St. Louis Gateway Rail: The 1970s

By Lesley Barker

Though the city of St. Louis is located on the Missouri side of the Mississippi River, for the railroads, the St. Louis Gateway extends into Illinois, north and south along both sides of the river. Two factors conspired against St. Louis’s aspiration to become the preeminent rail center of the 19th-century American Midwest: there was no bridge across the Mississippi, and Missouri’s loyalty to the Union during the Civil War was suspect. Chicago beat out St. Louis to attain the region’s top railroad billing. Fast forward to the 1970s, when the Gateway Arch, dedicated in 1968, redefined the St. Louis riverfront and when the St. Louis Union Station closed to rail service. The 1970s was a decade of railroad debuts—Burlington Northern, Illinois Central Gulf, Family Lines—and a decade of railroad demises—Rock Island and Frisco. It signaled the end of a century of rail domination of the American transportation scene.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Aug 14, 2006
• ISBN: 9781439633052

Lesley Barker

For the photographer of rail images, the St. Louis Gateway of the 1970s provided abundant opportunities to record rolling stock of many railroads, extant and fallen flags alike. Most of the images in this book were photographed by John F. Barker, whose Representative Collection of Trains in St. Louis 1900 to 1990 is a permanent exhibit of the John W. Barriger III National Railroad Library at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. Barker used the images to create accurate HO-scale models of trains in St. Louis. The images, too, now belong to the John W. Barriger III National Railroad Library.

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INTRODUCTION

To focus on just one decade of either the history of a certain city, St. Louis, which was founded in 1764, or of a specific industry, rail, which is itself nearly 200 years old, may seem a bit too narrow, especially when the city is the second largest rail center in the American Midwest. Our focus centers on trains in St. Louis in the 1970s. Why this particular decade? It was at the period of transition between when railroads dominated American freight and passenger traffic and when, thanks to the interstates and air travel, they were forced to consolidate into the mega-railroad conglomerates of today. This book is a pictorial overview of the railroads that served the St. Louis Gateway, and the non-railway corporations whose railroad rolling stock was seen in St. Louis during that 10-year period. To set the stage, it is useful to consider how the St. Louis-railroad relationship grew.

St. Louis changed as the railroads developed. Initially it seemed that the city would resist and even obstruct the railroads in its effort to retain a kind of hegemony over the Mississippi River steamboat traffic. Then, in an almost desperate quest to become the preeminent rail center of the American Midwest, St. Louis concentrated many resources on the development of its railroad industry, but finished in second place behind Chicago. The original spokesman for this goal was Sen. Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri who embraced Thomas Jefferson’s Manifest Destiny as his own life’s ambition. He articulated the need for a transcontinental railroad in a major speech at the 1849 railroad convention in St. Louis. The story of the way St. Louis has been impacted by the railroad is a fascinating one that has seldom been told. In essence, to chronicle the history of trains in St. Louis is to grind a lens through which the attitudes and priorities, which shape the city’s culture and politics, can be brought into focus.

St. Louis, Missouri, is located at the intersection of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. The River Des Peres forms part of the western border of the city and flows from and to the Mississippi River. At St. Louis, the Mississippi River bends toward the east to form a semicircular land mass. If you draw a straight line across the western side of the bend, the whole city fits within the enclosed land mass. For railfans, the St. Louis Gateway implies much more than just the city of St. Louis. The St. Louis Gateway includes all the railroad yards and trackage on both sides of the Mississippi River including East St. Louis, Illinois; Dupo, Illinois; Venice, Illinois; and St. Louis, Missouri. This complicates our picture because the railfan’s concept of St. Louis is oblivious to the rivalries, jealousies, and loyalties of the various metropolises. There are only two organizations, other than the transportation agencies, the Regional Commerce and Growth Association and the East-West Coordinating Council, which conceive of St. Louis as a region that includes counties in both Missouri and Illinois.

The St. Louis city limits changed several times. The original city, which was laid out in 1764, included 64 plats on the ground, which is the modern Gateway Arch Riverfront and Laclede’s Landing. By 1822, the west border was Seventh Street; the south border was Soulard; and the north border, east of Broadway, was Willow Street and west of Broadway, it was Carr Street. By 1841, the south border was Louisa Avenue, the north was Wright Street, and the west was extended to Eighteenth Street. Finally, the current boundaries were established so that the western limit is 500 feet west of McCausland/Skinker Avenue. St. Louis city does not belong to any Missouri county. It is surrounded and completely trapped between St. Louis County and the Mississippi River. Until trains could enter via the Eads Bridge, freight and passenger trains were forced to use the Wiggins Ferry to cross the Mississippi River at St. Louis. The railroads that were chartered east of the Mississippi River often did not have the authorization needed to operate on the west side even after the bridge was opened. This kept the Wiggins Ferry Company in the business of hauling trains across to where they could be coupled to trains that were bound further west.

When Baltimore and Ohio, in the east, began to lay track in 1829, St. Louis had become an American city with an international population and a reputation as a river city, which would make its next three decades known as the Golden Age of Steamboating. In 1830, Gen. Charles Gratiot of St. Louis commissioned Gen. Robert E. Lee to design the engineering project to clear the Mississippi River channel at St. Louis so that it would remain passable for large steamboats. The city’s economic reliance on its river port clashed with the agenda of the earliest railroad developers. To build a railroad drawbridge over the river at St. Louis would have imposed an obstruction to steamboat traffic.

The Wiggins family ferry business was closely aligned with the Chouteau family—dominated steamboat business. St. Louis had become the busiest inland port in the United States, since 1817 when the first steamship, the Zebulon Pike, docked at the riverfront for the first time. By 1846, St. Louisans owned 67 of the 1,200 steamboats on the Mississippi. Other steamboats carried settlers west up the Missouri River to Kansas City, from which point they could progress still further west by wagon train. Obviously, the rivers seemed to be much more valuable to St. Louis’s aristocracy than trains. These old, established French families had made their money from the river and, no doubt, they intended to continue to profit from it.

The Americans who settled in St. Louis in the 1830s, however, were determined to find another path to prosperity. One group of influential merchants understood that the railroad could be their ticket to affluence, especially as more and more of the west opened to settlers. They formed the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce in 1836. Many of these same men organized the Merchants Exchange in 1848. One was Daniel D. Page, the city’s second mayor