Howdy folks,
My first post here and it will be over my dream of building the St. Louis, Iron Mountain, and Southern Railway from St. Louis to Piedmont Missouri. I decided that I wanted to model this railway because of several factors. The first is that my great aunt and my grandfather used to ride the railway from Piedmont to St. Louis to work at the jobs they had there. They would ride up to St. Louis on Sunday, in order to be at work on Monday, and ride back home on Friday to spend the weekend's with their family's. My great aunt is my grandpa's sister in law as he married her younger sister. The era I would like to model is the 1880s since I love steam locomotives and that era. The scale I picked out is N Scale for the reason it is less expensive than HO scale and the size of the layout will effectively be twice as big, so I can do more scenes in the same amount of space.
I started doing research into this particular railroad and found a funny story about how the governor and everyone on the train was three sheets to the wind drunk due to being delayed at the previous stop of Des Arc. The locomotive had run out of wood for the engine, so they had to wait until more wood could be cut and restart the boiler. The train was delayed and didn't arrive until 5 hours later at 2 PM. The governor of Missouri and Jay Gould were to speak at the opening of the Piedmont station, in 1871, only to be interrupted by the steam locomotive catching the track side water tower on fire. The crowd watched the fire burn and the governor gave up on reading his speech, so he adlibed the rest of the speech after the fire died down. Jay Gould didn't speak from what I gathered. The train left the station for the next stop in Mill Spring then Williamsville and ending up in Popular Bluff.
I discovered maps of St. Louis from 1870, 1880, and 1898. The St. Louis, Iron Mountain, and Southern Railway operated out of two depots there, the Plum Street Depot which was on the riverfront and Union Depot that would later become Union Station in 1896. I used Google Earth to plot out the route of the line and had to extrapolate how the track ran to Des Arc, since the line was abandoned and torn up. Google Earth does have the current railway route for all of the railroads and that is what the black lines are in the following photos. Here are the photos of the route.
Piedmont to Iron Mountain
Possible route of the Des Arc track.
Iron Mountain to De Soto
De Soto to Kimmswick
Kimmswick to Saint Louis
The stop in St. Louis is to where Union Station is. This particular line actually went to Plum Street Depot.
I managed to find out a few items of historical note about the line. I found a schedule of the route from 1878 and 1886. Who would have thought that by 1886 that there were three express trains running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on this particular line. I managed to find out where the trains ended up at in St. Louis before Union Station was built in 1896. The depot was located at the corner of Plum and First Street.
Here is the schedule with the locomotive numbers as 601 for the first time, 603 for the second time, and 611 for the third time. This schedule is from 1886 and doesn't include all the stops. This adds a few more stops to the original list I found.
St. Louis: 9:10 AM, 8:30 PM, and 8:00 PM
Carondelete (Robert Ave Depot): 9:39 AM, 9:00 PM, No stop
De Soto: 11:10 AM, 10:22 PM, and 9:43 PM
Mineral Point: 11:54 AM, No Stop, No Stop
Bismark: 12:25 PM, 11:44 PM, 10:50 PM
Iron Mountain 12:42 PM, No Stop, No Stop
Middlebrook: 12:44 PM, No Stop, No Stop
Ironton: 12:59 PM, 12:16 AM, No Stop
Arcadia: 1:03 PM, 12:23 AM, 11:21 AM
Annapolis: 1:57 PM, 1:09 AM, No Stop
Des Arc: 2:16 PM, 1:30 AM, No Stop
Piedmont: 3:10 PM, 2:10 AM, 12:55 AM
The 1878 schedule is condensed and leaves out the rest of the stops.
Google Play has quite of few books concerning railroading like The Official Railway Equipment Register Volume 19 Number 1 and The Official Railway Guide. The Equipment Register is pretty interesting in that it lists for 1903 the types of cars, their lengths, max weight of cargo, and their number range. It's not just for Missouri Pacific and St. Louis, Iron Mountain, and Southern Railway, but for all of the train lines that were in business at that time. Another fact I love about the register is that it was a monthly publication that started in 1884, so the list of the cars etc... were kept up to date. It even has information about how the railroads would handle foreign cars to their line.
I'll have questions about the trains of this era, but I'll ask them later.