Missouri, Kansas, & Texas Railroad along the Missouri River by Cathead - 1/87 (HO) scale - model railroad with steamboat

[Cathead]

While I'm most known on MSW for my scratch-built Missouri River steamboats (see signature links), my interest in transportation along the Missouri River extends to that great rival of river traffic, railroads. So I'm taking a break from steamboat modeling to build at least one module of a possibly larger model railroad depicting the route of the Missouri, Kansas, & Texas railroad along the Missouri River valley in central Missouri, ca. 1900, complete with at least one river scene featuring a contemporary steamboat.

 

MK&T passenger train along the Missouri River, ca. 1900 (State Historical Society of Missouri):

This will be a typical build for me in that it'll be laced with details of local history and geography that set a context for the models. As a former model railroader who transitioned to shipbuilding for a while, I'm finding that I miss the ability to set models in their full context. Most ship models end up sitting passively on a shelf, while a model railroad allows one to actually operate the model realistically through an entire landscape. As a geologist and naturalist who's lived in this area for almost 20 years, I have a strong connection to the Missouri River valley, having extensive experience hiking among its hills, birding within its floodplain, biking along its corridor, and paddling beneath its bluffs.

 

Mrs. Cathead on a shared river trip; these are the same bluffs shown in the next photo below:

 

The Missouri River's route through central Missouri is far more scenic than outsiders with a "flatland" view of the Midwest might suspect. The river follows a 1-2 mile wide gorge lined by limestone and dolomite bluffs towering up to 300 feet over the floodplain. Rail lines built along this corridor were forced to hug the valley walls by the huge river's constant meandering, making their routes often look like overdone model railroads with straight bluffs absolutely dwarfing the trains below. The Missouri Pacific built up the valley's south side in the mid-19th century, while the MK&T (more commonly called the Katy) built down the north side in the 1890s.

 

MK&T main line squeezed between tall limestone bluffs and the Missouri River, ca. 1912, same bluffs as above (State Historical Society of Missouri):

This project has been in the planning stage for several years, and directly influenced my last steamboat build, the Peerless, a small steamboat that operated on the lower Missouri River between St. Louis and the small central Missouri town of Rocheport. I built that model at the common model railroading scale of 1:87 (HO) to allow for its possible future inclusion on a diorama or layout depicting this region.

 

Historic photo of Peerless (State Historical Society of Missouri) and model version for comparison:

The immediate focus of this build is the scenic river town of Rocheport, framed to west and east by some of the most dramatic bluffs anywhere along the lower Missouri, and home of the only tunnel anywhere on the Katy system. This was a major river port in the pre-Civil-War era, and was the upriver home port for Peerless during its 1893-1903 operations on the river. The Katy built through Rocheport in the mid-1890s, meaning the two co-existed for nearly a decade, the perfect hook for a steamboat-and-railroad enthusiast.

 

Rocheport in the early 1900s, as seen from bluff tops to east and west (State Historical Society of Missouri):

Today, Rocheport is a popular tourist town, known for its B&Bs and nearby vineyards, and brought to prominence by its central location along the 240-mile Katy Trail. This is Missouri's cross-state rail trail that follows the old MK&T line (abandoned in the 1980s), and is the longest continuous rail trail in the country. I've cycled the entire length, but like many people, am always drawn back to Rocheport's incomparable scenic setting. The trail also makes modeling the MK&T in this area particularly attractive, since the right-of-way is unusually accessible!

 

Rocheport tunnel and river bluffs (same bluffs as other photos) along the modern Katy Trail:

There's a lot more background information to share, and construction has already started, so this log will work to catch up on past progress while continuing to explain the design, purpose, and context of the project. It's going to be wordy for a while but there's also lots of neat imagery to share. I didn't initially intend to track this with a build log, looking forward to being freed from the tyranny of photography, writing, and reporting. But I'm finding that I miss the community that develops around a build, and I think there's a really neat historical story to tell. And writing about one's work can sometimes help clarify or altering thinking about a project in ways that being too lone-wolf can miss. So welcome aboard!

 

One more historic photo, and three shots of the layout underway.

 

 

 

Edited March 1 by Cathead

[JacquesCousteau]

Looks like an interesting build, and a good home for the Peerless!

[Paul Le Wol]

Eric, this is going to be a great project to follow. Three of my favorite things; boats, trains, and boats with trains! You know it’s funny that I’ve heard that old Taj Mahal song about the Katy hundreds of times but never realized what it was about until after reading your introduction. Looking forward to this.

[Keith Black]

Eric, thank you for sharing this project. I look forward to following this epic journey. 

 

 What is the layout length? 

[Cathead]

Keith, I'll give a lot more details of the full layout plan in a future post, but the Rocheport section measures about 2'x11'.

[Canute]

Great start, Eric. I'll be following this project.

[Literalman]

I don't think it was mentioned in the posts above, but Katy was a nickname for the Missouri, Kansas & Texas, based on the KT part of the initials. Maybe this was stated in plain sight and I just didn't notice …

[Cathead]

I mentioned "Katy" as the railroad's nickname but didn't give the backstory. The official story is that the company's stock symbol was KT and that's where the nickname came from, but I personally think it also just developed organically because it's so obvious.

[lraymo]

Eric, this is great history along with your project, and I'm glad you decided to share it!  I've been to Rocheport several times to ride the Katy trail (but I've never done the whole thing! I'm impressed with anyone who's done that!)

Love your layout, and looking forward to watching the build!

[Cathead]

There's so many different paths I could take in starting to catch you all up on the context for this project that it's a bit overwhelming. Do I focus on the model-railroad-oriented process of track planning, how we design the track layout to allow realistic operations? Do I focus on more historical details of the railroad in general and Rocheport in particular? Do I focus on building the benchwork and early scenery forms? 

 

All of that takes time to write up, and you all are here for the modeling, so let's start with a simpler narrative, the current building I'm working on. This is a really interesting-looking structure seen behind the depot in only two photographs that I've found, shown below with zoomed-on crops.

The front part of this building is clearly an early grain elevator, with a loading spout set to extend down to the door of a boxcar on that spur. This is the era when grain was shipped in boxcars with planks nailed over their open doors. But what's going on with that huge building attached behind the elevator, with its massive interior, and even weirder, a wide ramp leading up to a second-story "porch"? In the first photo (1898), the ramp and porch are uncovered, while by the second photo, I think in the 19-teens, there's a roof over that whole thing.

 

I finally got the answer from a very helpful contact at the Katy Railroad Historical Society. While the front part is indeed a grain elevator, the back part is a massive hay barn. The Katy did a serious business in shipping Texas cattle north, and built a series of huge barns to store the hay needed to feed these cattle on their journey to processors in Kansas City, St. Louis, and Chicago. So that's a hay barn, and the ramp allows loaded hay wagons to drive up to the second floor and deliver hay into the barn, probably through the doors you see in the first (uncovered photos). Very cool! You'll see Rocheport's small stock yard in the lower right of the wider-view photo, just down the street from the hay barn. This also shows the local economic impact a railroad could have; even a small town like Rocheport would benefit from this major source of local farm revenue coming from the railroad.

 

I wish I had room to model this building in its entirety, but then the scene would extend way too far back. As it is, I can only fit a narrow part against the backdrop. So I did some estimated measurements, using the usefully placed boxcar in one photo for scale, and came up with a representative design that fit my space. I then built a cardstock mockup to see how it looked visually behind the depot (that project is a different topic).

 

This told me that my original elevator tower looked a little too squat, so I redrew my plans to make it a bit narrower and slightly taller. I also removed the loading dock I'd somewhat speculatively placed there, as I don't like the look and it doesn't fit the curve of the siding.

 

Once I'd redrawn my plans, I started building. This is really straightforward after years of complicated shipbuilding curves; lots of nice straight walls and square corners. I'm using pre-scribed siding and styrene castings for doors. Here are two quick photos of the progress so far.

 

That's all I've got for now. I'll keep following up as I work on this. One fun question is what those two doors way up on the elevator's face are for? They're clearly visible in the photo, so I included them, but danged if I can figure them out.

 

 

 

 

[Keith Black]

2 hours ago, Cathead said:

One fun question is what those two doors way up on the elevator's face are for? They're clearly visible in the photo, so I included them, but danged if I can figure them out.

 Eric, historical photos of grain elevators is my latest rabbit hole. It's a neat subject, thanks. High up doors seemed fairly common, this image is just one of many, the why of them is a mystery.  

 

[Paul Le Wol]

26 minutes ago, Keith Black said:

 Eric, historical photos of grain elevators is my latest rabbit hole. It's a neat subject, thanks. High up doors seemed fairly common, this image is just one of many, the why of them is a mystery.  

Perhaps they were used to ventilate dust and heat to reduce the risk of explosion while the elevator was operating.

[Cathead]

Paul, that occurred to me after seeing Keith's photo, and my first thought was why doors and not just large windows? But then it occurred to me that doors are easier to open when needed and seal when not, without the added expense and fuss of glass if the light isn't needed.

 

I still remember my high school physics teacher showing us how to make a cannon out of nothing but a cardboard tube, sifted flour, and a match. Good stuff. So I bet you're right.

[Cathead]

More progress on the elevator hay barn, which is now a unified structure:

I scored a pattern of plank ends into the elevator's siding; the goal is for them to show up faintly after painting, just enough to suggest this wasn't built with 50' planks. In writing this I realized I need to do this on the hay barn's front wall, too.

 

This doesn't look all that different from the last photo, but there's a lot of work you can't see, like internal bracing (especially within the elevator), and getting all the constituent parts lined up into a nice whole.

 

Next will be attaching about 1" of depth to the hay barn and setting up whatever roof framing I want. At that point it's ready for airbrushing, followed by roofing. If you're wondering, this structure would have been fairly new in 1900, so the goal is for it to look well-kept with just enough weathering to not look toylike. Somewhat different from the usual rough neglect we modelers often like our working models to have. So no missing planks or shingles, no peeling paint, no repair patches, etc.

 

By the way, that brief preceding conversation about what the upper doors are for...that's exactly why I decided to go ahead with a build log. There's just such a richer experience to building models when you can benefit from others' insights and questions. That exchange didn't even change the model, but it makes the model richer to understand more about the prototype. Thank you!

Edited Thursday at 03:23 PM by Cathead

[Keith Black]

8 hours ago, Cathead said:

Thank you!

 No, Eric, thank you! Thank you for creating this build log, build log enrichment flows in both directions. 

 

 The grain elevator is coming along nicely. 

Edited Thursday at 11:04 PM by Keith Black

[pennytimeline]

This is so cool, I model planes, trains and automobiles, to quote the motion picture as well as armor and ships.  So many models, so little time!