Waterville & Washington Railroad

I had the pleasure of talking to Dean Cox who worked for the Missouri Pacific and he allowed me to borrow his train sheets from 1957 for my line. When I talked to him about the amount of traffic the line saw and he said during the grain harvest rush season, the line would see multiple trains a day with train lengths stretching to the horizon pulled by 4 or 5 locomotives. However, during the dry spells between harvest the line was known as the "High, Dry, and Dusty" with a few cars pulled by a single or pair of locomotives. It has been argued that the high volume of traffic that came off of the Northern Kansas Division is what sustained the Missouri Pacific main line from Kansas City to Omaha.

I'm a Missouri Pacific fan and a history buff. The Mopac ran through my home town of Waterville, Kansas. The line was originally built as one of the Transcontinental lines named the Atchison and Pike's Peak Railroad, but later changed its' name to the Central Branch of the Union Pacific. After the realization that the line would not be transcontinental, the hope of the line was to meet up with the proposed line from the Kansas Pacific to the Union Pacific transcontinental line in Nebraska. That line was not built. Jay Gould controlled the Kansas Pacific and Union Pacific and purchased the Central Branch and then quickly leased the line to the Missouri Pacific, another Jay Gould line. The Missouri Pacific formally merged the line in to the Missouri Pacific system in 1909. The line was part of the Mopac until the merger with the Union Pacific in 1982. Various line abandonments followed and then the line was leased to the KYLE Railroad. The KYLE operated the line unti...