Missouri-Kansas-Texas (Katy) HO Scale Models

The Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, universally known as the Katy, traced its origins to 1865 when the Union Pacific Railway, Southern Branch was established in Kansas. The modern corporate entity took shape in May 1870 when the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway was incorporated at Junction City, Kansas, absorbing the Southern Branch along with its approximately 182 miles of existing track and consolidating several smaller regional lines including the Tebo and Neosho Railroad and the Hannibal and Central Missouri Railroad. The newly formed railroad quickly distinguished itself by winning a fierce competition to be the first line to cross southward into Indian Territory, with workers laying rail across the Kansas border on June 6, 1870. Though congressional land grants promised to the winning railroad were ultimately overturned by the courts because the land belonged to sovereign Indian nations, the Katy pressed on, becoming the first railroad to enter Texas from the north when its tracks crossed the Red River in 1872. The railroad steadily expanded its reach across the south-central United States over the following decades, extending its main line to Dallas in 1886, Waco in 1888, Houston in April 1893, and San Antonio in 1901. Joint ownership of the Galveston, Houston and Henderson Railroad gave the Katy immediate access to the Gulf Coast port at Galveston upon reaching Houston. At its fullest extent the system connected Kansas City and St. Louis in the north with Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Dallas, Fort Worth, Waco, Temple, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, and Galveston in the south, forming a vital corridor through the agricultural and energy-producing heartland of the region. The railroad maintained major shop facilities at Parsons, Kansas, and at Sedalia, Missouri, with later facilities established at Denison and Waco in Texas. In the 1980s the Katy further expanded by acquiring former Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific trackage between Fort Worth and Salina, Kansas, operating that segment under the name Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas Railroad. At the end of 1970 the system encompassed approximately 2,623 route miles. Among the more colorful episodes in the Katy's long history was the deliberate head-on collision of two locomotives staged near West, Texas, in 1896 at the direction of a company promoter named William Crush. The event, witnessed by an estimated 40,000 spectators, resulted in the deaths of three bystanders killed by flying debris from exploding boilers. Ragtime composer Scott Joplin memorialized the spectacle in his piano piece "The Great Crush Collision March." The railroad also operated notable passenger services, most prominently the Texas Special, which it ran jointly with the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway from 1915 until January 4, 1959, connecting St. Louis with Dallas, Fort Worth, and San Antonio. By the 1980s the Katy was struggling financially as railroad consolidation across the region stripped away much of the overhead traffic that had sustained the line. Union Pacific Corporation and its subsidiary Missouri Pacific Railroad received Interstate Commerce Commission approval to acquire the Katy on August 12, 1988, and formal merger into the Missouri Pacific was completed on December 1, 1989, bringing the Katy's independent existence to a close after more than a century of operation. The Missouri Pacific itself was already fully integrated into the Union Pacific system, meaning the Katy's trackage ultimately became part of one of the largest railroad networks in North America. The railroad's legacy persists in several forms, most notably the Katy Trail State Park in Missouri, which converted a substantial portion of the old main line corridor along the Missouri River into a recreational trail, and a section of former Katy right-of-way in Dallas that became an urban trail linking several city landmarks. Union Pacific acknowledged the railroad's heritage in 2005 when it painted a new EMD SD70ACe locomotive, numbered 1988 to mark the year of the merger, in traditional Katy colors.