bar stock.
j. General Motors Assembly Plant at Leeds, Missouri. Large enough to have its own support yard and multiple switch jobs per shift.

In Kansas, MP served a salt mine on a branch out of Geneseo, but otherwise it was all about grain gathering in terms of volume. A lot of grain trains originated in Salina, directly on the MP from a local elevator, and also interchanged from UP.

Crossing the border into Colorado, MP served the Transportation Technology Center and the Pueblo Army Depot near Avondale. The TTCI featured large loops of track for testing rail equipment, and MP often moved locomotives and rolling stock to/from TTCI as railroads would loan equipment to the facility for testing.

2. Industry track diagrams were assembled into ZTS books (Zone-Track-Spot). These diagrams were mostly hand-drawn and not to scale, but showed track arrangements and often gave track capacity or number of spots. They show up from time to time on Ebay, and the MPHS archives crew is working to digitize these books. If you narrow your search down to a certain area, I am sure we can come up with diagrams among the forum group.

5. The hotshot auto train between St Louis and Pueblo was the CSP (Chicago-St Louis-Pueblo). During certain months of the year, MP also hosted the FFT (Ford Fast Train) between Kansas City and Pueblo. After 1981, MP originated the FFT at St Louis in its waning years. There were several trains handling auto traffic between St Louis and KC.