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

[Cathead]

9 minutes ago, popeye2sea said:

In many cases the railroads owned the land as part of land grant deals with the government to develop the right of way .  As the rail lines were built the railroad sold off parcels.

In earlier eras, yes, but by ~1900 that wasn't really happening in places like central Missouri because most/all of the land was already owned by private landowners long before the railroad came through. The Katy's expansion across central Missouri, the focus here, didn't benefit from such a program. Many Western towns were, indeed, platted by the railroads as part of their land grants, but that didn't happen in this case.

 

There's an interesting side story here related to the Katy, though. When the first portion of the line was being built in the 1800s, heading south from western Missouri and eastern Kansas and heading for Texas, the railroad WAS counting on those large government land grants to fund its construction. It was promised such grants across Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). But those grants got tied up in legal battles that went up to the Supreme Court, since that land was owned by relocated Native American tribes, who argued that the government couldn't just give their land to a railroad since they already held government-granted title to it. Long story short, the Katy never did get any of those land grants and that caused a major financial burden for the railroad that played into its longer-term struggles to succeed and stay independent.

 

Quote

In New England towns grew around typical commercial nexus; farms, rivers, ports, crossroads.

 

That tends to be true of most towns. Few North American settlements weren't/aren't centered on some form of nexus, no matter where they were. Even out on the prairies, towns tended to be either by springs, or on local high ground, or even just centered on a notable stand of trees. Most of the towns along the Katy's line along the Missouri River long pre-dated the railroad because they were river-shipping towns first. There are a few exceptions, like McBaine, but that only existed because of the junction up to Columbia.

 

Another is the town of Mokane, farther east, which grew around the Katy's first chosen location for a division point yard and locomotive servicing facility, roughly halfway to St. Louis. The town's very name is railroad derived, a shortening of Missouri (MO), Kansas (KAN), and Eastern (E), the name of the shell company created by the Katy to build that line. Once it was complete, the Katy absorbed the MK&E but the name of Mokane remained. Eventually the Katy moved their main yards and division point west to Franklin, where their main lines diverged (as depicted on my layout), but Mokane's another rare example of a true railroad town on this line.

 

 

[Rik Thistle]

Eric,

 

2 hours ago, Cathead said:

I've always gotten the impression that even small villages were quite densely constructed, especially along their high streets

 

Richard

On 1/20/2026 at 6:08 PM, Rik Thistle said:

Rural areas, eg small farms and villages, had more land to spare so spacing was a bit more generous. Houses/buildings tended to be stone built so there may have been a need to keep a sizeable construction zone between them. 

 

I think original small villages would have a bit more space to play with.  If the village quickly grew in to a town/citiy then the original buildings were likely knocked down and Gen 2 built.

 

But again very dependant on whether the village/town was built in a restrictive valley or a flatter area. Town planning, if there actually was any in the early days, would have been minimal, I guess.

 

Yes, there are quite beautiful and compact high streets in Europe which have been deliberately preserved. Which is the right thing to do, - it's good for culture and tourism 

 

I skied in Breckenridge many years ago....beautiful location and town. And I agree, the streets were wide and plenty space between the buildings.

 

 Sorry for sidetracking your very good build thread in to a town planning discussion.... onwards with McBaine 😉

 

Richard

 

[wefalck]

Town development is an interesting subject and certainly was different between the USA and Europe, given the different time-scales. Most towns and even villages in Europe go back hundreds of years or even back to Roman times, with some of the original settlement patterns from the latter period still traceable on modern maps.

 

There different factors determining plot sizes and shapes. One factor can be how taxation was fixed, in some countries it was, for instance, the width of the plot along the street, resulting in narrow deep plots (as seen e.g. in Spain). Fire regulations could be another factor - thatched and/or wooden houses where built further apart from each other. Post the plague epidemics and the 30-Years-War in the 17th century many villages had to be refounded and until then unsettled land began to be cultivated. There was an incentive, for security reasons, to keep the built-up area tight (and more easily to defend), again resulting in narrow plots with vegetable gardens/orchards extending far out. Sometimes these old patterns can be still seen today, even in now urbanised areas.

 

Not being blessed with the space for a model railway (due to dense urbanisation and consequently small apartments with little ancillary space, such as basements), my main interest is the landscaping etc. development. I guess, I have to wait a bit for that now ...

 

[Keith Black]

I hadn't thought about farms in that area but a neat accessory would be an old thresher to sit at the edge of McBaine  I love old threshers, they're just lovely old things. 

 

 Metal HO scale model kit that's available out there. 

[Rik Thistle]

Threshers are fascinating machines, especially to a young lad - I was raised on a farm.

 

Fascinating, but potentially very dangerous....lots of exposed moving parts, but since the hands understood the risks they didn't get injured.. Different times.

 

Richard

[wefalck]

… and the portable steam-engines or traction-engines that powered them.

[Cathead]

It's fascinating to me which subjects explode into huge discussions and which don't!

 

3 hours ago, wefalck said:

resulting in narrow plots with vegetable gardens/orchards extending far out. Sometimes these old patterns can be still seen today, even in now urbanised areas.

You can find similar patterns of land use and ownership in portions of the US that were influenced by early French settlement. For example, on the lower Mississippi River, both banks are lined with long narrow strips reaching back from the river, because each farm needed access to the river for shipping but could extend as far back into the floodplain as they liked. You also see this pattern in portions of southeast Missouri (from St Louis south) where again you get very narrow land boundaries that pre-date Anglo-Saxon settlement. French settlers here had completely different mental models of land use, tending to set up semi-communal villages with shared agricultural land, rather than the Anglo-Saxon model of scattered individual farmsteads that was more common elsewhere in the US. But this doesn't apply to the area this model railroad depicts, where the French influence was limited to fur trappers and traders rather than settlers.

 

3 hours ago, wefalck said:

my main interest is the landscaping etc. development. I guess, I have to wait a bit for that now

Well, the good news is that (a) I won't be stopping scenery progress in Rocheport entirely and (b) McBaine should move forward faster as it's a smaller and simpler scene. 

 

2 hours ago, Keith Black said:

a neat accessory would be an old thresher to sit at the edge of McBaine

I'm not an expert on old farm machinery. Any advice on determining designs that would be appropriate for 1900? My loose understanding is that by, say, the 1910s or so steam-powered machinery was taking over from horse-powered threshers/harvesters, but it feels like 1900 is a real transition time that could make it hard to make a correct choice of model. I'm certainly intending this layout to depict a pre-automobile era, especially in these smaller towns where they would still have been an expensive novelty. So it would feel anachronistic to have a steam thresher sitting there. In the model you show, I can't quite see a detail that tells me definitively one or the other, what the power source would be or what the correct era would be?

[Rik Thistle]

Eric,

 

Threshing Time | Farmington Historical Society - https://farmingtonhistorical.org/stories-threshing.html   and  Machinery’s profound impact on farming never seems to slow - https://historyonthefox.wordpress.com/tag/reaper/

 

Some pics and info from around 1900. Note: adding a Thresher would tie down the season your layout depicts ie when the crops come in.

 

Richard

 

Edit: Adding a thresher etc would fit in nicely with the grain barns mentioned in earlier posts. This could be a whole project in itself, assuming there were crops grown nearby...maybe it's a side-project for now or for later when the railway layout is up and running. Either way another interesting subject for us readers 😉 

 

Edited Thursday at 12:18 AM by Rik Thistle

[Cathead]

1 minute ago, Rik Thistle said:

Note: adding a Thresher would tie down the season your layout depicts ie when the crops come in.

Not necessarily. It could be stored under a barn's overhang, or possibly being depicted on a road being moved somewhere. The layout is set in late fall or early winter, so past harvest time for most crops, so it definitely wouldn't in a field. But that doesn't preclude it being present.

[wefalck]

Considering the envisaged season, perhaps a steam-plow set might then be more approriate. I am not quite sure about the developments in the USA, but over here in Europe in many areas, at least those with larger fields, contract steam-plowing was quite common with the two-engine plus balance-plow set travelling all over the regions.

I believe in the USA and Canada, IC-engine powered tractors with plows attached came into use even before WW1, while these took off in Europe only from the 1920s or so on.

 

[Cathead]

4 hours ago, wefalck said:

IC-engine powered tractors with plows attached came into use even before WW1,

My impression, though I'm not an expert, is that 1900 is just a bit too early for the widespread adoption of steam-powered farm machinery. Especially on smaller farms in relatively remote areas like this layout depicts. Even by 1910 it'd be more acceptable. Part of my problem in researching things like this, is that most sources don't really care about the exact year and will just say things like (making this up) "in the early 1900s, steam-powered machinery became more widespread and was widely adopted by WW1", which is fine if you're interested in the general history but not very helpful if you're specifically trying to nail down the situation in a certain narrow time frame within that rapid transition.

 

I've been using "1900" as a shorthand for my layout's setting, but really it's kind of an amalgamation of roughly 1893-1903, essentially the first decade from when the line was first built to just before the massive flood of 1903 did all sorts of damage. And that framing especially nudges the technological level more toward the horse-dominated 1800s than the IC-dominated 1900s. And aesthetically, that's what I want to present: the last era of a horse-dominated culture before autos/IC started taking over. I just find that more interesting, personally.

[Rik Thistle]

Post deleted.

Edited Thursday at 02:01 PM by Rik Thistle

[Rik Thistle]

15 minutes ago, Cathead said:

the last era of a horse-dominated culture

 

Yes, that sounds good.

 

Clydesdale horses pulling ploughs etc were still used in Scotland well in to the 1930s.  Very powerful and gentle animals.

 

Richard

 

 

[Keith Black]

 

 "No stem Mr Holman"

 

 

 Horse drawn threshers appeared before steam powered tractors took over. 

[Cathead]

First one looks horse-drawn, second one looks mule-drawn. Especially appropriate for Missouri. My point is ensuring that if I were to include a thresher model, that it correctly be a non-steam version.

[Ian_Grant]

Wow that's a lot of horses/mules hitched together!  Very interesting history picture.......

[realworkingsailor]

I’d also suggest researching what kind of agriculture was practiced in the area. Threshers are great if you’re in the middle of vast fields of wheat, but are pretty useless in a dairy operation! From the looks of the grain elevator in Rocheport, it doesn’t look like grain was a significant crop in the area, and going by the few photos you’ve shared of McBaine, if grain was significant, an elevator would have been one of the first structures built.

 

Andy

[Keith Black]

On 1/21/2026 at 1:30 PM, Cathead said:

  Quote

Turner McBaine – grandson of his namesake – went into business after graduating from the University of Missouri. He returned to live in Columbia, and spent each summer with his family on their land along the Missouri River, the largest farm property in the county, where he oversaw his tenants. In 1899, according to the Encyclopedia of the History of Missouri, 1,000 acres were planted in wheat, yielding 25,000 bushels. About 1,000 cattle and 1,500 hogs went to market annually from the McBaine farm.

 I worked on a 200 acre farm in Washington so 1,000 acres of wheat isn't a small feat by any means, Andy. In some cases a group of farmers would go in together and buy a thresher. That quote is what led to my thinking a thresher would make for an interesting accessory. It was just a thought. 

 

 If Eric wanted to include a thresher in his layout, placement could be a bright shiny new horse drawn thresher on a flat car sidetracked waiting for the thresher to be off loaded. 

Edited Friday at 03:30 PM by Keith Black

[Kenchington]

There was an interesting reversal in technological progress, as well as marked local variation, in agricultural machinery.

 

A man of my name was enumerated in the 1871 English census as an operator of steam ploughs -- hauled to and fro across the wide wheat fields of Wiltshire on a steel cable worked by a traction engine. I doubt that there were many such rigs in the USA at that time. Yet diesel-powered tractors came so late to (Old) England that in my mother's country, in Devon, the farms were still worked by heavy horses through to 1945 -- long after internal-combustion power had taken over on this side of the Atlantic. When I was a kid in the '60s, the local farm still had the old harness hanging on the walls of one of the lofts.

 

My maternal grandfather drove a steamroller, from the 1920s on, building the new motor roads. In 1942–43, they had to build approach roads to the new USAAF airfields constructed for the D-Day invasion. The locals had the roller (powered by steam) but otherwise men with picks and shovels. One day, one of the American engineers said: "You guys need a bulldozer!" My grandfather remembered his response as: "What's a bulldozer?" A man with decades of experience in road building had simply never heard of such a thing.

 

Which is to say that a model showing Missouri circa 1900 needs to show Missouri circa 1900 and it may be very, very different from what was being done somewhere else, even close by, or "somewhen" else a decade earlier or later!

 

Trevor

[wefalck]

I gather we are veering off-topic here and I could write a lot about steam-ploughing and its development from around the middle of the 19th century in England to latest use, probably in 1960s N-Germany. I got interested in that when living in the UK in the late 1980s and coming across many preserved examples at 'steam fairs'.

Probably the most innovative manufacturer was John Fowler & Cie., but there were others, of course. Fowler came up with the two-engine system, one on each side of the field, which also entailed the invention of the so-called balance-plough that could move forward and backward without having to be turned around. The system really became commercially successful, when the so-called 'clip-drum' was invented to pull the towing cable by the German chief-engineer of Fowler (Max von Eyth). These sets were so expensive that only large estates could afford them or specialised contractors that were touring the country to offer their services.

Much of western and central Europe, however, has/had much too small fields to make operation even by contractors economically feasible. So horse-drawn ploughs persisted well into the 1950s particularly in hilly and mountainous areas. I have photographed ploughing by horse in Hungary as late as 1974!

Before the ecosystem value of peat- and wetlands was recognised, there has been a massive drive to prepare these for cultivation. Once the peat has been 'mined', extremely large steam-plough sets were used to mix the residual peat with underlying sand down to a depth of up to five metres (15 ft). This could only be done with two-plough sets positioned on more solid ground.

Such huge sets were also used to drain the malaria-infested wetlands south of Rome in the 1930s.

 

Sorry for this rambling ... Here is a 1:76 scale model of a ploughing engine I built decades ago: 

 

 

 

[Kenchington]

1 hour ago, wefalck said:

Here is a 1:76 scale model of a ploughing engine I built

And you even have my far-distant cousin, James Daniel Kinchington, there at the controls of his engine. Lovely!

 

To return our hijacking of this thread to nautical matters: JDK's elder son was a stoker in the Royal Navy, then worked for HM Coastguard -- before becoming a publican. More especially, JDK's cousin (son of his mother's elder sister) was Absalom Blachford, sometime skipper of King Edward VII's yacht Britannia.

 

But that's enough name-dropping for one day!

 

Trevor

[Cathead]

5 hours ago, realworkingsailor said:

I’d also suggest researching what kind of agriculture was practiced in the area. Threshers are great if you’re in the middle of vast fields of wheat, but are pretty useless in a dairy operation! From the looks of the grain elevator in Rocheport, it doesn’t look like grain was a significant crop in the area, and going by the few photos you’ve shared of McBaine, if grain was significant, an elevator would have been one of the first structures built.

Andy, you're going to have to trust me that I know this area and its history well. My goal in this log isn't to have to write a fully cited research thesis, so  sometimes readers are going to have to believe that I'm reasonably informed. Grain, hay, and livestock were the dominant agricultural products in this area at the time, along with some orchards (for example, the many apple shippers listed in the railroad's business directory for Rocheport). And as Keith's requote shows, I did just post some very specific information about agricultural output from the largest farm in the county.

 

At the same time, keep in mind that much of the landscape around here is hill country, so you're not getting the vast fields of, say, Illinois or Montana. That doesn't mean farm equipment like threshers weren't used on the local farms, possibly as a cooperative or traveling system. Also, I'm not sure what you're judging the Rocheport elevator against, but it's actually not much smaller than plenty of small-town elevators in use along railroads into the 1950s, when farms had gotten a lot bigger. Rocheport also had a three-story flour mill, it's just not discussed in my log much because it's not in the scene. But again that shows a significant enough production to support both an export elevator and a local mill.

 

As for McBaine, don't assume that elevators are the only way to ship grain (or flour). If you go back early in the log, you'll see me sharing photos of contemporary riverboats heavily loaded with bagged grain/flour being shipped downriver that way, rather than in bulk. I don't find it at all difficult to believe that grain was being shipped out in bags from McBaine, especially if most of it was coming from a single farm that probably had its own handling facilities, given that it existed before the railroad and was already shipping grain by river. So McBaine didn't necessarily need an elevator to be built in that otherwise flyspeck town when the dominant agricultural shipper was already set up for a different handling method.

 

As for the specific thresher question, McBaine would be an especially good place to display such a thing. As I already discussed, McBaine sits in the floodplain of a 2-mile-wide valley at a location where the Missouri River is on the far side of the valley. Virtually all the Missouri River floodplain was being intensively farmed in that area. So you actually ARE getting local farms that look a bit more like Illinois or Montana down in there, at a scale that really would support mechanization and consolidation (this is a primary reason the McBaine farm was so large; it's the local geographic setting).

 

Whereas Rocheport is the opposite situation: it's a pre-existing river town without any access to the broader floodplain (all of which is on the far side of the river, for miles in either direction. But what IT'S doing is acting as a funnel for all the smaller farms up the tributary valley and into the hill country to bring their collective products down to the river to ship. So an elevator makes sense there, because it's collecting products from many different small farms to ship out on the railroad. And prior to the railroad, all those area small farmers would have brought products down to the river landing and sent them out by steamboat. 

 

In other words, Rocheport is a collective shipping point for many small farms in the general area extending back into the hills; McBaine is primarily a single shipping point for a large consolidated farm in the river bottoms. 

[Cathead]

Let me say this: all this rabbit-hole discussion is interesting and I'm not going to dissuade folks from pursuing it. But what I WILL say is that I'm personally not going to go to deep into the weeds on some of these issues. The thresher question is a very, very minor detail in a room-sized project. Even if I add one, it'd be (like telegraph poles) one of the last things done because it doesn't have a functional influence on the core purpose of the project: a realistic operating model of a 1900s railroad line in this part of Missouri. 

 

That's what differentiates this project from the more typical projects ship modelers are used to: this is meant to be USED on a regular basis. And as such, I'm going to keep my eye on the prize of being able to run operating sessions while still developing a realistic and detailed setting that helps those operations feel real. So many of these details, while interesting and worth thinking about, are potentially years away from being realized because they aren't the priority in the near-term, unlike finishing a specific ship model.

 

Discussions of agricultural patterns are more directly relevant in that they inform the operating scheme and even the way sidings and buildings are laid out. But again, in this layout I'm very closely following what the actual Katy did in both these towns. I have the railroad's track schematics for these places. I have the railroad's shipping directory for each town. If there was an elevator in Rocheport and not in McBaine, that's how it really was, not just some detail I'm making up or getting wrong. The operating patterns I'm planning are based on the best information I have regarding who was actually shipping on the railroad from these places. And I live nearby. I've been immersed in local history for decades. That doesn't mean I can't be wrong, or misinformed, about something, but I do have a deep contextual knowledge of this area, its history and economics and geography and geology, that I'm drawing on, but I can't fully share without writing a massive thesis.

 

This project is WAY more complicated to explain in an online setting because it draws so heavily on a collective knowledge and sense of place; it's so different from designing a specific model of a certain item in isolation. From a ship modeling perspective, it's more like trying to develop a working diorama of a major naval yard that somehow incorporates the flow of supplies from near and far, the tidal patterns and estuary geography, and the socioeconomic context of the workers.

 

I'm also making decisions on what to include or leave out based on what works for my operating layout, rather than an attempt to literally recreate the exact reality. Sometimes, as a model railroader, you need to do what works for you even if it diverges slightly from what the railroad really did. 

 

There's some other context I can share that will help people understand McBaine a bit better, but I'm tired of writing long entries at the moment. We'll get to some of that soon, when I share the actual track plan and scenic plan for this scene.

 

[realworkingsailor]

1 hour ago, Cathead said:

Andy, you're going to have to trust me that I know this area and its history well. My goal in this log isn't to have to write a fully cited research thesis, so  sometimes readers are going to have to believe that I'm reasonably informed. Grain, hay, and livestock were the dominant agricultural products in this area at the time, along with some orchards (for example, the many apple shippers listed in the railroad's business directory for Rocheport). And as Keith's requote shows, I did just post some very specific information about agricultural output from the largest farm in the county.

 

At the same time, keep in mind that much of the landscape around here is hill country, so you're not getting the vast fields of, say, Illinois or Montana. That doesn't mean farm equipment like threshers weren't used on the local farms, possibly as a cooperative or traveling system. Also, I'm not sure what you're judging the Rocheport elevator against, but it's actually not much smaller than plenty of small-town elevators in use along railroads into the 1950s, when farms had gotten a lot bigger. Rocheport also had a three-story flour mill, it's just not discussed in my log much because it's not in the scene. But again that shows a significant enough production to support both an export elevator and a local mill.

 

As for McBaine, don't assume that elevators are the only way to ship grain (or flour). If you go back early in the log, you'll see me sharing photos of contemporary riverboats heavily loaded with bagged grain/flour being shipped downriver that way, rather than in bulk. I don't find it at all difficult to believe that grain was being shipped out in bags from McBaine, especially if most of it was coming from a single farm that probably had its own handling facilities, given that it existed before the railroad and was already shipping grain by river. So McBaine didn't necessarily need an elevator to be built in that otherwise flyspeck town when the dominant agricultural shipper was already set up for a different handling method.

 

As for the specific thresher question, McBaine would be an especially good place to display such a thing. As I already discussed, McBaine sits in the floodplain of a 2-mile-wide valley at a location where the Missouri River is on the far side of the valley. Virtually all the Missouri River floodplain was being intensively farmed in that area. So you actually ARE getting local farms that look a bit more like Illinois or Montana down in there, at a scale that really would support mechanization and consolidation (this is a primary reason the McBaine farm was so large; it's the local geographic setting).

 

Whereas Rocheport is the opposite situation: it's a pre-existing river town without any access to the broader floodplain (all of which is on the far side of the river, for miles in either direction. But what IT'S doing is acting as a funnel for all the smaller farms up the tributary valley and into the hill country to bring their collective products down to the river to ship. So an elevator makes sense there, because it's collecting products from many different small farms to ship out on the railroad. And prior to the railroad, all those area small farmers would have brought products down to the river landing and sent them out by steamboat. 

 

In other words, Rocheport is a collective shipping point for many small farms in the general area extending back into the hills; McBaine is primarily a single shipping point for a large consolidated farm in the river bottoms. 

 Admittedly in the vast amount of information you’ve shared, I missed your point on the major farm in the area. My point was not to question your research and knowledge, and I have no doubt you know the area about as well as the back of your own hand. 
 

My basis for questioning the grain elevator size was based on my observation of different elevators in other parts of North America. To me, at any rate, it appears to be closer to a feedmill sized elevator; still capable of generating car loads of outbound grain, but also shipping and receiving grain and/or feed, seed, etc for the local farmers. But, again, you know the area far better than myself, I can only make semi-educated assumptions. 
 

Andy

[Egilman]

9 hours ago, Cathead said:

My impression, though I'm not an expert, is that 1900 is just a bit too early for the widespread adoption of steam-powered farm machinery.

Try the 1850's....

 

Steam powered agricultural equipment had been around 40 years before the first Diesel tractor was born....

 

Was old tech in the early 1900's

[Cathead]

I want to apologize for the testy tone of a previous post. I was checking MSW as a mental break during a fairly stressful work day, and my real-life mood leaked through. This build is such a complex project and I'm holding so many different aspects of the setting in my head (and notes/files) that it can be difficult to reconcile my own thoughts and plans with how outsiders see the project at any given moment. 

 

Among other things, I'm a professional scientific editor with significant educational experience, and very much enjoy sharing/teaching/exploring knowledge with others. However, the linear format of an MSW build log can make that very challenging for me. I'd much rather be writing all this up in book form (or even a website), where I could take the time to convey information in a more organized and coherent fashion. Trying to write all this out in a linear mode as the project progresses is something I'm finding very challenging, because there's no coherent way to provide all the background information necessary at any given point. If I wrote a book, you'd be able to read all of it in the space of days or weeks, and I'd have spent years carefully arranging everything I want to say so it all worked together. And you'd easily be able to flip back to an early chapter (or page) for a refresher on something if needed. In a build log like this, information or ideas relevant to (say) McBaine might have first been mentioned 10 months ago, and I can't expect readers to remember everything that's been said even if it's all still clear to me. Heck, I can't even remember what's been discussed sometimes, and it's a very slow process scrolling back through page after page of build log comments. But that also means a lot of repetition at times. The inherently chaotic nature of writing a build log and responding to inquiries within that log creates a very fractured narrative that is really at odds with how my organized brain works, and it's a challenge I definitely haven't mastered.

 

Although I've generally included a fair amount of historical context in earlier logs, I've never done one for a project this complex, and it's very challenging to me. So I find myself getting impatient sometimes when the log takes a direction I wasn't planning (even if it's interesting or worthwhile on its own merits) or when I need to try and explain a bunch of different interlocking ideas in a format that doesn't lend itself to that. Even just the nature of writing comment posts makes it harder to present ideas in an orderly fashion the way I would if I was laying out a more graphical format like a book or website. 

 

Over the weekend I will try to respond more clearly to some of the ideas and suggestions raised here. Thanks for being patient with me as I struggle to convey the vast context of this project clearly. In other contexts I really like to take the time to draft, edit, and organize my writing, an approach that doesn't work well with the more casual linear MSW comment-thread format, so at times I don't handle it well. I appreciate the interest every one of you shows in this project and want you to continue feeling comfortable expressing your interests and questions. To the extent that I want to keep discussion somewhat focused on-topic, it's simply a recognition that this is a huge project and I don't want other readers (or myself) to get bogged down in too many rabbit holes that can turn a build log into a rather messy narrative that could even be off-putting to other readers who want to keep their focus on the project itself. Thanks again for your patience!

 

EDIT: Just after posting that, I thought of a good analogy for what I'm trying to explain. Classic example of why this constant-update format is a challenge for me.

 

I am not a very social person. I am perfectly comfortable in a classroom or lecture hall. Put me at a lectern with a presentation, in front of hundreds of people, and I'm fine. Put me leading a birding walk or an education outing, and I'm in my element. Yet put me at a party with random conversation, and I start twitching and looking for a corner to hide in. I'm not comfortable in disorganized settings. Narratives that jump all over the place are hard for me.

 

Writing a build log like this is, for me, like trying to give an extemporaneous years-long lecture but without the benefit of pre-organizing the proper sets of slides/imagery/graphs or an organized framework for the talk. And the enthusiastic audience is constantly raising their hand with interesting questions that are welcome yet nevertheless derail the narrative structure of the talk. It's more like being at a party where I can't keep up. It's not that anyone else is doing anything wrong, it's just that it's not ideal for my personality putting its best foot forward.

Edited Friday at 02:56 PM by Cathead

[Cathead]

I'm going to try and give a wrap-up answer to the two conversational threads, and then move on for now. First, the thresher question.

 

On 1/22/2026 at 5:21 PM, Egilman said:

Try the 1850's....

 

Steam powered agricultural equipment had been around 40 years before the first Diesel tractor was born....

 

Was old tech in the early 1900's

So again, I admit to having relatively little knowledge of the details of agricultural equipment from this era. But what I've been trying to get at, is the difference between when something was invented, and the arc of when it became widely adopted. The question isn't when did steam threshers exist, it's when did they become so widely adopted that it would be appropriate for one to show up in this obscure corner of small-farm 1900 rural Missouri.

 

For example, while the first automobiles started appearing in the 1800s, my impression is that they didn't really take off in widespread adoption until after 1900, especially post 1910. And they certainly started out in cities where the road network was more amenable, and were late to infiltrate rural areas due to road quality (just like today's EVs that work fine for city driving but don't have the infrastructure to support long rural commutes or road trips).

 

The first automobile maker in St. Louis opened around 1898, and the city was a center of auto manufacturing for a while, but I'm sure sales were initially concentrated in the city. So while cars might be appropriate on the streets of a 1900-era layout in urban Chicago or St. Louis, they likely aren't appropriate yet on the roads of small Missouri farm towns in 1900. Just because they existed doesn't mean they're appropriate in my specific setting. Certainly none of the contemporary photos I have, anywhere on the rural portion of the line (such as at small-town depots) shows anything but horse/mule technology. To use the EV analogy, if I were building a layout depicting Missouri in, say, 2022, and someone suggested I include EVs on the layout, it would really matter whether the layout was in small-town rural Missouri or an upscale neighborhood in Kansas City. Just because lots of EVs are being sold right now globally doesn't mean they're an appropriate or likely detail in some settings where they haven't seen widespread adoption.

 

So again, the question is whether steam thresher technology was so well developed as to be so ubiquitous as to be a reasonable detail on this layout. The link given above shows lots of early examples, but I'll also note that a lot of them look to me like the sort of quirky early designs you get of such tech that never really pan out. That link doesn't tell me anything about the use of steam farming technology in this portion of Missouri at my chosen time. 

 

I did some searching in the state historical society photo collections for things like "thresher" and "threshing", and did find some nice photos, even two from Boone County, but sadly the most relevant ones don't have dates. (You can see for yourself at this link) They're roughly period-appropriate, but I can't tell from other details whether they're, say,  1880 or 1910, and that's an important difference given the narrow needle-eye I'm threading in the historical record during a fast-changing historical period.  As this response nicely put it:

 

On 1/22/2026 at 10:17 AM, Kenchington said:

Which is to say that a model showing Missouri circa 1900 needs to show Missouri circa 1900 and it may be very, very different from what was being done somewhere else, even close by, or "somewhen" else a decade earlier or later!

 

And while I'm thrilled that Keith originally brought up this interesting possible detail, and it's fun to think about, this is still a huge discussion about what would at best be a two-inch detail in a ten foot long scene that wouldn't be added for at least a year. I love the ides of adding a thresher to the scene at some point, and I even think there's a good argument that McBaine is the place to do it, as the setting for the largest farm in the county (and with some of the flattest riverbottom land) that would seem an especially likely place to adopt such machinery. It's just not a good use of my (or most readers') time to spend any longer trying to hash out the perfect approach right now.

 

So thank you all for your enthusiasm and contributions, but let's move on from the agricultural equipment theme for now and try to get back to the actual layout-building.

 

 

[Cathead]

Part two of wrap-up response: agricultural patterns in the area.

 

On 1/22/2026 at 4:33 PM, realworkingsailor said:

My basis for questioning the grain elevator size was based on my observation of different elevators in other parts of North America. To me, at any rate, it appears to be closer to a feedmill sized elevator; still capable of generating car loads of outbound grain, but also shipping and receiving grain and/or feed, seed, etc for the local farmers. But, again, you know the area far better than myself, I can only make semi-educated assumptions. 

I wish you'd said this the first time, because now I understand what you're getting at. Let me give you some additional context.

 

Rocheport absolutely was a local receiver of grain, especially wheat. This doesn't mean local wheat was produced at the scale, of, say eastern Montana, but it was still a primary grain crop and thus the focus of both industry and shipping. Let me quote a local historian's article about an example of Rocheport-area agriculture:

 

Quote

The importance of agriculture to the area is illustrated best by the development of the John W. Harris estate just north of Rocheport. This farm was designated the "Model Farm" of the state by the St. Louis Agricultural and Mechanical Society in 1873. Harris, a prosperous Rocheport merchant, acquired the farm through his marriage to Ann Mary McClure. He added 1200 acres to the McClure farm which included the Thrall farm. The land was enclosed by rail fencing, ponds created for water, orchards and gardens planted. Harris had 1200 acres in grass, 110 acres in corn, 100 acres in wheat, 70 acres in oats and the balance in millet. Harris had 350 head of cattle...His meat cattle were mainly Shorthorns, including 40 head of pedigreed stock. He had 400 sheep, the stock being a mixture of Cotswolds, Merinses and South Downs.

 

So here you can see that, as I've said before, assuming this farm is representative, the primary products were hay, livestock, and grain, with some orchards and produce. The emphasis on hay and livestock is demonstrated both in the huge hay barn attached to the elevator, and in the stockyard served by the railroad. Corn and wheat were obviously not dominant on the landscape as a ratio to grass, but were the primary grain crops being grown, meaning that's what the grain-handling infrastructure was built to handle. It's why the elevator is relatively small, but still there.

 

Grain was already a notable product in the Rocheport area, because a good-sized flour mill predated the railroad. You can see it along the riverbank in this photo. This mill was listed in the railroad's business directory along with the elevator. It's not seen on the layout because it's out of the scene for the space I have, but it was there and it was taking in local grain and was likely shipping by river, pre-railroad. I'd bet that its business was notably harmed by the railroad's coming, since (a) the new elevator gave local farmers access to new markets and (b) the railroad could also ship in flour/meal from elsewhere. But it shows that grain production was significant enough to support those industrial buildings in town. 

 

The railroad's business directory lists the "Rocheport Elevator" as the only entry under the category of elevators and mills. It uses that name specifically for the business, in notable contrast to other towns where it specifically lists, say, "such and such feed mill". You can clearly see the chute used for loading boxcars, but there isn't any visual evidence of a significant railside unloading facility (for example, for grain being shipped in to mix bulk feed). So while I have no doubt that there was some incoming traffic of farm-supply products (and you can see a large nearby warehouse), I don't have any clear evidence that this was operating as a feed mill rather than as a primary grain exporter of wheat and corn.

 

Furthermore, another nearby town DID have a feed mill. It's escaping my mind which one, and I did some brief searching but couldn't come up with the evidence, but you're going to have to trust me on this one. I have a clear memory of one of the trailside interpretive signs discussing how this mill's proprietor had developed a particularly good poultry mix that won him recognition from state government, and shipped his mix all over the state. It specifically discussed this mill bringing in ingredients by rail and then re-shipping the final product, as you'd expect from a feed mill. The accompany photo, as I recall, was a classic Midwest structure about the same size as the Rocheport elevator. This was in one of the other Rocheport-like small towns along the river, I thought it was Hartsburg but can't prove it without going back to that section of trail.

 

Point being, there were a variety of small agricultural industries along the rail line during this time, but I've got no evidence to suggest that the Rocheport elevator was acting as a feed mill. That role was being filled by at least one other industry elsewhere along the line but not far away, meaning its products could easily be shipped to Rocheport along the railroad.

 

Finally, you could point out that the harvest seasons for wheat and corn are different. In Missouri, wheat is (and was) summer-harvested while corn is/was fall-harvested. I set this layout in the late fall / early winter for a variety of other reasons, meaning that technically the wheat harvest has long since been gathered and probably shipped, so any active grain handling is likely corn. You could also argue that maybe this structure is milling feed between harvest seasons, and I couldn't prove you wrong. Frankly, this is one of those details I'm sort of fudging for the purposes of operational interest. Model railroads often have to simplify reality to practical purposes. I'm comfortable with my interpretation that the elevator's primary purpose was as a shipper of local grain. Especially, and this is important, because this is just my model railroad's interpretation of the setting and not a history book dealing with Facts. This (possibly simplified) approach lets me create a manageable operating scheme while holding to the essence of local facts, even if certain details are unclear. But it's all stuff I've thought through, even if I didn't expect to need or want to go through the reasoning in excruciating detail.

 

As for McBaine, to repeat, I've never found evidence of any sort of elevator/mill there despite the major agricultural presence. The railroad's business directory doesn't list one and no photos or maps ever show one. And to repeat, the huge Turner McBaine farm there predated the railroad, meaning it likely had its own facilities for handling and storing grain, and for shipping it pre-railroad (presumably by bagging it as that would be the only practical way). So again, especially in a model railroad setting, I think it's reasonable to decide that the McBaine farm was shipping bagged grain from a siding at the depot, and no one felt the need to build an elevator because alternate methods were already in place. That has the side benefit of making McBaine a bit more operationally distinct from Rocheport, another justification in a model railroad context.

 

So again, let's close this chapter for now because I'm comfortable with the level of historical and practical justification for how I'm envisioning my version of reality in these settings (again, the difference between a model railroad and a history book), and would like to get back to focusing on the actual design and building of this scene. Thanks for pushing me to explain all this more clearly, since it seems that was needed to help people understand the why's of things, and I again I appreciate the enthusiasm and interest that leads to discussions like these.

 

EDIT: And to circle back to the thresher thing one last time, this is again why Rocheport and McBaine are different. I agree that threshers are of less  use in a setting where a bunch of small farms are raising 100 acres of wheat (Rocheport), but that's very different from a single large farm raising 1,000 acres of wheat (McBaine). So if I were to display a thresher, it'd be at McBaine where it would be more logical. But this also shows that you do have to take hyper-local context into account. Two railroad stops roughly 10 miles apart are serving dramatically different agricultural settings, and you can't just take national trends like thresher use or elevator/mill design and assume they apply to these hyper-local settings without some specialized knowledge of the area.

 

 

Edited Saturday at 04:08 PM by Cathead

[Egilman]

4 hours ago, Cathead said:

So again, I admit to having relatively little knowledge of the details of agricultural equipment from this era. But what I've been trying to get at, is the difference between when something was invented, and the arc of when it became widely adopted. The question isn't when did steam threshers exist, it's when did they become so widely adopted that it would be appropriate for one to show up in this obscure corner of small-farm 1900 rural Missouri.

Well, I'm a historian as well, Boone County MO prior to the civil war was mostly small farms owned by whites with around 10 or so black slaves on average... (Missouri was a slave state in that era) After the Civil War and the emancipation of said slaves, most of the owners left the area for what they considered greener pastures, leaving the remaining ex slaves to homestead the vacated farms.... Still a poor rural small farm area... The one thing that stands out is Boone County is known as a millinery county... meaning a central hub of grain mills and elevators taking in raw freshly threshed grain from all over... (up to 100 miles in some cases) So yeah grain elevators were a very prominent feature of the central Missouri landscape... And it goes without saying the railroads that supported getting that grain to market... 

 

Yes there were mechanical threshers in Boone County in the 1880's... Missouri's own agricultural records show this, usually owned by the Millerinery businesses.... (the farms were for the most part too small to afford Threshers and the associated equipment and it was before the time of collectives and farm associations) but there were Steam powered threshers in Boone County...

 

Existing historical photo's prove it...

Photograph of John Ellis and S S Warren sitting on a thresher. Part of the Harris Family Photographs Collection, a collection of photographs of family, friends, employers, church, and schools collected by Julia Warren Harris. The collection is a vivid portrait of Black family and social life in Boone County, MO, particularly the Three Creeks area, Columbia, and Ashland.

 

In researching this photo it's time scale is in the late 1880's...

 

I'm not trying to argue with you brother, and in the area your modeling there wouldn't be many pieces of such equipment.... But to say it's not possible due to the economic condition of the area, the lack of wealth in the area or the early examples of pre war equipment exclude their inclusion...  History clearly, if delved into deep enough, shows they were there, prior to 1900 as a fact... But probably a rarity and the property of the milling-grain elevator businesses of the era... Before the great farm organization efforts of the early 1900's...

 

Probably not enough volume to include one in your work,.. (and your working on a very narrow time frame) I agree....

 

Your doing a wonderful job on this, a master work, and the education in history and modeling skills that go along with it causes me to pause in awe...

 

Great respects my friend...

 

EG

 

I apologize for the derail...

I will step out of the conversation now

Edited Saturday at 08:03 PM by Egilman

[Cathead]

OK, let's back to the actual model railroad design for McBaine. Here's an MK&T engineering diagram for McBaine, clipped from a broader map that covers the entire portion of the railroad I'm modeling. I used this map for Rocheport, too, though I don't think I showed it. I've marked it up for clarity since some of the text is hard to read. This is from around 1920 but it's quite representative of what was present around 1900 in these smaller towns.

 

On the broader document, McBaine is clearly marked as a water stop for locomotives, and that's borne out by the labels for the pump house and water tank. There's a double-ended spur on the north side of the main line that wraps around the depot and likely served local customers. There's a longer passing siding used for meets between trains, then there's another double-ended spur on the south side that I'm assuming was used for cars headed to Columbia (at least that's how I'm handling it on my scheme). You can clearly see how this fits the 1949 photos I shared above, with the creek bridge just west of the depot and other infrastructure, and the Columbia branch junction just west of the bridge.

 

As is usual in model railroading, I had to simplify my version a bit. Below are drawings of the benchwork and of the basic track plan.

Some notes:

• Obviously the entire scene has been compressed for length. If I tried to model the full 3,802' long main siding here, it'd be almost 44 feet long.
• I converted both spurs to be stub-ended rather than double-ended, just as I did at Rocheport, for two reasons:
  • (a) this saves space and cost, since it takes a lot of room to wrap such a track back down to a parallel line and reconnect it, while turnouts are expensive 
  • (b) this makes operations more interesting. The real Katy loved making all its sidings double-ended because that meant they could be worked from either end, making operation more efficient. But on a model railroad, we enjoy doing complex work, so stub-ending the sidings adds interest. And it still follows the overall layout of the setting reasonably faithfully. Again, same approach as in Rocheport. Speaking of adding operational interest, I chose to make the spurs face opposite directions to further increase the operational interest.
• The Perche Creek bridge (Roche Perche is an older name for that waterway) is faithfully in the right place because it's such a strong scenic element and I just like bridges. The water tower, pump house, and so on have their proper place. 
• I might include a couple of small town buildings along the main road just to hint at the existence of a town. Even though they weren't really in that exact spot (as per the 1903 photo), they'll capture the feel of the setting. But overall this shouldn't look urban. Most of the open space should be farm fields or pastures.
• I have not included the Columbia branch junction. There just isn't space for it to go anywhere and I don't see the need for a "dummy" turnout. My operating plan assumes that local freights use that south-side spur to drop off and pick up cars from/to Columbia, capturing the essence of that branch's operation with regard to the main line. We'll just assume that another local dealt with those cars between operating sessions. This lets McBaine retain its operating interest as a junction in a very tight space.
• The north side spur retains its function as place for local cars to be spotted (stockyard, bagged grain, local deliveries, etc.)

 

Speaking of operating, here's the latest draft of the town schematic that will be posted on the fascia to guide operators. This is the same concept I already discussed regarding Rocheport, though the design has been subtly updated since then:

 

This tells operators what every track is called and gives clear numbered locations for every place a car might be spotted. So each car's delivery instructions can be checked against such a schematic to know what to do. Up to three cars can be delivered locally on (1) and up to four destined for Columbia on (2). That's all I have space for, even though Columbia certainly got more traffic than that. But again, this captures the feel of the place.

 

One addition to this schematic from the earlier version shown in Rocheport is a banner at the bottom telling operators where they are along the entire layout. I really like this, both as a bit of practical clarity and as a nudge to feeling that you're part of a larger railroad system even in these small towns.

 

To round this post out, I brought the benchwork up to the railroad room and have been laying out the track plan properly. Here's McBaine with Rocheport in the background:

 

Overhead view of west half:

Overhead view of east half:

Hope all that helps you see where this scene is going and how it represents the real location!