There has been talk of abandoning the St. Louis and Iron Mountain tracks south of Gordonville, so I thought I’d see what kind of shape they were in. When I first started walking across the bridge over Williams Creek, south of CR 228 between Gordonville and Dutchtown, I thought it was in pretty good shape.
That dip doesn’t look good
The further I walked south, though, the more I became sure I wouldn’t want to be on a train crossing the creek. What’s that dip up ahead?
Better get up a head of steam
I can hear Casey telling his fireman, “Better throw on more coal. We’re gonna need a run at it to jump this.”
Photo gallery of Willams Creek bridge
These photos were taken in July and October. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the image to move through the gallery. I’ll have more photos of the railroad later.
I’ve always been fascinated by trains. I remember standing at the Advance train depot with my grandparents to watch the steam engines come puffing in with black smoke boiling from the stacks and a deafening blast of steam when it stopped.
Texas singer and songwriter Guy Clark describes how it was to be six years old in 1947, when the whole town turned out to see a “mad dog, runaway, red-silver streamline train” whiz though for the first time. Up until then, “Trains are big and black and smokin’ – steam screamin’ at the wheels, bigger than anything they is, at least that’s the way she feels…When they finally said ‘train time,’ you’d a-thought that Jesus Christ his-self was rolling down the line. Things got real quiet, momma jerked me back, but not before I’d got the chance to lay a nickel on the track.”
Coins on the track
When Bob, Claire, Mother and I visited Wittenberg the other day, a slow freight pulled slowly through the town, then came to a stop. I tuned the scanner in my car to the train frequencies and heard the engineer talking to dispatch about stopping for a signal that shouldn’t have been red. While they were sorting it out, I thought about Clark’s song and dropped a penny, nickel, dime and quarter on the track.
Watch the video to see what happened.
Crawling under trains at 10
I’ve been around trains quite a bit and have a lot of respect for them. When I was about 10, Dad had a road-building job down in the Bootheel and had the gravel for the job delivered by rail. He’d let me crawl under the hopper cars to bang open the door that would spill the rock onto a conveyor belt. He told me to make sure I didn’t come out from under the car until he gave me the all-clear, then he would have a bulldozer push the cars forward until the next one was ready to dump. (Just think how many regulations that would bust today.)
Where did my pennies go?
When we left to go home one Friday, I put a row of pennies on the main line, expecting to find them when we came back on Monday. When I rushed to the tracks to find zip, Dad explained that a fast, heavy train will smash the coins as thin as tin foil, then it’ll weld them onto the passing wheels or onto the track. To get good results, you had to do it on a siding or when the train was just starting out.
Over the years, I don’t know how many “last rides” I’ve photographed as passenger trains dwindled to a passing few. I rode the Silver Meteor from Florida to Chicago through a 100-year blizzard with drifts so high that they knocked out the headlight on our engine. I rode in the engine of a freight train along the east coast of Florida (where I learned that I couldn’t handle the stress of seeing so many cars drive around closed crossing gates with our engine bearing down on them.
In Gastonia, N.C., I saw a train hit a car that tried to beat it to the crossing. A 16-year-old kid died in my arms.
So, I don’t encourage you to do what I did. Still, like Guy Clark sings in his song, “Oh, but me, I got a nickel smashed flatter than a dime by a mad dog, runaway red-silver streamline train.”
Maybe I’ll leave a coin for Dad
Maybe I’ll leave one of the coins on Dad’s gravestone to show him that I finally pulled it off.
The Missourian carried a story May 22, 2012, that a Jackson, Gordonville and Delta Railroad plan to abandon a 13-mile section of unused tracks has some Allenville residents worried. They’re not concerned about losing the railroad – it hasn’t carried traffic between Gordonville and Delta since 1997. They’re worried about the railroad bridge and trestle over the Diversion Channel. (Click on any photo to make it larger.)
Tiny town cut off by floods
The story by Shay Alderman quoted lifelong Allenville resident Phil Thompson as saying the town has been hit by 12 floods since 1973. Roads were impassable for about six weeks during flooding in 1993 and 1995. The trestle and bridge were the town’s supply lifeline.
Will bridge end up on scrap heap?
Robert L. Adams, railroad president said the bridge is in such poor condition that he would advise against anyone walking or driving a vehicle across it. I can understand why he’d say that for liability reasons.
I’ll have to take a meander down that way when I go home. At least I’ll know I won’t have to dodge any highballin’ freights in the middle of the channel.
When bicycle tourist John Gorentz, AKA Spokesrider, passed through Cape on his way from Michigan to New Madrid, I tried to pick him a better route to follow than the Missouri River Trail that runs through the hills and curves of New Hamburg. One alternative was to take Nash Road. Unfortunately, at that time is was a dusty gravel road. On a recent trip to the airport to eat, we decided to see if the road was finished. It is and it is really nice. (Click on any photo to make it larger.)
Bloymeyer roundabout
When I was flying aerials in November 2010, I noticed the Bloymeyer roundabout joining Nash Road, Hwy 25 and Hwy 77 had been completed. In this photo, Nash Road comes in from the top left. Hwy 25 from Jackson and Dutchtown is on the lower left and then turns to the right to go to Advance and Bloomfield. Hwy 77, at the top right, goes to Chaffee.
Mario’s Pasta House and a water hole is opening up at the intersection to take advantage of the traffic coming off I-55 and headed through. I wouldn’t be surprised to see other businesses open up, maybe even the old Montgomery Drive-in.
A nail in the coffin for Dutchtown
This is going to put another nail in the coffin of Dutchtown. Northbound I-55 traffic headed to towns south and west of Cape won’t have to go all the way to Hwy 74 and then through Dutchtown. It’ll be able to take a fast (60 mph), straight road with good shoulders straight down to Hwy 25. There’s not much out there yet except farm land, so there aren’t many driveways and side roads to watch.
When Hwy 74 floods at Dutchtown, which it seems to be doing more and more often, traffic has to go all the way to Jackson to get through. Nash Road is on the dry side of the Diversion Channel, so the highway department won’t have any incentive to raise the roadbed in Dutchtown to keep it above water.
Nash Road: south of Diversion Channel
Nash Road starts south of the Diversion Channel and north of the Cape Girardeau Airport.
Road is a shipping hub
I was surprised at the number of warehouses and depots that have grown up on the road.
Railroad derailment
In early October, 15 empty cars on a Burlington Northern Santa Fe train derailed on the tracks that parallel Nash Road. Nobody was injured and no hazardous chemicals were involved, The Missourian reported. I include these photos only because you could see them from Nash Road and because Keith Robinson, a railroad buff, is a regular reader.
Nash Road photo gallery
Here is a gallery of photos taken of and on Nash Road. Click on any image to make it larger, then click on the left or right side to move through the gallery.
There has been talk of abandoning the St. Louis and Iron Mountain tracks south of Gordonville, so I thought I’d see what kind of shape they were in. When I first started walking across the bridge over Williams Creek, south of CR 228 between Gordonville and Dutchtown, I thought it was in pretty good shape.
The further I walked south, though, the more I became sure I wouldn’t want to be on a train crossing the creek. What’s that dip up ahead?
I can hear Casey telling his fireman, “Better throw on more coal. We’re gonna need a run at it to jump this.”
