I have heard of a railroad called Ottumwa Connecting in a book. I looked it up but found no results. It is not existing today. What happened to Ottumwa Connecting? Was its sucsessor Burlington Junction railway?
Thank you for any information you can provide.
Ottumwa Connecting abandoned 1985. Some pieces bought by Ottumwa Terminal which is now IAIS. (created from WAB/N&W remnants in 1984 and never did much. Power was ex BN NW-2 # 152)
Somebody needs to learn how to research. No satisfaction for buttonpushers in doing railroad research.
Thanks for the information.
Des Moines Register, July 1, 1984 https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/130698914/ Pat Johnson has a one-track mind and it's on the railroad. The Ottumwa Connecting Railroad isn't your typical railroad. When it came to life on June 11 and rolled quietly into town, it carried with it the distinction of being Iowa's shortest railroad and one of the smallest in the United States. The railroad gives new meaning to the word "small." It has just 3.25 miles of track, one locomotive, one customer, and just one employee besides Johnson, who doubles for now as the company's president and its principal train engineer. "I tell people that we're not as long as other railroads, but we're just as wide," Johnson said. "We're not much for show; we're strictly a little, working railroad." The Ottumwa Connecting Railroad links two of the city's principal industries, the John Deere Ottumwa Works and the Ralston Purina Co.'s feed plant, with the main line of the Milwaukee Road. The companies' rail connection with the outside world was severed 28 months ago when the Norfolk and Western Railway abandoned its branch line between Ottumwa and Moulton. That decision forced the Ottumwa businesses to rely solely on trucks for all of their transportation needs. The Norfolk and Western, part of the Norfolk Southern Corp., one of the nation's largest rail companies, pleaded poor economics for deciding to pull out of Ottumwa. The company said it was losing money on the branch line. But 53-year-old Johnson, a businessman from the Colorado Springs suburb of Fountain, believed black ink could flow where the red ink had once run. He convinced Colorado Springs railroad executive Gary W. Flanders to purchase the most valuable portion of the line from the Norfolk and Western this spring, and Johnson leased the track from Flanders' company [Colorado & Eastern]. Johnson was at the controls of the railroad's 1946-vintage locomotive, a 1,000-horsepower powerhouse that once belonged to the Burlington Northern Railroad, as he deftly guided flatcars out of the sprawling Deere grounds, beneath U.S. Highway 34, and over the 750-foot iron bridge that spans the Des Moines River. The cars were uncoupled on a Milwaukee Road siding southeast of the Ottumwa business district, and Johnson headed the engine back across the river. Joining Johnson on the trips was the railroad's only other employee, Tony Long of Fairfield, a 29-year-old veteran railroader with the Burlington Northern who had been laid off by that company because of the downturn in the economy. (Johnson expects to add another full-time employee in the weeks ahead, and as business warrants, he plans to add a couple of part-time workers.) Johnson's background is in transportation. He once owned a small bus company in Kansas, and he was one of the owners of a small Oklahoma railroad, the Northwestern Oklahoma, before he began looking two years ago for a potential short line operation of his own. "I functioned as the general manager of the railroad, but that didn't mean all that much because I was also the engineer," Johnson said. "Flexibility. That is the secret for a successful short line being able to have people who can do a whole lot of things." He added: "Yesterday, Tony and I both were working on the track. Today, I was taking care of some of the paperwork. This is really a mom-and-pop operation. We're planning to paint the bridge ourselves over the course of the next couple of summers." Johnson learned that a short line might fly in Ottumwa from officials in the rail division of the Iowa Department of Transportation…Johnson is among a growing number of entrepreneurs across the country who believe that marginal rail lines of no interest to the major railroads can be worked at a profit by small companies having only a handful of employees and no expensive union contract requirements. The small railroads are called short lines, and the Ottumwa Connecting Railroad is one of six short lines that have been started in Iowa in the past few years, in the wake of the major railroads' widespread abandonment of their least desirable segments of track. Ten short lines are operating in Iowa now: the Ottumwa Connecting and the Iowa; Iowa Northern; Keokuk Junction; Boone and Scenic Valley; Colorado and Eastern; Cedar Rapids and Iowa City; Des Moines Union; Iowa Terminal, and the Davenport Rock Island and Northwestern railroads. Officials are working to get four other short lines going in the Centerville, Washington, Burlington, and Forest City areas. While much of the talk of a national level deals with the possibility that another mega-merger will create a single railroad stretching for the first time from sea to shining sea, the talk in Ottumwa centers on this railroad that a person can traverse on foot without working up a sweat. The Ottumwa railroad is a shoestring operation, Johnson frankly admits. Train service right now is provided only as often as the John Deere factory's production schedules demand. Flatcars carrying large forage harvesters were moved out last week, one load heading for a customer in the West and the other bound for a Virginia export terminal for shipment to customers in France.
http://johnmarvigbridges.org/Ottumwa%20Wabash%20Bridge.html
This is the Ottumwa Connecting bridge Mr. Johnson had expected to paint.
Also explains the short lived history of the railroad (Colorado & Eastern/ Gary Flanders)
What is the Colorado & Eastern rr?
thank you.
Colorado & Eastern/ Colorado Springs & Eastern (both owned by Flanders, HQ in Colorado Springs) were former Rock Island lines purchased by Flanders on promissary notes in the Denver and Colorado Springs areas (at one point operating as far east as Belleville KS) under an ICC directed service order. He also operated Northern Railcar, a fly-by-night railcar repair and inspection outfit. Locomotive fleet was a gaggle of F units, NW-2's, SW-1's and NW-5's from BN and a small number of GP-7's from UP. Most of his holdings including other railroads in Council Bluffs, Ottumwa, Arkansas and Chicago were all shoestring operations on shaky ground. The railroads, locomotives and related equipment wound up being repossessed by creditors and the railroads. Much equipment had been stripped for parts or otherwise sold off.The railroad version of a ponzi scheme eventually collapsed. Rail lines leased by Flanders to other small railroads found themselves holding the bag at the end with obligations they knew nothing about.
Thank you.
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