Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis HO Scale Models

The Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis traces its origins to 1797, when James Piggott received a license from Spanish colonial authorities to operate a ferry crossing between St. Louis and Illinoistown, the settlement that would later become East St. Louis, Illinois. After Piggott's heirs sold the operation to Samuel Wiggins in 1819, the service grew from a horse-powered crossing into a steam-powered ferry by 1828. Wiggins eventually sold the ferry business along with approximately 800 acres of Illinois land in 1832, and subsequent owners began developing rail facilities on that property. The coming of the Eads Bridge in 1874 transformed the crossing, and by 1870 the ferry had already begun moving individual rail cars across the river in anticipation of the more efficient fixed crossing to come. The formal organization of the Terminal Railroad Association came about in 1889, largely through the efforts of financier Jay Gould, who brokered an agreement among several proprietary railroads to create a unified terminal operation serving the St. Louis gateway. The founding members included the Missouri Pacific Railroad, the St. Louis Iron Mountain and Southern Railway, the Wabash Railroad, the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, and the Cleveland Cincinnati Chicago and St. Louis Railway. The new association took on the construction of St. Louis Union Station, which opened in 1894 and served as one of the busiest passenger terminals in the country for decades before Amtrak vacated it in 1978. The TRRA also became entangled in a prolonged rivalry with the St. Louis Merchants Exchange over control of Mississippi River crossings, ultimately gaining control of both the Eads Bridge and the Merchants Bridge, the latter originally constructed by the Exchange specifically to challenge the TRRA's position. In 1989, the association transferred ownership of the historic Eads Bridge to the City of St. Louis, receiving the MacArthur Bridge in exchange. Today the Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis operates as a Class III switching and terminal railroad under reporting mark TRRA, co-owned by five major Class I carriers: BNSF Railway, Canadian National Railway, CSX Transportation, Norfolk Southern Railway, and Union Pacific Railroad, with Union Pacific holding a proportionally larger share than its partners. The railroad owns and operates the Merchants Bridge and MacArthur Bridge, the only two railroad crossings of the Mississippi River in the St. Louis metropolitan area, and manages Madison Yard, the largest classification facility in the region with capacity for thousands of cars. A major reconstruction of the 1889 Merchants Bridge was completed in 2022 at a cost of approximately 222 million dollars, followed by a substantial renovation of the MacArthur Bridge. The TRRA's role as a neutral switching intermediary among competing Class I railroads makes it an enduring and strategically important institution at one of North America's most significant rail interchange gateways.