Wabash Railroad

The Wabash Railroad was a Class I railroad that operated in the mid-central United States. It served a large area, including track in the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, and Missouri and the province of Ontario. Its primary connections included Chicago, Illinois; Kansas City, Missouri; Detroit, Michigan; Buffalo, New York; St. Louis, Missouri; and Toledo, Ohio.
The Wabash's major freight traffic advantage was the direct line from Kansas City to Detroit, without going through St. Louis or Chicago. Despite being merged into the Norfolk and Western Railway (N&W) in 1964, the Wabash company continued to exist on paper until the N&W merged into the Norfolk Southern Railway (NS) in 1982.
At the end of 1960 Wabash operated 2,423 miles of road on 4,311 miles of track, not including Ann Arbor and NJI&I; that year it reported 6,407 million net ton-miles of revenue freight and 164 million passenger-miles.
Origin of name.
The source of the Wabash name was the Wabash River, a -long river in the eastern United States that flows southwest from northwest Ohio near Fort Recovery, Ohio across northern Indiana to Illinois where it forms the southern portion of the Illinois-Indiana border before draining into the Ohio River, of which it is the largest northern tributary. The name "Wabash" is an anglicization of the French name for the river, "Ouabache." French traders named the river after the native Miami tribe's word for the river.
Corporate history.
Merger tree.
The Wabash Railroad resulted from numerous mergers or acquisitions as shown by this table:
Pre-Civil War.
The name Wabash Railroad or Wabash Railway may refer to various corporate entities formed over the years using one or the other of these two names. The first railroad to use only Wabash and no other city in its name was the Wabash Railway in January 1877 which was a rename of the Toledo, Wabash and Western Railway formed on July 1, 1865. The earliest predecessor of the Wabash System was the Northern Cross Railroad, which was the first railroad built in Illinois.
Norfolk & Western abandoned the track between Lock Springs and Chillicothe in 1983, and salvaged this portion of the line in 1985.
Thirty-seven miles of track between Chillicothe and Brunswick was sold to the Green Hills Rural Development, Inc., a Missouri economic development group organized as a non-profit corporation, in 1985. The line was leased, by order of the ICC, to the Chillicothe-Brunswick Rail Maintenance Authority (CBRM) on July 24, 1987. On April 1, 1990 the line was leased to the Wabash and Grand River Railway (WGR). The WGR's lease was terminated on December 1, 1993 due to severe flood damage on the line, and the line reverted to CBRM.
In 2003, during a dispute caused by inter-community rivalries and jealousies over industrial development along the line, the owner, Green Hills Rural Development, Inc. "sold" the railroad to the City of Chillicothe, MO, (all real estate, rails, tools, rolling stock and locomotives) for $32,500. Thereafter, the line was immediately appraised for $1.53 million, not including rolling stock or other tools or equipment and inventory of the short line railroad.
On December 8, 2006,the Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune reported that the city of Chillicothe sold the majority, about , of the railroad to Seattle-based Montoff Transportation, LLC for $976,000. The part of the railroad that was sold had been embargoed since 2004. The city still owns the railroad to the city's industrial park and to a location just east of Chillicothe, where future development is planned. Today, the part of the railroad south of Norville has been abandoned and dismantled, and the city has pocketed a large sum of cash. On January 29, 2008, The Chillicothe City Press reported that the city council had voted to buy back the right of way previously sold to Montoff Transportation, paying $10 to acquire the 100' wide by 29-mile long corridor. The stated intention was to gradually develop a trail. The report further stated that, though Montoff had the right as part of salvaging the rails to remove the bridges along the right of way, the cost to do so had been excessive. Instead, the deteriorated decks, which were sufficient for light duty use such as a trail, were being left.
Moberly–Des Moines.
The Moberly-to-+Des Moines line consisted of the 15th & 16th Districts of the Moberly Division, with the dividing point between the two districts being Moulton, Iowa. The line had a good traffic base up until the early 1970s, when traffic began to fall off precipitously. Freight traffic included coal mined in Iowa (prior to 1960), agricultural goods, farm machinery, and paper products. A change of personnel in customer service at Des Moines brought about a resurgence in business in the late 1970s and into the 1980s – so much so that NS largely re-built the line with newer, heavier steel and continuous welded rail in the mid-1980s. The Moberly-to-Des Moines line had few local industries shipping on it in the 1980s in either northern Missouri or southern Iowa, however, and served primarily as a "bridge" to get the NS to the Des Moines market.
During the early 1990s, NS began to look for ways to save on track outlays and maintenance, and a deal was hammered out with the Burlington Northern (BN) to share access to Des Moines over the old Chicago, Burlington and Quincy (CBQ) "K Line" which paralleled the Mississippi River from Hannibal, Mo. north to Burlington, Iowa. From there, haulage rights were secured to Des Moines over the BN mainline to Albia, then northward to Des Moines on the old Albia joint trackage. A portion of the line north of Moulton was saved in order to provide access to the national rail system by the Appanoose County Community Railroad (APNC).
The last carded NS train on the Moberly-Des Moines line ran in 1994. The Moberly-to-Moulton segment in Iowa was used extensively in 1993 during the Midwestern Floods of that year, as many observers noted that it was one of the few north–south through routes that were "above sea level" during the flooding. Unfortunately, this was not a factor that could have been used to save the line. Today the line's right-of-way has not been preserved, and as of 1997 the line was completely dismantled and is quickly being consumed by other land uses.
Passenger trains.
The Wabash had a fleet of passenger trains, including several streamliners & domeliners:
The first passenger trains to be dieselised used EMD E7 locomotives, and later ALCO PAs and EMD E8s.
Wabash Cannonball.
The name of this legendary train became famous with the 1904 revision of an 1882 song about the "Great Rock Island Route." Yet the name was never borne by a real train until the Wabash Railroad christened its Detroit-St. Louis day train as the "Wabash Cannon Ball" in 1949. The train survived until the creation of Amtrak in 1971, when it was discontinued. On October 26 and 27, 2013, Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society's Nickel Plate Road 765, in conjunction with the Norfolk Southern Railway's "21st Century Steam" program, pulled a 225-mile round-trip excursion, retracing the "Cannon Ball's" former route between Fort Wayne and Lafayette, Indiana.
Heritage unit.
As a part of Norfolk Southern's 30th anniversary in 2012, the company painted 20 new locomotives into predecessor schemes. NS #1070, an EMD SD70ACe locomotive, was painted into the Wabash "Blue Bird" paint scheme.
Rail to trail.
Several portions of the old Wabash Railroad right-of-way have been converted to recreational use, including the Wabash Cannonball Trail in northwest Ohio, the Wabash Trail and Wauponsee Glacial Trail in Illinois and the Wabash Trace Nature Trail in Iowa.
Notes.
http://www.multimodalways.org/docs/railroads/companies/Wabash/Wabash%20System%20Map%2010-1907.pdf Wabash Railroad System map 1907