Nostalgia & History > a Katy coal train

This empty coal train had just finished unloading its coal at the coal fired power plant at or near Fayetteville Texas, which wasn't too many miles south of Smithville. Here is MKT SD40-2 #629 and SP (?) #7416 heading up this empty northbound train. Before the UP gobbled up the Katy, Smithville was an important location on the MKT of Texas. Smithville was a junction on the Dallas-Ft Worth to Houston mainline, where a line split off for San Antonio. The Katy did a lot of its switching for Houston at Smithville and it was also a division point. There used to be a lot of trains pass thru Smithville until the UP took over and abandoned the Katy's all welded rail mainline into Houston. About the same time the UP suffered traffic woes since there were too many trains and not enough tracks going into and coming out of Houston. The segment of this mainline was, and still is in place from Smithville to Katy Texas, but it's just a branchline now, and still serves the aforementioned power plant and some aggregate businesses at Katy Texas.

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Here's that lashup on the empty coal train of 4/25/87 at Smithville from its rear end.

Con

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Too smal resize!

10X 6 inches, 75 pixeles per inch, jpeg compression at high (not too high!)

Nice... If I had a wish list of roads to bring back, MKT would definitely be on it.

Dave
-DPD Productions - Featuring the NEW TrainTenna LP Gain RR Scanner Antenna-
http://eje.railfan.net/dpdp/

Actually, for the last couple of years traffic has been pretty brisk on the segment west of West Point. UP built a new connector to the ex-SP "Dalsa" line there to allow for southbound trains to San Antonio (and BNSF trains to/from Eagle Pass) to come down from Caldwell and then get onto the Katy to Smithville, Lockhart, and San Marcos on towards San Antonio.

Don't forget that the UP sold the line from Katy to Houston for big bucks so Interstate 10 could be expanded. Wish they would have retained some ROW for commuter trains, but they didn't.