Exploring the main line across Iowa is more fun than a silo full of corn

I’ve come to throw myself at the mercy of the Iowans out there. For years, I’ve been thinking their state would be a dull place to watch trains -- a flat, uninteresting, straight as an arrow trip through endless cornfields. I’ve held that view for much of my adult life. Then in the last year family obligations prompted me to take frequent trips to Iowa or across the state. Now I have come to ask forgiveness and to praise the tracks in the farms.

Being a child of the south, my limited knowledge of the Hawkeye State was shaped by studying geography in textbooks, learning about the Kate Shelley Bridge, and playing a part in my high school’s production of Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man.” My choral director knew me well and cast me in the role of the train conductor in the opening scene “Rock Island.” She must have seen the future.

As an adult, my railfan trips tended to take me to mountain railroads, where trains faced significant challenges and scenic highlights such as bridges and tunnels. The middle part of the country could never capture my attention. I figured Iowa was put there to hold back the Mississippi and Missouri rivers and to keep Illinois and Nebraska from colliding. The all-Iowa April 1986 issue of Trains did little to persuade me.

In 2004, I made the required pilgrimage to that timeless electric-powered freight short line, Iowa Traction. I rode the Boone & Scenic Valley tourist line. I took a Milwaukee Road 261 trip out of Davenport. A few years later, after Railroad Development Corp. bought two Chinese QJ 2-10-2s to operate on the former Rock Island main line, now the Iowa Interstate, I went to ride and chase the locomotives. Otherwise, I still spent little or no time in Iowa. The mountains were still calling me.

The bulk of my Iowa education over the last year has been driving U.S. 30, which parallels the former Chicago & North Western main line across the state. This is, of course, Union Pacific’s busy main line into Chicago. First, I got to know the eastern end between Cedar Rapids and Clinton, and it was pleasingly packed with all manner of traffic but still didn’t “wow” me. But as they say in “The Music Man,” “you gotta know the territory!”

At Christmas, I spent time on the western end of the state. Here was what I’d been seeking, some goodies on the UP main line to jazz it up:

• A big, imposing bridge across the Missouri River.
• An interesting junction at the crew-change point of Missouri Valley (and the also fascinating but unremarked California Junction nearby). (Missouri Valley, by the way, still hosts that fleet of stored UP SD9043MACs that have been waiting on frame repairs for a year and a half.)
• Parallel tracks with Canadian National’s former Illinois Central line across the state to Council Bluffs.

Best of all, there were twists and turns on the UP main line between Denison and Arcadia on the grade that takes trains out of the Missouri River drainage basin and into that of the Mississippi. Back at the office, I happened to have a copy of the Chicago & North Western Historical Society’s reprint of a guide to place names on my desk. Between that and other research, as I suspected, Arcadia is the top of the grade at the dividing line and the highest point on the main line. Its original name delights me: Tiptop. Nearby Westside is so named because it is the first community on the westside of the dividing line.

Of course, there is a feast of trains on this line to delight anyone. I started east the Sunday morning after Christmas and UP put on a fine show of empty hoppers, autoracks, intermodal, and even a local freight. I’ll share some of those images here with you. And I’ll tip my hat to the Iowa folks once more and apologize for not exploring your fine state before now. I will be back. You see, I finally know the territory.