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

[Cathead]

No further modeling progress has been made due to an overload of family visits, work deadlines, the onset of spring garden/orchard season, and more. So here's a little more background context to keep you all interested.

 

Below is a rough track plan that will continue to evolve but is guiding my work. I've spent two years researching and adjusting this and it's pretty close to my final "ideal" design. The arrangements at Rocheport and McBaine are quite accurate representations of those settings with some necessary tweaks and compression. The depiction of Franklin Jct and New Franklin follow the general pattern of the railroad there but the literal track arrangements have been adjusted more heavily to match the requirements of space and operational interest. The  bridge over the Missouri River at Boonville is nearly 8 feet long, but is only about a third the length of the real thing. I plan to go through all of these scenes in more detail to discuss how I designed the track plan for each and how they match up with reality but this at least gives a loose sense of the plan. This also shows the modular design I'm following.

 

Below the track plan is a rough map of the real railroad's route through the modeled area, laid over a lidar elevation map of the terrain. This helps illustrate how the Missouri River valley dominates the setting, flowing through a valley over 2 miles wide at Boonville and lined on either side with tall bluffs rising 200' above the floodplain. The railroad's main line comes up across southwest Missouri from Oklahoma and Texas, through the city of Sedalia (off-layout), then crosses the Missouri River at Boonville. At Franklin Junction, the railroad splits, with the original main line continuing north toward connections with Chicago, while the newly built (mid-1890s) Missouri River extension headed east along the river valley to connect with St. Louis. You can see how the line hugs the northern side of the valley, pinched between the bluffs and the meandering river.

 

And here's a full MK&T route map from the same era, originally from the Katy Railroad Historical Society. I've highlighted the modeled area in red:

 

 

The layout's basic design is intended to provide two different but equally important (to me) operating goals: a connected loop allowing for continuous "railfan" running, but also a point-to-point design that lets trains be operated in a realistic manner from one staging yard, through the modeled portion, and back into staging again. For example, in the design above, trains leaving the staging yard to the right are heading north from Sedalia, while trains leaving to the left are heading west (railroad south) from St. Louis. When they re-enter the staging yard after transiting the modeled layout, they can simply be re-staged as a new train later in the operating sequence. Franklin yard is where freights are broken down and remade for various destinations down the line in all three directions, though I'm not really modeling the northern branch toward Chicago because I don't have space. Local freights also originate here to work the route through Rocheport and McBaine. The Katy ran three passenger trains a day each way on this line during this era, along with regular freights and livestock trains.

 

That will make sense to the model railroaders reading this; if it doesn't to others, please say so and I can explain in more detail. Or ask any other questions; it'll still be a while before I can get back to real modeling work so this is as good a time as any to engage in the intellectual side of this project.

[Canute]

Looks like a fun layout for operations, Eric.

[Keith Black]

 The historical aspect of this project is fascinating, Eric. Thank you for taking the time to be our guide into the past. 

[Cathead]

Here's another way of looking at layout design. There's a tension between pure operational interest (lots of active switching and industries) and pure scenic interest (lots of pretty places to run trains through). This region has both, but I don't have the space to do all the possibilities justice. So there were a number of different ways to organize the layout plan depending on what my priorities were.

 

Here's a schematic view of the area in question. Every town sits in a small valley where some tributary to the Missouri River cuts through the bluffs, and these towns are separated by long stretches of scenic riverfront running with tall bluffs immediately behind the tracks. At the west end, the line makes a literal 90º turn to join the north-south mainline (great for a model railroader, we never get corners that neat!). At both ends of the north-south mainline, the line climbs through the bluffs to reach the high ground beyond. At McBaine, a ~9 mile branch climbed through the river hills to the larger town of Columbia.

 

 

A pure operations layout could focus almost solely on a big version of Franklin Yard, where the railroad's two main lines met and where lots of switching happened along with a busy engine terminal and passenger depot. The next-best operational locations are Boonville (which had a lot of industries for a fairly small town) and the branch to Columbia from McBaine (Columbia had more industry than anything in the river valley beyond Boonville).

 

A pure scenic-running layout would ignore these settings to focus on the Missouri River bridge, lots of river- and bluff-front running, and the Rocheport tunnel area. This would let the builder do the dramatic scenery justice with long stretches of track gently curving along the river, really bringing the scale and beauty of the setting into focus.

 

My track plan is a compromise, because I want both. I think a pure scenic-running layout would be fun to build but eventually become boring because there's not much to do long-term once you've railfanned a few times. To me, realistic operations are one of the key attractions of model railroading (in contrast to, say, static ship modeling), and I was determined to allow for this. But as a geologist and naturalist, it was unacceptable to leave out the scenic setting; at that point why not just design a free-lanced operations layout rather than a version of the Katy that stripped out all the best parts?

 

So through a long iterative process, I developed a way to include:

• a Franklin yard that was big enough to allow some basic operational switching while still being small enough to not dominate the room
• a Missouri River bridge that was big enough to convey the massive original span while still being small enough to fit
• three more mainline towns with minor switching, enough to allow diverse operations
• barely sufficient scenic runs along bluffs and the tunnel

Reluctantly leaving out:

• Boonville and its many industries (if I were more purely operations oriented I could swap the big bridge for this town)
• longer runs along the river (again, I could swap Rocheport or McBaine for a nice long river/bluff run)
• meaningful operations along the northern line from Franklin Jct and the Columbia branch. In both cases, I'm allowing for cars to be switched into blocks as if they were headed for those destinations, and that has to be enough.

What this lets me achieve (hopefully) is operating sessions that can host 3-4 operators, allowing for the fun social time that is such a key part of model railroading, with a diversity of jobs from through passenger trains to yard switching to local freights. While still giving fair play to the scenic setting and something of the geographic scope of this line. And including this many towns balances the operator jobs, so a local freight has enough to do to be worthwhile as an assignment, and through trains feel like they're passing through many different locations rather than just one stretch of the line.

 

If I had just a bit more room the first thing I'd change is to add Boonville, it's such a fascinating town, but it just doesn't make the cut. Leaving it out also simplifies operations because I don't have locals going both directions from Franklin yard.

 

Anyway, that's another brain dump but maybe it helps you see more of how and why I've been thinking through this project. 

 

 

 

Edited April 15 by Cathead

[Paul Le Wol]

Eric,this is very interesting. In the track plan above, there is a duckunder that leads to the staging area. Do you need to access that area for operation or is the switching automated / controlled from a central location?

[Cathead]

Paul, great question. This layout will run up to three passenger trains and four freights each way during a single "day" operating session. If the staging was fully automated I'd need 14 separate staging tracks and at least that many locomotives, an expensive proposition in both space and purchases.

 

Instead, this is designed as a "fiddle" yard, meaning that one operator is tasked with actively remaking trains by hand as they depart and arrive. This lets me reuse fewer locomotives and cars far more efficiently and creates an interesting job. So that duckunder is how the staging operator (essentially a dispatcher) accesses that area. It's hidden behind the backdrop and big enough to allow a standard desk chair. The out of sight setting helps create the illusion of distance, that trains are entering the main layout from locations far away.

 

This lets me get away with five staging tracks instead of fourteen, which would be impossible in the space I have.

[Paul Le Wol]

Thank you for the explanation Eric. 👍

[Canute]

Eric, excellent job balancing the operations versus railfanning of your railroad. I'd come and operate there.

[Cathead]

Hopefully in a few years you can!

[pennytimeline]

You're doing a stellar job!  Can't wait to see more!

[Cathead]

I managed to steal an evening and do a little scenery work. This is a first round of plaster on the bluff face hosting the Rocheport tunnel along Moniteau Creek. Here I'm trying to get the basic shape of the bluff in place with some underlying geologic structure, such as the roughly horizontal bedding, various vertical joints breaking up the rock face, and the more chaotic rock texture right around the portal (both because of blasting and because the nature of the limestone changes there for technical reasons I'll maybe nerd out about at some point).

And the real thing:

Also made progress on the creek's banks:

Next step is to finish sealing in the creek bed and do some touch-up and additional detailing on the bluff face. When I'm comfortable with its texture I'll start first coats of paint. But this at least shows you I haven't completely stalled!

[Cathead]

Found a bit more time this weekend for another round of scenery work. This time I used a patching plaster from the hardware store to spread a thin coating over the rock work, using my fingers and other tools to make a finer bedding-plane texture than the coarse plaster allowed. This smoothed out the surface a bit and gave it a more complex texture that I like, though I'm not sure it comes through well in the photo. It's meant to capture the finely bedded, pitted surface of this limestone. Once I start adding color I think this will really come alive.

 

I also filled in the creek bed and some of the flatter area to the right.

 

Once these areas are fully dry I'm going to go over them with a fine sanding block. Anything that isn't rock bluff will be covered by various scenic materials anyway.

 

And here's one more view of this scene.

Really looking forward to getting some color on this whiteout!

[kgstakes]

I just now came across your post about the railroad you're modeling.  Man after my own heart - model railroading.  All looks great so far, will continue to follow your progress.

 

Your river boats will look good in the scene(s) when it's all completed.

 

Thanks for sharing.

[FriedClams]

Catching up on your monumental project, Eric.  This is more like empire building than modeling.  It's very interesting to follow along in the planning and to get some insight into the choices that must be made when building a model RR.

 

On 4/24/2025 at 10:41 PM, Cathead said:

because of blasting and because the nature of the limestone changes there for technical reasons I'll maybe nerd out about at some point).

 

I lived in Colorado for decades and did considerable hiking and "peak bagging" and have always found geology, even at my amateur level, to be fascinating.  So, I encourage you to "nerd out" when the impulse arises.

 

Gary

[Cathead]

1 hour ago, FriedClams said:

So, I encourage you to "nerd out" when the impulse arises.

This request is as good a time as any to point out that, in fact, I have already "nerded out" on this subject, as I have not one but two videos about the geography and geology of the Rocheport tunnel on the YouTube channel that my wife and I run, covering the geology, ecology, and history of the Ozark region. Part I sets the broader context and Part II deals with the tunnel itself, including the unusual geology of the eastern portal (what I'm currently modeling in this scene).

 

Part 1:

 

 

Part II:

 

Enjoy!

[Cathead]

Made some progress on base-layer scenery painting this week, taking a few minutes over multiple nights to slowly build up layers of color. Right now, without any vegetation, it looks like somewhere in Utah or Wyoming. But that'll change.

 

I also took a first stab at some basic backdrop painting, just trying to add a hint of hills/river extending into the background. This isn't meant to be photo-realistic, just enough to let the eye realize that it's not all backdrop sky back there. 

 

Also, the creek has been painted but I haven't added the model "water" yet, so it's just a dry surface. There will be multiple layers of "water" resin added, building up a sense of depth and a smooth surface. I also plan to tint the "water" some, as the real creek here tends to be pretty muddy, and this also helps fade the water into the painted "depth".

 

Most of the ground surface will be covered in various scenic materials to add texture, so the painting there doesn't need to stand on its own, but just provide an underlying foundation.

 

I'm not done with either the backdrop or the main bluff. Final touches on the bluff will include some more dark washes to bring out texture and cracks, and some vertical washes to simulate mineral streaking. The backdrop needs more texture, and the outer edges will be sharped up once I paint the sky (which I haven't done yet at all; that's just white primer).

 

But I thought I'd share progress and get feedback. You can at least get a sense of where I'm going with this.

Oh, and here are a few more winter context shots. I'm going for late fall, so no snow or ice, but otherwise the color palette is similar.

 

[Keith Black]

 Eric, the scene is really starting to come to life. I'm truly enjoying watching your work.  

[Cathead]

I spent some time this morning adding color & texture to the rocks using artist's pastels. I use these all the time for weathering models, and they're really effective at finishing scenic settings as well. They don't drip, and can be rubbed in with fingers or brushes (old toothbrushes work really well). Their powdered texture adds a "softness" to rock faces that paints don't, which helps them feel more realistic. I also touched up the backdrop with these, which again softens the painted took and allows more subtle textures than paints do.

 

Here's a broad view:

Here's a closeup of the rock face. The pastels let me add mineral staining as well as streaks of white that simulate the various layers of white-grey chert laced within the limestone beds. I also added smoke stains above the tunnel.

And for further comparison, I made these three sets of photos with similar perspectives. First, modern portal and model equivalent. This shows one thing I didn't get right; it's becoming clear to me that my tunnel shape is a little too squat; it should be taller for its width. Can't change it now and it'll still clear trains fine.

Second, historic photo directly down the tracks and model equivalent:

Third, historic photo from side and model equivalent. I've mentioned this before, but I know the bridge doesn't quite match. For now I'm using a simple kit; someday I'd be happy to build a  closer-matching bridge from scratch but it's not my priority.

I think I'm happy with the coloration, so the next step is to move on to things like adding ground-surface texture, water, and eventually trees (so it stops looking like Wyoming).

 

Thanks for following along!

 

 

Edited 21 hours ago by Cathead

[wefalck]

Is there any faulting/fracturing in those rocks? On the modern photo it looks a bit like it. If so, these could be added perhaps with some ink washes?

 

Do you leave the pastels as they are, or will you add some 'fixative', as pastel artists sometimes used to do? Otherwise, how will you protect these surfaces in the presumable open layout. I also use pastels, but my models are all stored under glass-covers.

 

[kgstakes]

If at all possible now, put a mirror inside the tunnel.  It will make it look like the tracks continue.  Angle or tilt it slighting so it doesn't reflect anything you don't want it to.

 

Just a thought.  Helps with the illusion that the railroad continues.

 

[Cathead]

2 minutes ago, kgstakes said:

If at all possible now, put a mirror inside the tunnel.  It will make it look like the tracks continue.  Angle or tilt it slighting so it doesn't reflect anything you don't want it to.

 

Just a thought.  Helps with the illusion that the railroad continues.

I would agree, except that the tunnel isn't a dead-end, but will continue through to a new module. See track plan in post #61 and look at the right side of the area labeled Rocheport (viewing angle is from the top down). The other portal will be on the next module in that direction. What's beautiful here is that this tunnel changes partway through; it's bare rock on this (east) side but lined with brick and stone on the other (west) side. So when I build the next module, I'll build that half of the tunnel as brick and stone, then when they butt together the joint will naturally look right because there really is a transition in the middle of the tunnel. See the video part 2 linked above to really appreciate this. Here's a sneak preview of the western portal:

 

33 minutes ago, wefalck said:

Is there any faulting/fracturing in those rocks? On the modern photo it looks a bit like it. If so, these could be added perhaps with some ink washes?

 

Good questions!

 

There is no faulting, though there are a handful of major vertical joints, which are already simulated. The ones on the model are a little more uniform top-to-bottom than the real ones, but I think they're close enough. Smaller "structures" you may be seeing are probably fracture planes where rock is locally spalling off the bluff face. I may experiment with using a dark pencil to draw in a few other fractures, but overall there isn't much in the way of vertical structural features crossing bedding planes.

 

I don't intend to use any fixative on these surfaces, as they won't be touched or handled. I apply most of my pastels with fingers and find that skin oil does a remarkable job of binding pastels to most surfaces. I've never used fixatives even on my ship models; I'd only do so for things like actual railroad cars that will be routinely handled.

[wefalck]

This must be actually quite stable rock with little weathering - otherwise I would be worried, that after ice-melt in spring spalled-off rocks drop onto the tracks from the tunnel opening ...

Edited 20 hours ago by wefalck

[Cathead]

Oh, no, rocks are regularly dropping off that face and the other bluff lines along the route. I've got photos of dinner-plate-sized rocks that spalled off and got caught in the vines that often lace these bluffs, and end up dangling in midair like cargo in a ship's loading net. There's regularly little piles of debris at the base of the bluffs, and I've moved debris off the trail more than once at the tunnel mouth. It's mostly very small pieces, but it's definitely an actively weathering surface. I can only assume the railroad regularly checked the portal area for debris on the tracks, since they never stabilized it further.

 

To give a quick written recap of the geology at the portal, most of the bluff line there is Mississippian limestone laced with chert beds. But paleo-karst is quite common in these rocks; there are many places where old caves developed in the bedrock and then either collapsed and filled in with Pennsylvanian sands. All along this route you can find unusual protruding outcrops of hard sandstone that are essentially filled-sink structures, more erosion-resistant than the surrounding limestone, so remaining behind as filled molds when the limestone dissolves.

 

As it turns out, this portal is drilled right into one of those collapse structures; 10 m to either side and it's solid limestone, but right where they put the bore, it's a complex massive breccia of chert and other rock fragments that collapsed into the paleokarst. This extends well into the tunnel, pretty much as far as to the point where they started the brick/stone lining out to the western end. Like the other filled-sink structures, it seems to be relatively solid and well-cemented, and most of the debris I see coming down off the bluff is from the limestone spalling off higher up, not actually chunks from the breccia. This observation fits the fact that the railroad never bothered to line this part of the tunnel, so seems to have realized that the filled-sink breccia is in fact quite stable, despite looking like it shouldn't be. 

[wefalck]

Geologist talking to geologist 🤪

[kgstakes]

2 hours ago, Cathead said:

I would agree, except that the tunnel isn't a dead-end, but will continue through to a new module. See track plan in post #61 and look at the right side of the area labeled Rocheport (viewing angle is from the top down). The other portal will be on the next module in that direction. What's beautiful here is that this tunnel changes partway through; it's bare rock on this (east) side but lined with brick and stone on the other (west) side. So when I build the next module, I'll build that half of the tunnel as brick and stone, then when they butt together the joint will naturally look right because there really is a transition in the middle of the tunnel. See the video part 2 linked above to really appreciate this. Here's a sneak preview of the western portal:

 

Good questions!

 

There is no faulting, though there are a handful of major vertical joints, which are already simulated. The ones on the model are a little more uniform top-to-bottom than the real ones, but I think they're close enough. Smaller "structures" you may be seeing are probably fracture planes where rock is locally spalling off the bluff face. I may experiment with using a dark pencil to draw in a few other fractures, but overall there isn't much in the way of vertical structural features crossing bedding planes.

 

I don't intend to use any fixative on these surfaces, as they won't be touched or handled. I apply most of my pastels with fingers and find that skin oil does a remarkable job of binding pastels to most surfaces. I've never used fixatives even on my ship models; I'd only do so for things like actual railroad cars that will be routinely handled.

Oops my bad, didn't look at the whole picture.  Will look forward to many more posts of your model railroad,

 

[Cathead]

43 minutes ago, kgstakes said:

Oops my bad, didn't look at the whole picture.

No worries, I appreciate you taking the time to think about the project and make suggestions!

Edited 17 hours ago by Cathead