Actually- it was the Truman. Constructed as part of a levee/channeling project by the Corps in 1944-45, the MILW/RI route via Polo was already in place (built 1931) before the Truman was built. Being one of the largest in the country- the span's ownership was joint between MILW and RI, but federally constructed nonetheless. As an aside the drawbridge operator (MILW) controlled the double track Polo to the bridge from the CTC machine at the bridge, including the single track bridge. Thanks for playing.
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
Murphy Siding wrote: What happened when one of the owners went out of existence? Or later, when the second one disappeared?
Soo sold the line to SP, and the North Western cancelled the sale. There's a lot of history to that line.
nanaimo73 wrote: Murphy Siding wrote: What happened when one of the owners went out of existence? Or later, when the second one disappeared? Soo sold the line to SP, and the North Western cancelled the sale. There's a lot of history to that line.
? That's a little fuzzy. I understand the Soo Line connection, but how did SP and CNW get in the mix?
nanaimo73 wrote:The Milwaukee Road and the Rock Island had parallel lines between Polo and Kansas City, and they agreed to operate them as a double track line. The C&NW acquired the Rock Island line and Soo got the Milwaukee Road line. Soo Line did not want the line to KC, and worked out an agreement to sell it to Southern Pacific. The North Western stopped the sale because of the double track agreement. Later on, Soo, or CP, sold the line (majority ownership) to I&MRL while UP was busy merging the C&NW. IC&E and UP are now the two owners.
How ironic. If CNW hadn't squawked, UP would own both halves now. I wonder how the two troubled roads manged to keep up the maintenance on a co-owned bridge in the 70's? I bet they must have used a lot of that *CSX formula* bridge paint.
Milwaukee and the Rock Island had a very strange trackage agreement here- from Polo to KC (where RI and MILW came together) it was double track, save for the Truman bridge, with Rock Island owning one of the main tracks, and MILW the other. Each line had trackage rights to operate on each other's main as well.
The bankruptcy of the RI complicated things- CNW and KCS among others were hot to acquire the old RI, but Polo-KC was the main hangup. After some wrangling CNW was awarded the line by the RI trustees and MILW's blessing. When MILW was bought out by the SOO in 1985, the track then became SOO/CNW owned with SOO controlling the CTC out of the drawbridge tender's shack. Originally SOO thought the KC connection would be a saving grace for them to help pay off some of the debt it acquired in the MILW buyout- but that never came to pass- especially after MKT was merged into UP, and SOO tired of the KC connection and looked for suitors to buy it. SOO tried to sell the line to SP (who had considered buying it in the original Golden State sale, but took the KC-St. Louis line instead), but CNW blocked it by not allowing SP trackage rights over their segment of the Polo-KC portion.
This part of the line also came back into play again when SOO/CP finally sold their interests to the Washington Corp in 1996- UP had just got CNW and liked the prospect of using their friendly relationship with IMRL to run trains off the Golden State transcon to the Spine Line, then up the IMRL to Clinton. The relations were so good that at one time, UP was seriously considering rebuilding a segment of the former Golden State route between Allerton, IA and the former location where the RI crossed the old MILW near Seymour, IA to facilitate more "double track" to run trains to Chicago. (The plan being to get trains off the old ATSF main KC-Chicago - an SP left over from the failed purchase of the MILW KC-Chicago in which SP secured rights over ATSF to Chicago, another move that really hurt the SOO, as SP was a big interchange partner at KC.) The plans though never materialized as IMRL was sold to Cedar American Holdings, and the friendly IMRL connection UP had disappeared. (UP isn't a big fan of CAHR's plan to build into the Powder River.) Now the line is owned by two companies who really aren't all that cozy with one another- making for a very uneasy realtionship, but some very good train watching.
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