A few questions on one of my past favorite carriers.
1. In the 1980s did Katy start a priority St.Louis-Texas piggyback service called the TX Special (extra sections of #101/102) that worked w/a reduced crew consist or did I simply dream this? 2. At Ft.Worth, how close was the OKT (ex RI) to Tower 55? Did this line actually connected @ T 55?
3. Which Ft.Worth yd did the OKT use? Peach or Ney?
SFbrkmn A few questions on one of my past favorite carriers. 1. In the 1980s did Katy start a priority St.Louis-Texas piggyback service called the TX Special (extra sections of #101/102) that worked w/a reduced crew consist or did I simply dream this? 2. At Ft.Worth, how close was the OKT (ex RI) to Tower 55? Did this line actually connected @ T 55? 3. Which Ft.Worth yd did the OKT use? Peach or Ney?
I did a little digging and I am not 100% I am correct but the Trinity Railway Express uses the former Dallas to Fort Worth Rock Island mainline.
If you think of the Dallas to Fort Worth Metroplex as a giant oval of land with Dallas at one end and Fort Worth the other (Interstate 30 marks the center of the oval and roughly marks the UP railroad right of way between Dallas and Fort Worth). Both ends of the oval are developed and the center is slowly developing to match the rest. Look at the TRE Map below, to me it looks like RI used and accessed primarily North of the center point of this oval. Where the old RI yard used to be in Fort Worth looks to be at least 2 miles North of Tower 55 but not really that far West. The TRE line extended the RI line approx 1/2 to 3/4 mile West to reach Intermodal Station. Intermodal Station is directly North of Tower 55. So is the former Santa Fe Station in Fort Worth that Amtrak used to use called "Union Depot" The Santa Fe Station or Union Depot was where the Rock Island Fort Worth Passenger trains stopped it is just South of Intermodal Station but still approx 1 mile North of Tower 55.
Map of TRE - Fort Worth to Dallas Mainline:
https://www.trinityrailwayexpress.org/stations/
Map of RI Lines........this map distorts Dallas relation to Fort Worth, Dallas is directly across from Fort Worth in Latitude more or less, it's not far North as represented in the below map.
https://www.american-rails.com/images/rock-island-map.jpg
"
An additional mainline between Fort Worth and Salina, Kansas, was added in the 1980s after the collapse of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad; this line was operated as the Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas Railroad (OKKT)."
So I presume from the above note on the Katy website this is the former RI main from OK to Fort Worth.
Trains 1964 Rock Island Map:
Abandoned lines in Fort Worth:
http://www.abandonedrails.com/Fort_Worth_Texas
If you zoom in on the above map, Tower 55 is at the intersection of Interstate 35W and Interstate 30 in the Southwest Quad of the freeway interchange.
Follow the tracks left of Tower 55 and you see a bus icon with T&P that is the old and preserved Texas and Pacific Station. TRE laid new tracks to here that avoided tower 55, these are not ex-RI tracks. Follow the tracks north of Tower 55 and slightly to the West to the other bus Icon and that is Fort Worth Intermodal Station. ex-RI mainline was extended to here from a terminus further to the East somewhere by TRE. The TRE extension enters Intermodal Station from the North headed South and parallel to BNSF tracks. Just South of Intermodal Station is the former RI, AT&SF station which has Santa Fe markings all over it but is called Union Station for some reason.
You see that black line across the screen by Intermodal station is a Rock Island branch from their former Fort Worth yard so I am going to guess the former RI yard was north of the end of the eastern portion of that line somewhere. Rough guess........I have no real clue.
Katy eastern most line into Dallas was abandoned in the 1960's or early 1970's. If you look at a freeway map of Dallas the KATY passenger line is the North Dallas Tollway alignment South of I-635 to almost downtown. Construction of the tollway ripped up whatever track remained and they also made the section closer to downtown a bike trail. Not sure where the former KATY passenger line ends North of Dallas or if the whole line was ripped up.
Over on Trainorders.com, I found part of a discussion from 2003 talking about the Texas Special TOFC service. One poster said it operated under it's own symbol. Another did say #101/102 eventually were mostly TOFC. It was said it (TSS/TSN-Texas Special South/North) were Sprint type trains. I take that to mean either reduced crews or interdivisional service, maybe both.
I have an early 1980s era MKT-OKKT system employee time table. The Duncan Subdivision shows running from Duncan, OK to Ney yard. Peach is still shown and shows having a yard. The special instructions also talk about locomotive restrictions on a couple of tracks.
I would guess Peach was still used for some things, like industry support, but may have lost importance for other uses. I would expect OKKT's traffic was predominately grain, mostly in unit trains. Trains handling other car load traffic, agricultural or not, I would think would come out of Ney. I wouldn't think they would classify traffic going to points on the OKKT twice within a few miles. But this is only a guess on my part, and stranger things have happened.
Jeff
I don't recall any special Katy TOFC service in the 80's.
They may have offered such a service between Kansas City and DFW, but the Frisco dominated St. Louis - DFW. They offered a morning departure for a TOFC/auto rack train from St. Louis that put trailers on the ground at DFW for delivery at 7:00 AM the next day. We (ICG) were the Chicago connection for the Frisco train. We had a 10:00 PM cut off for receipt of trailers at Chicago IMX. A "Slingshot" would take the loads to Venice, IL (St. Louis) where they'd be grounded and drayed to the Frisco ramp. This provided the best intermodal service from Chicago to DFW, better than the ATSF. It was 2nd morning delivery from Chicago to DFW and that was fully competitive with the truckers. We were doing 33 hours ramp to ramp with a St. Louis interchange. I never knew a Katy route to be competitive with that.
We (ICG) hated that business. It was low revenue and the damn Frisco wouldn't return the trailers, empty or otherwise. So we'd run out of equipment for our good customers. I had one Frisco salesman call me all enthused about East Texas Motor Frieght wanting to put a bunch of loads on the service. Well, like everyone, ETMF was running short of equipment at the time and they decided they'd use ours until things got back to normal. Screw you guys. I told the Frisco guy we were not going to provide equipment for any such temporary move to help a truck line. (Yes, I know that was a violation of a Federal law at the time. But they were not going to totally run us out of equipment. Come Hell or a trial.) The Frisco guy said: "Isn't there anything?" I said: "No, you people do not return equipment."
The Katy did take some minor rate action. Somehow we wound up participating in a Plan II (truck pick up and delivery included) special commodity TOFC rate that only applied ICG-St. Louis-MKT. It amounted to one TOFC trailer per week from Chicago to Dallas. Our intermodal operating dummies screwed it up every week. They'd interchange the trailer to the Frisco instead of the Katy. Every week. So the Frisco would take the load to DFW and deliver it. Then they'd bill us for their cut of the interline move. Then the Katy would also bill us for their deprived revenue claim because we'd misrouted the load. Our Chicago IM terminal manager (a recycled trucker) apparently couldn't begin to understand the difference between the SLSF and the MKT.
As an added bonus, every week the Katy salesman would call me up and be quite unpleasant with me because he thought we were playing games with his business.
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