The Line Creek Loudmouth

Forgotten Railroads In Platte County

This week's post on the Frisco Highline Trail between Springfield and Bolivar, Missouri got me thinking about abandoned railroads here locally so I pulled up some Sanborn fire insurance maps and old plat books and used them as necessary to trace old railroads in Platte County.  I actually learned something tonight.  I found two railroad corridors that I never knew about!

Here was Platte County in 1930.

I always knew there was an old line between Leavenworth up along Bee Creek to Dearborn (blue) and one from Beverly up to Edgerton (magenta).  What I didn't realize is that the Beverly-Edgerton line extended all the way south to Waldron and that there was a line that connected Dearborn to Edgerton (purple).  We also had the Kansas City to St. Joseph Interurban Railroad (yellow) which I've blogged about so much that I created its own tag which you can read the entire collection of posts here.

While I was doing this research, I came across some interesting things.  Since the "Bee Creek" Rock Island line and the Interurban Line intersected in Dearborn, I started with the 1930 plat map but it didn't give me enough detail on how three railroads came together.

Since I couldn't exactly extrapolate and guess how the railroads used to be since MoDOT built a state highway, North Platte built a school, and other businesses grew, I pulled the 1917 Sanborn fire insurance maps.  Unfortunately there was not much to insure in Dearborn back then so the map wasn't as large or as detailed as I wanted it to be.

These Sanborn maps are hard to read even for a seasoned map nerd like myself.  Print and paper was obviously not cheap in 1917 so they crammed everything into one page with no match lines. 

It looked like Dearborn had two trail depots.  The one that served the railroad to Edgerton was located near 2nd and Delaware right where the Platte Valley Bank is located.

It also appeared that there was a depot to serve the Interurban where Commercial Street is located. 

The Sanborn map had the lot numbers so I went to the Platte County GIS, turned the lot numbers on, and voila here is where the second depot it located.

I also noticed a note and zoomed in some more.  The Sanborn map above had a note "end of wood and metal trestle."  I pulled another screenshot and apparently there was a wood and metal railroad trestle that was 20 feet high along Commercial Street?  Was the Interurban elevated and that was the bridge over Maple Leaf (now Route Z)?  Did the dirt get removed when North Platte graded their baseball and football fields?  I just don't know. 

If you want to zoom in and out, you can see the 1917 Dearborn map courtesy of the University of Missouri by following this link here.  From the Platte County GIS, I can see where the Edgerton railroad was consumed by Route Z.  See the weird, rounded property lines along Delaware between 2nd and 3rd Streets?

I wasn't planning on spending much time researching Dearborn but I will say that the North Platte School District always treats me great and has a really great band. 

This Bee Creek line continued north and eventually connected with the rail line that goes up through Trenton and into Iowa.  You can see all of this if you can figure out how to read an 1888 state railway map.

Since I totally nerded out, here is my Google map of these forgotten railroads and you can zoom in and out and critique my mapping skills by either clicking this link to open up a new window or using the map embedded below.

 

I-29 and Lake Waukomis Area 1954 Aerial

Well I had a meeting today with a railroad with an office in KCK and took a local road route back home.  I found a site with a couple of smokestacks and wanted to find an old aerial so I did some searching on Kansas aerials and found a 1954 aerial showing our part of the world.

Here's the nearly brand new Park Hill High School on NW 72nd Street.  This of course is now Plaza Middle School.  NW 72nd Street is at the top of the picture, Route 9 is on the left, and the newly relocated US 71 is on the right. 

This is I-29 and 64th Street.

I of course had to see what my Miltonwood suburban home looked like (wondering where Miltonwood is, click here).  Please note, my house is on top of the hill and away from any streams or ditches.

Here is the brand new Southeast Elementary School on Northwood Road.

Chinn Elementary was still still a pasture.

 

Platte City in 1877

I found some fine reading.

I was looking over the business owners and there was a reference to the railroad depot in Platte City so I started looking at everything in the book.  Here was Platte City in 1877 and I tried aligning an aerial map so you can try and compare the two.

View Larger Map  |  View Bird's Eye

The Platte County Landmark had some amazing perks for the editor back then.

The atlas had a picture of the bridge over the Platte River on Main Street with a riverfront hotel.  If you ever wanted to see where the bridge was, just find the picnic pavilion and historical marker at Main and 1st Street.  Panoramio™ (which the evil Google™ bought and is destroying) user VoyagerMU posted a picture of some bridge abutments at that location and you can see it here.

The atlas has some other neat pictures.  I didn't see any address for the Cockrill and Company Bank.

I do know where the court house is located.  I will be visiting it today for a condemnation case.

You can read through the list of businesses.

 

I did find in interesting that Platte City had a "Daughter's College" near 2nd and Academy.

I didn't find anything on the railroad depot but it was in Tracy near the County Fairgrounds.

The train depot was right across from where 92 turns to go to Leavenworth.  It's also now Rusty's Auto Sales.  I wonder if Rusty knows the historical significance of his car lot or would be willing to go dig around and see what artifacts might be underneath those great deals on the lot?

Almost Cold Enough to Break the Paseo Bridge

It's really cold tonight.  How cold?  Cold enough to break a bridge? 

Nearly 14 years ago on January 22, 2003 when the old Paseo Bridge (see my December 2015 post on the original Paseo Bridge renderings) was closed when one of the joints failed because of the extreme cold weather.  I didn't remember why the failure happened so I did some research.  

I came across an eight page proposal written by Genda Chen and Lokesh Dharani to look at the structural failures which you can read here or you could just follow along with snippets.  The proposal had some detailed pictures of the failure.

After intensive research and study team of G. Chen, C. Courtright, L. R. Dharani, and B. Xu (full 98 page report here) came to the following conclusions:

Too bad the superstructure of the bridge wasn't designed as good as the substructure of the bridge.  It would have lasted forever.  Dykon Blasting Corporation had to use quite a bit of explosives to get the piers demolished.  The company website has a pretty simple summary of the demolition here.  I also pulled these pictures and text from an article by David Hersey that he wrote for the September/October 2012 edition of the Journal of Explosive Engineers.

Robert Ohl uploaded the following video of the blast which happened at night.

 

I came across this video by KCHistoryman Meade which has a bunch of neat old pictures of the bridge.  I'm glad there are people like him who do stuff like this. 

Enjoy memories of the old bridge and while forgetting about the frequent backups on it.  I think I gave credit to everyone but if I missed you, let me know and I will update the post.  I'm glad folks took the time to document the old Paseo Bridge.

Drennon Lake Pictures from 1976

Well I came across something I never thought I'd ever find.......pictures of a partially filled Drennon Lake.  These pictures came from an appraisal done in 1976 and the pictures are already captioned.

I'd previously blogged about the remnants of the dam before and for those of you new to the blog, read up about Drennon Lake and the old Little Shack on Barry Road. 

I can also add this first picture to the other pictures I found where the Kansas City to St. Joseph Interurban Railroad crossed Barry Road.

In the next picture the Line Creek Trail would be at the far part of the picture.

 

In this picture the Line Creek Trail would be on the right side of the picture hugging the lake.

The cove mentioned in the next picture is the "thumb" of the lake where the Line Creek Trail veers east-west to get around the old lake. 

From what I've been told by a handful of people the dam was breached and the lake went away with the Plaza flood of 1976.  Fortunately the footprint of the lake remains and the Line Creek Trail gives folks the opportunity to use the lake access road.

 

Metro North Mall before Metro North Mall

Came across a 1975 aerial showing the 169 and 152 area in 1975.  Here is a snippet of the aerial.  96th Street is left-right along the top and US 169 cuts through the middle.

The mall of course is getting a new makeover which I've written about before and is being branded as Metro North Crossing as an open air retail center.  Here is what it looked like before the first auto-oriented retail megaplex.

Looking over the old aerial, it appears that Barry Road was cut into the hills between US 169 and the "haunted" Gash Cemetery.

The Barry Road Flea Market is still there at Platte Purchase and Barry Road.  Just to orient you, Barry Road is the left to right street, Platte Purchase is the top to bottom, and Old Stagecoach is the diagonal road.  The Flea Market was right at the northwest corner of the intersection.  See the linked blog post in the first sentence of this paragraph for pictures of it.

 

The intersection of North Oak and Barry still showed signs of where the old railroad used to run.  I tried to show where the railroad corridor was with the red lines without harming the integrity of the aerial.  You can connect the dots.  Barry is left to right and Oak is top to bottom.

Lastly, I never realized there was a drive in movie theater along North Oak south of 95th Terrace.  Anyone out there have any pictures they'd like to share or do a guest post on it?

You can download the entire map and zoom in and out and explore it yourself.  The file is 119MB.

  Download 1975MetroNorthMallAerial

 

The Barry Road Flea Market

While we are waiting to save big money at Menard's^TM, I thought it'd be helpful to take a look at the old Barry Road Flea Market.  The Flea Market was located in the original town of Barry which was at the location of Barry Road and Platte Purchase (see more pictures at that post here). 

Below are excerpts from an appraisal done on the Flea Market when KCMO started widening Barry Road in the 1980s.  The report caught some interesting thinking about the area then and also pictures of the area before it became Barry Stroad.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If The International Airport Was Downtown

In the 1960's, someone thought it would be a good idea to show what "new KCI" spatially transposed on downtown.  I expect someone to swipe it and post it on FB without any credit or thanks to this blog sometime in the foreseeable future. 

No comments just sharing so explore and come to your own conclusions.  The aerial was done when the freeway system had just started downtown.  If you've never seen my post about downtown before freeways, you can see it here.

The Platte County 500

Did you know that the NASCAR speedway could have been in Platte County and not in the unspeakable state to the west?  A site north of the airport was considered.  From what I've heard, the only thing that kept it from happening was a financial commitment from the state of Missouri.  The site was just north of the Mexico City interchange.

Here is a more zoomed in site layout that was proposed.

The overpass at Bethel Road would have become a new interchange. 

If this would have happened, I wonder what would have developed.  Would we have gotten a ton of retail development that is a pain the rear to get around because the site planner and traffic engineer were high on weed?

Seriously...the layout to control access management for traffic flow ended up creating traffic choke points and focusing everyone to the same places?  I'd rather try to navigate around John Knox Village at 4PM when everyone is heading to IHOP^TM for the cheap early meal than ever try to get in and out of the Legends shopping mall.

Yes, I know you really care what I think about the awful layout of this lifeless commercial district.  Either way it didn't happen and the only racetrack history we'll have in Platte County will be in Riverside with its interesting history and characters.

 

Cartoon credits to Warner Brothers from the Scooby Doo Show.

Vale is Closer Than You Think!

Looking for something to do this weekend?  How about going to Vale?  It's not an airplane flight or 12+ hour drive away.  It's a 30 minute maximum drive.  It's actually in Kansas City between Raytown and Lee's Summit.  I've only driven through. 

I am assuming the town was platted as a stop of the old Rock Island Railroad and as the train depot shows on this old assessment map.  Now that I've come across this, sometime over a winter I might just see if there is any remnant traces of the train depot.

Just to the north of the town of Vale was a 300+/- foot long tunnel which goes underneath Bannister Road.  I've been through that tunnel but unfortunately it was so long ago that I didn't have a cell phone nor a digital camera (shuddup Millenials....and no I wasn't there when Moses parted the Red Sea-if you call me ancient I'll kick your skinny jean hiney).  Maybe if Steve Rhoades with Vireo is reading this, he might have some pictures from what I think was a 3.5" floppy camera.

Vale Station shows up on the 1934 Lee's Summit quadrangle USGS topo map.

It still shows up in the 1957 USGS Lee's Summit topo map.

It didn't exist in the 1887 Harrisonville USGS topo map.  I tried drawing the Rock Island Railroad corridor in red and where Vale would have been with the green arrow.

You can read more about the history of this segment of the Rock Island here and here or download the old plat map below.  In the meantime, take a day trip to Vale and annoy your friends on social media with all the awesome pictures of your visit.

Download Town-of-Vale-Jackson-Co-MO

 

1920's Car Focused Boulevard Design

It's summer.  It's been fun.  I'm on blogger vacation but with all this chatter about parkway and boulevards going on I thought I'd share this 1928 concept rendering for the intersection of Paseo and Linwood. 

I think it's the only intersection in Kansas City that has statued traffic signal in the middle of the intersection.

This plan would have made a "subway" for Paseo through traffic.  Below is the section if one was on Linwood looking east and also if one was in a drone looking down on the intersection.

This is what a driver on Paseo would have seen as they crossed underneath Linwood.

The plan appears to have been sponsored by the Councilman for the area and prepared by an architect.

Download the whole 61MB plan here.

Download Linwood-Paseo-1928

It was a big expensive design that never came to fruition probably because the cost to build the improvement made the project unfeasible and so it became just another urban intersection of four lane stroads.

Government has limited revenue just like a household budget.  It's kind of hard to buy a condo on the beach when the paycheck only covers a raised ranch in the older 'burbs.  America needs less asphalt and I'll use this as another opportunity to plug the guys and gals at Strongtowns.org for some weekend reading. 

Birth of the 6th Street Freeway?

I came across a copy of one of the first Kansas City specific federal redevelopment plans which explains the reason why Main/Delaware is configured the way it is today. 

View Larger Map  |  Get Directions  |  View Bird's Eye

I decided that I would add a "KC Freeway History" sub-category on the right since I am going to start having more and more stuff to blog about freeways.  I need to find the time to go back and re-tag posts like the 1985 Kansas City Downtown Loop Study and the 1947 Kansas City Master Plan Downtown Loop posts.  It appears that the layout of Main/Delaware was all done for the sake of redevelopment for surface parking facilities.  This was the land use in the 1940's.

You can download at the bott0m of the post and read the whole report but here are some interesting tidbits I noticed when skimming the report.

What is interesting is the report explains the reason for the weird U-turn ramps underneath the south side of the Main/I-70 bridge were designed for the street car to turn around.  The project essentially severed the River Market from the street car system.

Was traffic really that bad or people in that big of a hurry after WWII that this was such a big concern?

I also found it interesting the freeway/trafficway map was slightly different from the 1947 KC master plan.  The redevelopment master plan had the Paseo Bridge connection across the river while the 1947 plan, in color below, did not.

The difference in the two leads me to believe the radio myth that the 6th Street Freeway was located solely to break up the Italian voting block.  There is no other reason for that highway to be planned in its location unless it was a political decision.  Other cities (Buffalo, Seattle, New  York City, etc) routed their freeways along rivers or other publicly owned areas and a freeway could have been built along the south side of the Missouri River a lot easier than putting it along the 6th Street corridor. 

Aerial views of the riverfront are shown in the "Kansas City Before Freeways" and "1940's Hannibal Bridge Picture." If you look at those pictures, there was a lot of ground between the City and the River that would have been an easy freeway connection from the new river crossing bridge to the Intercity Viaduct.  Putting the highway there would have made more sense for transportation versus and urban renewal project.  It's too bad the engineers and planners in the 1940's didn't have the Talking Heads in their iPods™ to give them some inspiration...

Download Northside URP - 7-6-1953 (00174925xA7821)

 

Song credit to Talking Heads.

1985 Kansas City Downtown Loop Study

I spent way too much time this weekend driving through massive freeway infrastructure with a trip to Omaha and back so allow me to vent at the start of this post.  I actually counted a section of I-80 which had 14 lanes........

It's amazing how "system to system" interchanges, ie. I-80 to I-480, really take up a lot of space and require massive viaducts which cost a lot of money to maintain and replace. 

View Larger MapDriving Directions

The Federal Highway Trust Fund is going broke and the easy, knee jerk excuse is the fact that gas taxes have not gone up since 1993 and vehicles are more fuel efficient.  However, I feel part of the reason why our infrastructure is crumbling was over-building and over planning and our policy makers didn't do a good job of overseeing transportation designers and planners.  Now it costs so much to replace what we have and no one is asking if we are spending taxpayer money on infrastructure which might have a negative return on investment. 

This is St. Joseph, Missouri which has a metro area population right near 127,000 people.  Don't get me wrong, the engineer in me loves the double decked viaduct right on top of the Missouri River and all the ramps and merges.  It breaks up the trip but I wonder if it really was necessary to be an interstate highway versus an urban parkway or arterial.

View Larger MapDriving Directions

 

In the civil engineering profession, the first step in a transportation project is a study.  That study, of course, predicts massive amounts of traffic and therefore something has to be done (real world example of what I drove on this weekend here).  The highway designers and bridge engineers start to get excited because more highways and bridges to design means more design fee.

It's a viscous cycle that I don't think FHWA or the engineering profession really comprehends.  The voters don't seem to want to pay more for the product being put out by FHWA and government doesn't evolve to the market like the private sector has to.  FHWA isn't going out of business like companies who didn't change with the culture (Montgomery Wards™, Woolworth™, Palm™).

Anyways, the Kansas City Downtown freeway loop has had issues from day 1.  I think it all started with the original 1947 concept layout.  I found a 1985 study of the loop and pulled the conclusions for you to review.  You can download the whole report at the bottom of the post.

I so wanted to editorialize like Beavis and Butthead watching a music video but didn't with the exception of one section.

Some of these traffic and accident issues went away with the construction of the mega bridges and viaducts of I-670 (if all of those viaducts were built in the late 1980's, I wonder what the cost to replace them will be in the 2030's?).

View Larger MapDriving Directions

 

Here was the downtown loop from the early 1980's.

One thing I noticed is that they did remove some of the odd ramps that needed removal near I-70 and Oak/Locust.  I tried showing them with blue arrows.  I did find it interesting that there still were a lot of buildings in Columbus Park including some between Independence Avenue and I-70 in the aerial in the green box.  I think the black dots denote accident locations.

Here is one of the recommendations in a simple map format.

You can download the whole report here and read at your pleasure.  

Download 1985-DowntownLoop-Study

Second Hannibal Bridge with Road Deck

Picture of the second Hannibal Bridge courtesy of the 1950 Paseo Toll Bridge Study.  If you haven't seen my blog post with a 1940's picture of the bridge you can see it here or the opening day picture of the first Hannibal Bridge courtesy of the Kansas City City Manager's Centennial Report here.

This is looking east from somewhere between 4th Street and Woodsweather.

This is what it looks like today from the general area I am guessing.  If you zoom into the street view, it looks like that rock wall in the lower right hand corner of the picture above is still there.  I think the railroad in the picture above was the one that went up to 2nd Street and was the bridge moved to Union Station years ago (story here).

This is looking north from about where the Broadway Bridge viaduct goes over Woodsweather.

Amazing how the road deck on the bridge still looks the same.  The ramp is obviously gone.  This is the best view I could get from street view.

 The Hannibal Bridge is of course a rotating bridge which turns to allow large ships to pass.  I can't confirm how it turns but after doing some research, I found this video which leads me to think it's operated by trolls....

Cartoon credits to Warner Brothers from The New Scooby Doo Movies. 

 

Kansas City's City Manager Centennial Report Part 1

It is amazing what stuff is just laying around in a 150+ year old organization.  I happened across Kansas City's Centennial Report from 1950 a while back and haven't had time to do anything with it so I figured I'd share the pretty pictures and pages in bits and pieces.

Main and 2nd in 1867!

Street view today.

Main and 5th in 1871.

Street (or highway) view today.

First Hannibal Bridge in 1869.  Check out 1940's picture here.

Main and Baltimore Streets in the 1890's.  I'm not sure where the "Junction" would have been.  Maybe where Main/Delaware do that weird split right in the middle of I-70?  Also, in the Baltimore picture, I am amazed at the dirt bluffs still present and the bicycle shop on the right side of the street.

Baltimore street view today.

 Here are the first few pages of the report for your enjoyment.

 

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Old School Tiffany Springs Parkway Interchange Pictures

Before "The Boat," the office buildings, and the new fangled interchange, I-29 and Tiffany Springs looked rather rural and simple. 

The pictures below were from some old appraisal that I don't what was for or when it was done but I found it interesting.  Here is the area today.

Here it is pre-development.  Note the old, now abandoned, frontage road along the right side of I-29 that connected Tiffany Springs Parkway with Old Tiffany Springs Road.  I would guess this was in the 1970's.

This is a zoomed in shot at the farmstead where the twin black towers and Ambassador went through.  North Congress is the red line on the right.

The pictures explain themselves.

Interurban Railroad at Barry Road Circa 1980's

New readers may not know this but part of my mission with this blog is to provide a historical record of stuff so people know the who/why/what/when of the Line Creek Valley.  I've kind of taken to preserving and informing about the old Kansas City to St. Joseph Interurban Railroad.  The late Ed Gentry's started this effort here and I'm adding to it.  I've blogged enough about the railline now that I've given its own tag.

One benefit of working for KCMO the past 10 years is that a lot of people have retired or had to move locations.  Somehow being the last man standing on one floor of City Hall made my cubicle the depository (or suppository as I call it as I clean the stuff up) for a ton of boxes full of paper.  Somehow I wound up with a box of old appraisals conductedby the City in the early 80's when they were buying right of way to widen Barry Road between I-29 and US 169.

I found some old pictures that showed where the Interurban crossed Barry Road.  These were for an old pasture tract where the Barclay Club Apartments were built.  For a visual location of the crossing, it's where the large overhead power lines cross Barry at the apartment entrance. 

One can still see the old rail-bed on the south side of Barry and in the aerial below.

View Larger Map  |  Get Directions  |  View Bird's Eye

This picture looks like it was taken just on the north side of Barry and is looking northwest at the railbed which is on the right side of the big orange tree.

The next picture is looking east at Barry and one can see the rail-bed in the pasture.  The rail line ceased operation in the early 1930's.  Waukomis/Green Hills Road was built as Route AA by MoDOT in 1942+/- and I assume Barry which was as MO Route T at that time was done in the same era so I assume the rail crossing was leveled when the road was paved.  It's hard to tell with the trees along Barry.

 The final picture is looking north right on top of the rail-bed.  It would be to the left of the picture.

Last year I posted some pictures of where the Interurban crossed Route 152 and also where it was the Drennon Lake Dam (and if you don't know where Drennon Lake was, click here).  You can also check out Matt Staub's post about the railline here and Rick Drozd has some cool pictures of the line at the bottom of his long page here.

Kansas City in 1962

I scanned an old 1962 Phillips 66™ map of Kansas City.  I've got nothing to comment on because I've only got one hand free to type with and a teething baby in the other so enjoy and note anything you see interesting in the comments.

North of the River.

 Midtown.

 Sightseeing guide.

By the way, baby like trains and Aerosmith.......who get the song credit.

 

 (which when I was a kid used to think the song was Jimmy cracked corn all night long)

 

 

Excelsior Springs Interurban Line

I always try to get a decent bike ride the day of or day before I referee a varsity football game.  It helps get my legs stretched and warmed up.   My mind is sharper and I am less tired the next day.

Anyways, a couple of weeks ago it didn't work out that I could get a decent ride in on my usual routes so I brought my bike with me and explored some of the Liberty greenway trails.  While they are more for walking/jogging I did get a decent enough ride to get me through my game by using some streets.

I don't know how they came to fruitition but part of the greenway system was built on the old Excelsior Springs Interurban railroad line.

I uploaded some pictures to Panoramio and you can see them mapped here.

There was even a foundation of an old post still there.

The other trails were just built in greenways along sewer corridors.

You can read more about the Excelsior Springs Interurban here.  I excerpted some paragraphs.

"Retiring from active banking in 1908 to devote his full attention toward promoting the interurban, St. Joseph financier Charles F. Enright is largely responsible for the Kansas City, Clay County and St. Joseph (K.C., C.C. and St. J) Railway Company. Enright solicited financial support from Eastern capitalists, secured franchises and the necessary right-of-ways for the road. The system consisted of a 51 mile division linking Kansas City to St. Joseph, and a 28 mile line to the spas of Excelsior Springs. The original Kansas City terminal was located at Thirteenth and Walnut streets, but was moved in 1920 to the Railway Exchange building at Seventh and Walnut."

"Two trains left simultaneously from Kansas City and Excelsior Springs, converging on Liberty, where one pulled into a siding to let the other through. At the Excelsior Springs station (currently V.F.W. Post 741), the conductor would reverse the trolley, and the westbound run was made backwards. The cars ran hourly from dawn until midnight. Riding the full length of the route cost 75-cents, and daily patrons could purchase commuter tickets by the book."

"The interurban's heyday lasted from 1913 until 1923; during those years net earnings rose annually from $198,000 to $455,877. But profits were offset by much litigation. On October, 24, 1917, the Missouri Supreme Court forced the K.C., C.C. and St. J. to pay $250,000 in damages to the Interstate Railway Company for ursurping its Kansas City to St. Joseph right-of-way. And occasional mishaps were inherent to the system's close schedule. The K.C., C.C., and St. J. Railway's safety committee published their statistics for the year 1915 on greeting cards, and distributed them to customers after New Year's 1916. "Although the electric line carried over a million passengers during the year," read the analysis, "only nine were injured;" a remarkable figure, considering 13 separate collisions with livestock had occurred as well as 23 automobile and other accidents. While the line had averaged a collision every 10 days, the card closed with a surprising attribute, giving "trainmen and friends along the line credit for this good showing."

 The line even has a historical marker in Liberty to commemorate the line.

Like the Kansas City to St. Joseph Interurban line, I'll geomap/preserve the corridor as time goes on.

Park Hill High School 1964

Doing the one handed blog post while holding an 8 week old tonight.  Here's Park Hill High School in 1964.  US 71 is hard to see but it's on the right of the picture.  Barry Road is in the middle.  There is no North Congress Avenue.  Pine Ridge Presbyterian Church is there on the north side of the school. 

Here is a zoom shot.

Here is the 1964 USGS map.  Anything in purple was built between 1964 and 1971ish.

While you're digesting this, I'll keep playing baby loudmuth's favorite song over and over to keep him sleeping till mom comes home.....

Song credit to Iron Butterfly.

(You know if I still had a tape answering machine, this would be my message.  It'd weed out the true telemarketers)

Old School 112th Street and I-29 Intersection

I haven't had a chance to write up anything on future trails lately.  In the past month, KCMO did officially receive a bunch of $500,000 federal trail grants.  One of those grants was to extend the trail system north towards the employment centers along the I-29 corridor as shown in white in the map below.  The KCI Corridor Trail will connect the Route 152 Trail to KCI and parts further north.

While getting federal grants is a great thing to stretch local dollars, it comes with a huge bureaucratic and time consuming process that makes me more anti-government every day.  One of the fun things one gets to do is fill out forms required to make sure the project doesn't impact any historic items (learn more here). 

While I was working on some historical clearance submittals for the extension of the Platte County trail system along the I-29 corridor, I came across some old aerials and had to pull the old USGS topographic maps.

Platte County was pretty desolate in the early 60's.  The topo map below illustrated how there were few structures mostly clustered around the old Interurban Railroad and hitching post towns.  The base data in the map was from 1961 and the items in purple were mapped in 1970.  What that means is one can see what was built from 1961 till 1970 ie anything in purple.  There wasn't much purple even back then.

The area along I-29 was even more rural.  These aerials from 1964 show the area between Cookingham Drive on the top and Tiffany Springs Parkway on the south.  The old Bonnie and Clyde Red Crown Tavern would have been just to the top of these aerials.

The two pictures split at 112th Street.  The north-south (up and down) road is Amity.

Some things stand out.  I-29 was just a four lane highway.  Multiple connecting streets had not been severed or removed by the airport.  The TWA overhaul base was full and employing thousands of folks.  TWA eventually built a headquarters in the top picture on the east side of I-29.  MoDOT upgraded the highway to an interstate with frontage roads. 

Things lo0k a lot different today.

View Larger Map  |  Get Directions  |  View Bird's Eye

Old School Line Creek Street Flooding

With all the rain today, I thought I'd share some pictures to remind you how much it used to stink crossing from the east side to the west side of the Line Creek Valley when it rained. 

For those of you not familiar with the area, the old intersection of 68th Street, Gower Drive, and Waukomis was a geometric cluster and it was all in the floodplain.  This was the only way to get across Line Creek between Barry and Vivion Roads (4+/- miles).  I-29 didn't count as it only had half interchanges at Waukomis and Gateway Drives.  This was the area back in 2003 which shows the old disjointed intersections and the new alignments.

Below is a picture looking north form the old intersection of Gower and Waukomis.  Water would flood from the Lake Waukomis tributary on the left side of the picture and flow over the road to the main channel on the right.

Below I was looking west on NW 68th Street from the stop light.  The Line Creek box culverts would take a decent rain but water would still pond on the street as it was flat with the ground and the ditches were not deep enough to keep water off the road. 

Below I was looking northwest from the old intersection of Bryan and Waukomis.  The old Bryan Road Bridge was so undersized and not high enough and water from the Lake Waukomis tributary always crossed over when it rained a lot or a tree got stuck under the bridge.  It was bad enough having to naviate that intersection with the 60 degree skew and free for all merge movements with Robinhood Lane across the street.  I'm sure that intersection layout made all sorts of sense back in 1922 when the area was developed as Miltonwood and people used horses and buggies but it didn't function with cars.

Sometimes it would flow so fast that the street would have to be closed as evidenced by all the gravel gone and the grass mowed down.

Today of course it doesn't flood anymore, people don't have to walk in the road and over the ditches to catch the bus, and the intersections are at 90 degrees and have proper sight lines to see cars and sidewalk users.

I don't know how to embed streetview so check out the new street corridor here.  The new Waukomis also is a three lane street vs an intrusive four lane speedway.  Want to compare how a three lane and four lane street have different travel characteristics?

 

A lot of citizen input formed the footprint of this road.  People didn't want a 4 lane speedway like Barry Road or Line Creek Parkway.  They liked the trees and rural character of the corridor.  Long time residents didn't want to be forced out of their homes.

I have a whole other post I will write some day on my evolution as a transportation engineer as it relates to this area but the new section of Green Hills Road cost half as much as a four lane road, required minimal new right of way, and has more trees than comparable four lane arterials or parkways because the budget wasn't blown on overkill pavement and moving dirt.

This is a sneak peak of the new Green Hills Road but one can tour the corridor on streetview by clicking here.

ASB Bridge History

Earlier I shared what life was like in Kansas City before freeways.  One thing I noticed in that picture was that the only way to easily cross the river was using the ASB Bridge.  As I was going through scans, I came across a 1979 study of what to do with the car deck on the bridge because the cantilevered (non-engineer definition=hanging) car lanes were so deteriorated that the load limit was 6 tons which is just a little heavier than an ambulance.

The study had a bunch of items but it was the best write up I have come across about the history of the bridge.  I never realized the bridge carried the Excelsior and Kansas City to St. Joseph Interurban Railroad.

Here is a picture of the ASB Bridge with the car deck (public use disclaimer).

One thing I don't quite understand is when in the past someone at MoDOT determined that tolling is not legal.  There are state statutes that allow MoDOT to toll.  No one is willing to investigate that and come up with a sustainable funding plan to rebuild I-70.  It's the fairest way to pay to rebuild I-70.  Don't use it, you don't have to pay for it.

Anyways, here is how the bridge was paid for.

Kansas City Before Freeways

Earlier I shared the 1947 master plan for for downtown and the freeway system.  Tonight as I was looking through a flash drive for something to write about, I came across some old pictures of downtown before the Paseo Bridge was built.  I don't know when these were taken but I assume it had something to do with the planning for a new river crossing later to be known as the Paseo Bridge.

This is looking south from North Kansas City towards the Northeast area.  City Hall and the ASB Bridge are on the right.  Notice the pollution coming from the downtown power plant.

I tried replicated the shot with current aerial views but website won't let me embed it so you can compare the past to today.  You will have to arrange your windown side by side after clicking the map here.

I also zoomed in and tried to label some of the north-south streets.  I didn't want to block to much so you might have to strain to see the green arrow which denotes The Paseo.

The red arrow is Campbell Street which was where the east part of the loop was constructed.  The yellow arrow is Gillis where people used to get down to the bottoms until the federal government tore everything down and changed the street network to build a housing project.

I also found this picture someone was using to locate the freeways in the city.  This is looking north from above 17th/18th Street.

Here is what the west side of downtown looked like when it was just the Intercity Viaduct.  Notice the Jetson style rendering of the building on the bluff.  The picture was taken above the Missouri River and looking towards the southeast.  Also note the 8th Street Tunnel that took people from the bottoms to downtown.

One thing that stands out in all these pictures is the lack of trees on the slopes.  I wonder if that was because fire code and service weren't exactly reliable and people didn't want mass fire to spread all over like Chicago in 1871.

I have a bunch of other things but they warrant more time for their own post.  In the meantime while it's popular to blame freeways for the de-population of the urban core, people shouldn't let "urban renewal" projects such as concentrated housing projects off the hook.  Last time I drove through the area, Gillis and 4th Street is now vacant and there is nothing there.

Clip credit to Reason.tv.

Think the Downtown Freeway Loop Is Confusing Today

Imagine if it had been designed according to a 1947 master plan completed by KCMO.  I took some screen shots to try and give you some idea of the geography of the plan compared to today.

The picture below shows the northwest corner of the loop at 5th and Broadway.  The blue arrow at the top is where the Broadway Bridge crosses the river.  At the time of this plan however, there was no Broadway Bridge and vehicles traveled on the Hannibal Bridge upper deck.  The purple arrow shows the location of Broadway and where a northbound tunnel was to be located as part of the west part of the freeway loop.  The green arrow shows Washington Street where the southbound tunnel for the west freeway loop was going to be constructed.  The red arrow shows current I-70 and the Intercity Viaduct.  The blue arrow in the lower left is where Beardsley Road and current day I-35 are located. 

The first original idea for the Paseo Bridge connection to downtown combined the new freeway with the interchange where the ASB (replaced with Heart of America) bridge connected to Independence Avenue.  I guess this was to make 100% sure the Columbus Park voting block was decimated.  The blue arrow shows the Paseo Bridge freeway connection, the red arrow the ASB/HOA/Route 9 connection, the purple arrow the north freeway loop/I-70, and the green arrow the east freeway loop.

What's interesting about this drawing is the tunnel (magenta arrow) along Oak Street that would put traffic under a couple of east-west streets to get to the ASB.

Not to be outdone with a 5 legged freeway interchange, the interchange of I-70 and US 71/Bruce Watkins Drive was some type of super compressed cloverleaf.  The purple arrow is the east freeway loop, red arrow is south freeway loop/I-670, and blue arrow is US 71/Bruce Watkins Drive.  I highlighted Grand Avenue in green to show the tight interchange that was to serve the south part of downtown.

Lastly, the I-670/I-35 interchange looked somewhat reasonable compared to the others.  The west freeway loop tunnel under Broadway/Washington is shown with the green arrow, I-35 shown is shown with the blue arrow, and the south freeway loop/I-670 is shown with the red arrow.  Grand is shown with the purple arrow just to give you context to the map above.  The red arrow is where the Bartle Hall Ballroom Expansion sits over I-670.

Download and zoom in on the whole plan and what downtown was like by downloading the PDF below.

Download 1947-KCMO-MasterPlan 22