The Rock Island Line

Chapter 3: A Rocky Road

In July 1915, No. 671 has come loping over the plains into Denver with a local passenger run and now awaits an eastbound assignment on the ready tracks at Rio Grande’s Burnham engine house. The Rock Island–built 4-40 ’s 79-inch drivers provide speed, if the load is light. Otto C. Perry photo, courtesy Denver Public Library, Western History Collection 55 Chapter Three A Rocky Road The great era of railroad-building was ending. On July 12, 1893, historian Frederick JacksonTurner addressed a distinguished gathering of colleagues at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago’s Jackson Park. Many of those present had ridden Rock Island trains to the fair, where they could stroll the grounds and view the railroad’s exhibit of the agricultural bounty being grown along its line. Turner’s paper had far-reaching implications for the road’s future. In it, he declared that the western frontier, the possibilities it entailed, and the energies that it had called forth had made America unique among nations. But that source of uniqueness, of greatness, Turner told the assembled historians, was at an end. The West was being settled. The frontier, he announced, was closed. Within a few years, the Los Angeles & Salt Lake laid rails across Utah and Nevada toward southern California. David Moffat began his final assault on the Rockies with construction of the Denver, Northwestern & Pacific. In 1905 Milwaukee Road’s directors approved extension of that line west to Seattle. But at the start of the new century, it was hard to imagine where yet another transcontinental railroad would fit in. The “Pacific” in Rock Island’s corporate title 56 must have seemed an increasingly unlikely destination to those guiding the road’s future. The Rock had not yet reached its full extent. It still had territorial ambitions, but Cable preferred leasing lines to building new ones. And where he did build, he built on the cheap. Of the 3,568 miles operated in 1898, the Rock Island owned 2,877. The rest were leased or operated through trackage rights, for which the road was paying almost $800,000 a year. Not a wise use of the road’s healthy surplus. When Warren Purdy took office, he launched a long-overdue industrial development campaign. He set out to improve the physical plant, introducing the long-legged 4-4-2 Atlantic speedsters and heavy 2-8-0s in freight service. He put out branch lines probing for promising sources of traffic. The ring of mauls on spikes could be heard all across Oklahoma Territory, from Enid to Greenfield Junction, Geary to Anandarko, Anandarko to Fort Sill and Lawton. Purdy pushed the Guthrie & Kingfisher Railway The second Rock Island 2-8-0 in as many years, numbered 1799, poses on the turntable at Eddystone, Pennsylvania, in 1907. The first, an experimental engine Baldwin built and exhibited at the Jamestown, Virginia, Exposition in 1906, proved too heavy for Rock Island’s track and was sold to New York, Susquehanna & Western. This replacement was too light, but nevertheless it survived to be renumbered 2200. Author collection During a quiet moment between trains at Rock Island’s “old” Peoria depot, a horse-drawn wagon unloads a boxcar along the Water Street team track. Built in 1891, the station lost its clock tower in 1939 and saw its last train in 1975, but it survived to be listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 1978. Author collection 57 Left: Goodland, Kansas, had been a town for less than a year when the first Rock Island train arrived July 4, 1888. The road quickly established a division point and built a depot, hotel, roundhouse, and shops. Denver and the Rockies lie about 116 miles beyond that far, flat horizon in this 1915-era postcard view. Author collection Below: The hostler at Limon, Colorado, is up on the Vanderbilt tender, watering No. 2556 for a run. On April 21, 1919, the three-year-old 2-8-2 still looks like she just rolled off the erecting room floor at Baldwin. Otto C. Perry photo, courtesy Denver Public Library, Western History Collection 58 into the Oklahoma territorial capital at Guthrie. A branch from Enid was sent to tap the oilfields beyond Billings. After a 12-year hiatus, the board finally authorized construction from Liberal west toward El Paso. Allied companies were building...