Railroad Freight Yards by Zina Abbott

 

My upcoming book in the Old Timey Holiday Kitchen series features the third sibling of the Jewell family, the brother of two sisters, who already had their own romances published. In prior books, I identified him as having a railroad job in Kansas City, where the family came from before everyone but him moved to Colorado. Rather than being a ticket agent, baggage handler, or rail maintenance laborer, I decided he should work with managing freight. Thus started my quest to learn the ins and outs of how rail freight was handled in the 1880s.

 Although possibly a decade or two later than the setting of my story, this photograph is of the Kansas City freight yard. Note that many of the cars appear to be made of wood. There is also at least one gondola (like an open wagon) and a few metal tank cars. These cars get moved around the freight yard and from one railway's freight yard to another by using smaller locomotives designated for use strictly in a company's own freight or repair yards. 

Do not trust the inforation you receive from AI on a Google search to be infallible. When I specifically asked about the Kansas City freight warehouse in 1885, I was told the freight for all the companies were handled together and managed by one freight terminal. Then, after stumbling onto a Facebook Kansas City historical group, I searched back through several years of entries and found this 1884 map of the Kansas City rail yard. There were five railway companies that used the Kansas City Union Depot (orange), the passenger terminal located in what is called the West Bottoms district (note the names of some of the neighborhoods) part of Kansas City. However, only three--Missouri Pacific (maroon), Union Pacific (blue), and Missouri River, Fort Scott, and Gulf (green) had freight depots there.

At the time this 1881 map of Kansas City and eastern Kansas was drawn, it appears the only section that was identified as Kansas City, Kansas, then was the little lip of land west of the straight north-south Kansas-Missouri border, east of the Kansas River, and south of the Missouri River. The smaller communities to the west of the state line--Wyandotte, Riverview, Armstrong, Armourdale, and Argentine--were not absorbed into Kansas City, Kansas, until a later time.

The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway did have rail access to the Kansas City, Missouri, depot (orange next to the yellow-green arrow), but its freight yard was located in Argentine, Kansas (blue circle). 

 

 Here is a map of another freight yard. Kensington, Michigan, was a hub for two rail lines, the Illinois Central Railroad and the Michigan Central Railroad and Belt Railway Connection. It appears both rail lines shared a passenger depot (red). However, the bottom-right of the map shows the roundhouse (blue), the freight house (green), and thirteen and a half miles of track that is part of the freight yard (orange).

 

The situation is slightly different for a town like Salida, Colorado, the city on which I based my hypothetical town of Cleora. In 1885, Salida was a connection station. It had two spur lines, but all three lines were part of a single rail company, the Denver and Rio Grande Railway. On the birdseye view map drawn in the nineteenth century, the depot was identified, as was the roundhouse. I know there was a machine shop, but the other buildings were identified as workshops. With all the silver mining and agriculture in the area, I am sure the Salida station managed it fair share of freight. However, I have found almost no information about it.  

In the image above, No. 6 is the Kansas City Roundhouse. No. 5 is the freight yard.

 

The possible reason I had difficulty finding pictures of freight yards might be due the fact that most of them are not pretty. Railroad depot buildings and train platforms are designed to be visually appealing to passengers. They are similar to nicely landscaped front and back yards, intended to delight the homeowners and impress friends and neighbors. Freight yards (also repair yards) are more like a residential side yard--that six-foot space between the garage and the fence where people keep their garbage cans, water hoses, and miscellaneous junk that does not fit inside the garbage can, so they store it there until they collect enough to justify a trip to the dump.

 

Here is the Pennsylvania Lines Great Freight Yard at Conway, PA. Look at the coal cars waiting to be shipped in all directions.

 

And, when one is talking about Kansas City's Kansas Pacific /Union Pacific Railroad's freight yard, let us not forget the closely related stockyard with the Cattle Exchange building next door. Some cattle might have been sent to local meat packing plants, but the majority were loaded onto cattle cars and transported north by other railroads to places like Chicago.

 

Stollen by Stella is not currently on pre-order but will be published in December. 

Book description:

     Stella Jorgenson struggles to enjoy the holiday now her father’s new job meant moving away from extended family and friends. She does not look forward to spending Christmas dinner with her father’s boss and his family, including the son scheduled to start working on her father’s crew—all strangers. Hopefully, baking her late mother’s traditional Stollen to share will inspire the spirit of Christmas.

     For Thomas, the one bright spot about moving home with his parents was both his sisters were married and out of the house. Unfortunately, along with his new foreman and the man’s daughter, his persnickety, former schoolmarm older sister and pesky, trouble-making younger sister will be home for Christmas. Perhaps he could convince himself to look forward to being with family and merrily celebrating the holiday if being here was not a constant reminder he had been forced out of the job he loved.

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