I read where a lot of the materials for the UP going west out of Omaha came up the Missouri River. Was there developed rail lines from Council Bluffs to the east and Chicago already in place in 1869?
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
Murphy,
The short answer is No. Predecessors of CNW and Rock Island got to Council Bluffs about the time of the Golden Spike. I think Hoffsommer's book about Iowa railroads has completion dats for both. Remember that Dr. Durant and several other key figures of early UP were previously off RI subsidiary M&M, which I think was Mississippi & Missouri (rivers). M&M stalled at Iowa City in the 1850's IIRC. Sorry, that is the best I can do as books still all packed away.
Mac
The book "Railroads of Omaha and Council Bluffs" by William Knatsville indicates the C&NW arrived in Council Bluffs 1-17-1867 (that must have been a mild winter .). The Golden Spike ceremony wasn't until May of 1869. The Missouri River was first bridged in 1872.
Dakguy201The book "Railroads of Omaha and Council Bluffs" by William Knatsville
The book "Railroads of Omaha and Council Bluffs" by William Knatsville
I assume you meant William Kratville, who has written many books on the UP.
If there was a 2-3 year time, from when the transcon was done, until the Missouri was bridged, the trafic must have gone accross the river on ferryboats? Was there much traffic east or west our of Omaha, in the first few years after the transcon was built?
In at least one of the winters before the bridge was completed, track was laid across the ice to make the connection. The river in those days was a much broader, slower moving stream than the channelized version we see today.
The first train track on ice on the Missouri of which I am aware occured at St. Joseph MO in 1860.
A ferry crossing is an indication of very light traffic. It was not unusual to use a ferry during construction to build beyond the river until a bridge was built. In some cases this was a matter of months, in others a year or two. IIRC there was litigation about the Omaha bridge; the UP did not want to build it as they were on the edge of insolvency.
Capacity of a ferry is limited by length and width and arrangement of tracks at each end. The ideal for capacity would be straight track for the full width of the boat but that means all your switches need to be on the dock and you have to have room on the dock to get the two tracks parallel. As a practical matter you can have no more than two ferrys.
Two tracks on 11 foot centers implies a deck width of 25 feet (11 + 10 + 2 + 2), three would be about 36 feet deck. I suspect boats were two or three tracks and no more than 250' long. Assuming 30 foot cars that would be about 33' coupled length. Eight cars would be 264 feet long, so we would have a capacity of 14-16 cars per trip.
Early timetables showed a through passenger and an immigrant train. The passenger cars could have been ferryed across, but I suspect they were not. About the only advantage to handling passengers is that they are self mobile so I suspect they walked on and off the ferry.
Switching cars on and off a ferry is slow work. It is vey bad form to shove off the end or put cars between the end of the dock and the boat. You also need a yard nearby to hold cars for the boat and cars comming off the boat. Under ideal circumstances I suspect boat cycle time was not less than three hours, 30 min to unload and 45 min to load, 15 minutes to cross, then 30 + 45 again, plus 15 to cross. That is a maximum capacity of 8 round trips per day or 120 freight cars in each direction, assuming everything goes just right.
A freight train of the era would have been about 14-16 cars maybe 20. The UP was built as chaply as possible. Again from memory the Lane Cutoff, just east of Omaha, reduced grade from 1% to .4%. It would take 6 trains per day to handle our imagined boat capacity. I doubt that there was that much traffic to be had until well after the bridge was built.
Remember that cars of the era were 10 ton capacity, so our train was handling at best 200 revenue tons with a crew of five. Today that 200 tons is two carloads and trains of over 100 cars are common. By our standards, pre bridge traffic was incredibly light. Fortunately for the carriers, freight rates were quite high, but that is a whole other story.
If anyone knows what capacity of Omaha boats was and what real cycle time was please advise.
As has been posted here, the Chicago & North Western predecessor arrived in 1867. Next came the Rock Island and the Burlington & Missouri River across Iowa in 1869. The Milwaukee didn't arrive until 1882, followed by the Illinois Central in 1899 and latecomer Chicago Great Western in 1903. And the Wabash arrived from the southeast from Missouri. The Hannibal & St. Joseph had reached St. Joseph, Mo., in 1860, so this would be the natural route to haul material west and have it shipped up the river to Omaha. By August 1868 a railroad had been completed between St. Joseph and Council Bluffs, up the east side of the Missouri (now BNSF).So really there was only one major construction season, 1866, without rail connections from the east,
They may have laid track across the ice in especially cold winters if the river was frozen deep but more often they would put in "winter bridges," temporary wooden bridges across the river to be used in winter when boats couldn't cross. In the spring they would try to salvage as much of the material as they could before the ice went out. There would probably be a gap in service before the transfer boats could cross again. Obviously permanent bridges were the answer. Some transfer boats were used on the much wider lower Mississippi into the modern era, such as at Helena, Ark.
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