 A TRRA locomotive | |
| Overview | |
|---|---|
| Headquarters |  St. Louis |
| Reporting mark | TRRA |
| Locale | Illinois, Missouri |
| Dates of operation | 1889–present |
| Technical | |
| Track gauge | 4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge |
| Other | |
| Website | terminalrailroad.com |
The Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis( reporting mark TRRA) is a Class III switching and terminal railroad that handles traffic in the St. Louis, Missouri, metropolitan area. It is co-owned by five of the six Class I railroads that reach the city. [1]
The Terminal Railroad Association is owned by [2] BNSF Railway, Canadian National Railway (Illinois Central Railroad until 1999), CSX Transportation, Norfolk Southern Railway, and Union Pacific Railroad. All own one-seventh of the railroad except UP, which owns three-sevenths.
The Terminal Railroad also connects with the Kansas City Southern Railway.
The TRRA owns and operates the MacArthur and Merchants bridges, the two Mississippi River railroad crossings in the St. Louis metropolitan area. In 2022, the TRRA completed a $222 million rebuild of the 1889 Merchants Bridge. [3] In the same year, the TRRA began a $57.3 million renovation of the MacArthur Bridge that includes replacing the 1912 main span girders and rebuilding the Broadway truss in downtown St. Louis. [4]
The Association also owns and operates Madison Yard, the largest classification yard in the St. Louis region. The switching yard consists of 80 inbound, outbound, and holding tracks with a capacity of 2,200 cars. [5] The company is planning to expand Madison Yard to hold another 1,500 railcars, for a yard total of 4,000. [6]
The railroad operates 30 locomotives to move cars around the yard, deliver cars to local industries, and ready trains for departure. [5]
The railroad's predecessor companies in St. Louis date to 1797, when the town was still part of Spanish Upper Louisiana. James Piggott was granted a license to operate a ferry between St. Louis and Illinoistown (now East St. Louis, Illinois). In 1819, Piggott's heirs sold the ferry to Samuel Wiggins, who operated the service with eight horses until a steam-powered ferry took over in 1828.
In 1832, Wiggins sold the Wiggins Ferry Service and 800 acres (3.2 km2) of land in East St. Louis, including Bloody Island, to new owners, who began developing a rail yard on the Illinois property. In 1870, the ferry began porting rail cars across the river one car at a time until the 1874 completion of the Eads Bridge. [5]
When the Terminal Railroad was incorporated in 1889, railroads owned most of the Wiggins Ferry property. In 1902 when the Rock Island Line joined the Terminal Railroad, the ownership of the Wiggins Illinois property was complete. [5]
The formation of the Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis grew out of an agreement orchestrated by Jay Gould in 1889 between predecessor entities of the Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis and six proprietary railroads. Those original railroads were: [5]
The Association built Union Station, opening it in 1894. The station would close in 1978 when Amtrak moved to a temporary facility several hundred yards to the east.
In its early years, the Association was at odds with the St. Louis Merchants Exchange. The Exchange built the Eads Bridge but lost control to the Terminal Railroad. The Exchange then built the Merchants Bridge to keep the Terminal Railroad from having a monopoly. The Exchange then lost control of that bridge also to the Terminal Railroad.
The railroad's practice of charging a tariff to coal trains crossing the Mississippi River persuaded several industries to set up shop in Illinois rather than Missouri. The steelmaking town of Granite City, Illinois, was founded in 1896 to avoid the tariffs. [7]
In 1989, the TRRA traded the Eads Bridge to the City of St. Louis in exchange for the MacArthur Bridge.
The TRRA operates the following lines:
For four years beginning in 2001, TRRA received the Gold E. H. Harriman Award for safety in the Switching and Terminal railroad class. [9] In 2015, 2017, and 2021 the TRRA was awarded American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association's Presidential Award for safety (most man hours of injury free operation). In 2020 the TRRA received the American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association's Veteran Engagement Award. [10]
BNSF Railway is the largest freight railroad in the United States. One of six North American Class I railroads, BNSF has 35,000 employees, 32,500 miles (52,300 km) of track in 28 states, and nearly 8,000 locomotives. It has three transcontinental routes that provide rail connections between the western and eastern United States. BNSF trains traveled over 169 million miles in 2010, more than any other North American railroad.
The Eads Bridge is a combined road and railway bridge over the Mississippi River connecting the cities of St. Louis, Missouri and East St. Louis, Illinois. It is located on the St. Louis riverfront between Laclede's Landing, to the north, and the grounds of the Gateway Arch, to the south. The bridge is named for its designer and builder, James Buchanan Eads. Work on the bridge began in 1867, and it was completed in 1874. The Eads Bridge was the first bridge across the Mississippi south of the Missouri River. Earlier bridges were located north of the Missouri, where the Mississippi is smaller. None of the earlier bridges survive, which means that the Eads Bridge is also the oldest bridge on the river.
Conrail Shared Assets Operations (CSAO) is the commonly used name for modern-day Conrail, an American railroad company. It operates three networks, the North Jersey, South Jersey/Philadelphia, and Detroit Shared Assets Areas, where it serves as a contract local carrier and switching company for its owners, CSX Transportation and the Norfolk Southern Railway. When most of the former Conrail's track was split between these two railroads, the three shared assets areas were kept separate to avoid giving one railroad an advantage in those areas. The company operates using its own employees and infrastructure but owns no equipment outside MOW equipment.
A joint railway is a railway operating under the control of more than one railway company: those companies very often supplying the traction over the railway.
The Wheeling and Lake Erie Railway is a Class II regional railroad that provides freight service, mainly in the areas of Northern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania. It took its name from the former Wheeling and Lake Erie Railway, most of which it bought from the Norfolk and Western Railway in 1990.
Railroader of the Year is an annual award presented to a North American railroad industry worker by trade journal Railway Age. The award was first presented in 1964 by trade journal Modern Railroads and has continued through the magazine acquisition in 1992 to the present.
The MacArthur Bridge is a truss bridge that connects St. Louis, Missouri and East St. Louis, Illinois over the Mississippi River. The bridge was initially called the "St. Louis Municipal Bridge" and known popularly as the "Free Bridge" due to the original lack of tolls. Tolls were added for auto traffic beginning in 1932. In 1942, the bridge was renamed for Douglas MacArthur. The bridge was constructed to break the monopoly of the Terminal Railroad Association, which controlled two other bridges at St. Louis and charged what were viewed as unreasonable tolls.
The Porter Subdivision is a railroad line owned by CSX Transportation in the Chicago, Illinois, area. Formerly a part of the main line of the Michigan Central Railroad, it now connects CSX's former Baltimore and Ohio Railroad line and the Chicago Fort Wayne and Eastern Railroad from the east with the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad towards Blue Island, Illinois.
The Evansville Western Railway is a Class II regional railroad operating in the southern Illinois and Indiana region. It is one of three regional railroad subsidiaries owned and operated by P&L Transportation.
The Gateway Eastern Railway is a railroad subsidiary of the Kansas City Southern Railway (KCS), owning a 17-mile (27 km) main line between East Alton and East St. Louis, Illinois, United States. Originally created in 1994 as a subsidiary of the Gateway Western Railway, which acquired the East St. Louis-Kansas City line of the Chicago, Missouri and Western Railway in 1990, it was acquired by KCS along with its parent in 1997.
The Arkansas Valley and Western Railway (AV&W) was built as a short line railroad operating within the U.S. state of Oklahoma. It was founded in 1902 to link the city of Tulsa with the main transcontinental line of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (AT&SF) at Avard. The line was built in sections, initially from AV&W Jct. to Steen (Enid) during 1902-03. In 1904 it was extended westward to the junction with AT&SF at Avard. On July 19, 1907, the railroad was purchased by the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway, who operated it until November 21, 1980, when the Frisco was acquired by Burlington Northern Railroad.
Crossing the Kansas River in Kansas City, Kansas, the Highline Bridge is rare example of a double-tracked, double-deck railroad bridge designed for carrying railroad traffic on both levels. The bridge is owned and operated by the Kansas City Terminal Railway (KCTR) and provides access between the extensive rail yards on both sides of the river in the Argentine and Armourdale neighborhoods in Kansas City, Kansas and other rail yards in Kansas City, Missouri.
The Blue Line is the newer and shorter line of the MetroLink light rail service in Greater St. Louis. It serves 25 stations across three counties and two states.
Little Ferry Yard is a railyard and intermodal terminal in the Port of New York and New Jersey served by the CSX River Subdivision (CSXT), New York, Susquehanna and Western Railway (NYSW), Norfolk Southern Railway and Conrail Shared Assets Operations (CRCX).
The Chillicothe Subdivision or "Chillicothe Sub" is a railway line running about 229 miles (369 km) from Chicago, Illinois to Fort Madison, Iowa in the United States of America. It is operated by BNSF Railway as part of their Southern Transcon route from Chicago to Los Angeles. The Chillicothe Subdivision is a high volume route connecting three principal yards in Chicago in the east and the Marceline Subdivision in the west which continues to Kansas City.
The St. Louis Freight Tunnel is a historic railroad tunnel beneath Washington Avenue and Eighth Street in downtown St. Louis, Missouri. Completed in 1874, it carried freight and passenger trains between the Eads Bridge and the rail yards in the Mill Creek Valley, bypassing busy downtown streets. Today it is used by MetroLink, the light rail transit system in Greater St. Louis.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
