Nostalgia & History > TOOTD 1/17/1973 MILW Williamsburg, IA

The order group selected for today has a personal connection - the agent/operator who signed them,
Robert Capps had 36 years with the Milwaukee working at several locations in southern Iowa. 

Once the Marion line was embargoed, the depot in my hometown started to get vandalized, and one door was forced open. 

I called around the railroad to find someone to tell about what was happening to the station and wound up talking
to Bob Capps in Ottumwa, who at the time was responsible for the closed agency. 

He advised that "we have everything out of there we want, if there's anything in there you want, better get it out before it gets burned down". 

These orders were amongst the stack of paper retrieved, and probably within two years of the line being closed, the depot was razed.

There weren't a lot of orders from Williamsburg in there, but it looked like Bob was fairly busy this particular day in comparison to others.

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second set

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last two

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 Great stuff, thanks for posting.

I had to stop and think about these for a long time until I saw the orders and realized this was what I call the Amana Line.  
It's actually the original Milwaukee route to Kansas City that was profiled in the "Milwaukee Railroader" magazine a couple of years ago.
South of the Rock Island to Rutledge, this line is LONG GONE so it is a treat to see orders from it.  North of the Rock
Island to Cedar Rapids, the line is still in service, Crandic owned and operated by IAIS.  Thanks for posting, and I 
read these posts daily, they're always a treat!

Nick Tharalson,
Marion, IA

Glad you enjoyed - far as I know, the Milwaukee railroaders always called this the "Marion line" - though this may have been an Ottumwa crew thing.

There was a short stub of it left up at Rutledge for a while, several years after it was abandoned as a through line. One day, I happened to be nearby and heard a conversation on the radio about picking up an engine off the old "Marion Line".  I drove over and there was a lone BN unit parked on it, perhaps a bad order set off from a Muscatine coal train.

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22dot5_ERS Wrote:
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> Glad you enjoyed - far as I know, the Milwaukee
> railroaders always called this the "Marion line" -
> though this may have been an Ottumwa crew thing.
>
I'll take your word for this.  I had never heard what railroaders called this line before.

Nick Tharalson,
Marion, IA