The mighty fine road of history and possibility

Coming to a railroad crossing, most drivers grumble. I myself enjoy watching the train thunder pass, the diesel locomotive hauling boxcars, gondolas, flatbeds, coal cars and tankers across the plain, exotic names like the Sante Fe, Appanoose and Norfolk adorning their sides.

Each car hints at a new adventure, like a movie teaser that doesn't tell the full story, only teases you into heading for the theater.

What's in each of those boxcars? Who are Joe and Trudy, a proclamation of their undying love spraypainted across a behemoth of a tanker? Where is Wabash anyway?

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Railroads crisscrossed Iowa as far back as the 1840s. Though no railroad bridge spanned the Mississippi River, small, isolated towns on this side of the continent found they needed to be connected.

Most back then laughed at the notion of a railroad ever crossing the Mississippi. A famous verse from 1851 Iowa went: "I dreamt that a bridge of a single span / O'er the Mississippi was made. / And I also dreamt like an insane man / That the railroad there was laid."

Some people have remarkably small imaginations.

By 1854, the Mississippi and Missouri Railroad finally reached Old Man River at Rock Island, Ill. Keen on continuing westward, work on the line from Davenport west soon started; in the summer of 1855, a flatboat delivered the company's first locomotive, the Antoine Le Claire, to Iowa even though no bridge connected the rail lines across the river.

Finally, in 1856 the bridge opened. It marked the beginning of this nation's earnest efforts to tame the Great Desert, known today as the world's breadbasket.

• • •

Eventually the Mississip-pi and Missouri Railroad became the Chicago Rock Island. Woody Guthrie wrote of the "Rock Island Line," a song covered by Pete Seeger and Johnny Cash.

For many, it was indeed "a mighty fine road." Streamlined cars and diesel engines of The Rock Island Rocket, the line's premier passenger train, could whisk passengers between Chicago and Iowa City in about four hours. Its locomotives hit speeds of 110 miles per hour while cutting past the cornfields.

But the modern highway and car soon reduced the railroad's power. People quit using passenger trains, preferring to drive. After World War II, the U.S. Post Office quit delivering mail by train, opting for trucks and airplanes.

These days, the Rock Island Line exists only in song and the elaborate miniatures of model railroaders. Its cars were sold almost 20 years ago when the company folded.

• • •

Several decades ago, the powers-that-be tried to bring the railroads crashing down. In May 1856, the steamboat Effie Afton crashed into Rock Island's new river span. The wooden bridge caught fire; billowing smoke could be seen for miles.

Adding insult to injury, the Effie Afton's captain sued the railroad company, saying the bridge was a menace to river navigation. Indeed it was. Trains were far faster and offered more traveling options than did the river-bound steamboat industry.

Springfield, Ill., lawyer Abraham Lincoln defended the Rock Island Line, arguing that "There is travel from east to west, whose demands are not less important than that of any river." He closed his case with lines often referred to by speakers trying to win an audience: "He said he had much more to say," the Chicago Daily News reported, "many things he could suggest to the jury, but he would close to save time."

Lincoln won the case.

• • •

The towns that most of us went to school in, that many of us grew up in, that many of us now tell stories to our children and colleagues about, for the most part owe their existence to the railroad. Where trains went in the 1800s, towns sprang up.

Mapleton is one such Iowa community.

Settlers formed a town on the west side of the Maple River in 1857. But 20 years later, when the Northwestern Railroad was laid along the river's east side, most of the village's residents and businesses pulled up stakes, relocating across the river.

The same phenomenon is happening today as towns slide toward interstate highways, the modern equivalent of the mighty railroad. Think of Iowa City residents and businesses leaving the Iowa River's east side for the Interstates 80 and 380 crossroads.

At one time, after all, some people said a mall never would go over in Iowa City.

(originally published Sept. 21, 2003)