Slightly Better Than Nothing

Yet another debate team road trip to a relative rail hotspot. Yet again, I get almost nothing to show, railfan-wise. I did get to the one spot down on the Missouri River that everyone should see. It's downtown and features a bridge out to the river walkway. The bridge takes you right over some normally busy tracks. Naturally, I arrived at a lull.

The three tracks connect a wide array of yards around the city. The old MoPac Knoch yard and UP's Armordale yard are connected this way. These lines also have connections that cross over to BNSF's Argentine Yard and the KCS in North Kansas City. NS Avondale yard is across the river too.

The bridges are normally quite busy too. The silver lift bridge is the route to yards and industries in North Kansas City. I've only seen UP on that bridge but the BNSF has a heavy presence on the other side of the river. In fact, when you stand on the overlook bridge, you are surrounded by tracks, though the one's on the other side of the river are hidden by trees. The large National Starch plant is across the lift bridge on this side of the tracks. Last I knew they were served by a Watco switching crew from the old BN yard.

The other bridges are a combination of Broadway/Rt.169 and the closer/lower BNSF 2 tracks into North Kansas City yard across from the downtown airport. The yard was always full of staged trains waiting their turn to head north or south. Most were unit coal trains but general mdse. and grain were common too.


On the way home, the team stopped at Cedar Point Amusement Park. Like any decent park, it has a railroad. So the remaining pictures are from there. Since I ran a small version of this in my youth, I had to take a few shots of some of the details. The Davenport on the left was on static display and as you can see my "throw down" camera isn't as fast as I'd like on the caboose shot.