Toledo, Peoria & Western Railway HO Scale Models

The Toledo, Peoria and Western Railway traces its origins to the Peoria and Oquawka Railroad, chartered in 1849 with the ambition of connecting the Illinois River at Peoria to the Mississippi River. The line reached East Burlington, Illinois by 1857, though it never actually served Oquawka, whose local officials resisted the railroad's presence. By 1860 the road had pushed east to Effner on the Illinois-Indiana border, but financial difficulties forced it into receivership by 1859, and it was absorbed by the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad. In 1861 the CB&Q sold the Peoria-to-Effner segment to the Logansport, Peoria and Burlington Railroad, which was reorganized in 1864 as the Toledo, Peoria and Warsaw Railway. Despite the word "Toledo" appearing in its name, the railroad never came close to reaching Toledo, Ohio. After absorbing the Mississippi and Wabash Railroad in 1868 and extending across the Mississippi River between Hamilton, Illinois and Keokuk, Iowa in 1871, the company encountered renewed financial trouble later in that decade. It emerged in 1880 as the Toledo, Peoria and Western Railroad, was leased briefly by the Wabash, St. Louis and Pacific Railway, and was finally reincorporated on March 28, 1887 as the Toledo, Peoria and Western Railway. By 1893 the Pennsylvania Railroad had acquired a controlling interest, drawn by the opportunity to move its western terminus to Keokuk and to access CB&Q interchange points, and both the PRR and the CB&Q became joint owners of the property. The most consequential chapter in the railway's history came with the 1926 purchase of the struggling road by George P. McNear Jr., a former New York Central executive, for approximately 1.3 million dollars. McNear stabilized the railway's finances by selling off surplus property, including a terminal facility to the Peoria and Pekin Union Railway, and by floating a bond issue of 800,000 dollars. He discontinued passenger and mail service, aggressively marketed the TPW as a bypass route around the chronically congested rail terminals of Chicago and St. Louis, and forged a new connection with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway in place of a redundant CB&Q interchange. In 1937 the railway purchased six lightweight 4-8-4 Northern-type locomotives from the American Locomotive Company, reportedly among the lightest of that wheel arrangement ever built for a North American carrier, and the line became one of the very few American railroads to remain profitable throughout the Great Depression. McNear's tenure was nonetheless deeply contentious. His unilateral labor policies alienated all thirteen unions affiliated with the railway, producing a series of strikes that culminated in a work stoppage beginning December 28, 1941. President Franklin D. Roosevelt seized the railroad in March 1942 for the war effort, appointing John W. Barriger III as federal manager. When control returned to McNear in 1945, the strike immediately resumed and turned violent, including a confrontation at Gridley, Illinois on February 6, 1946 in which two strikers were killed and three wounded by armed guards. On the night of March 10, 1947, McNear was shot and killed near his home in Peoria under circumstances that were never conclusively resolved, though the killing was widely believed to be connected to the labor dispute. His successor, J. Russell Coulter, restored conventional work rules in May 1947, ending the strike and allowing the railway to rebuild its traffic base and return to profitability by the early 1950s. Dieselization was completed in October 1950 using ALCO and EMD locomotives. In January 1960 the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Santa Fe jointly purchased the TPW from the McNear estate in equal shares, steering the railway through a period of significant change in the broader industry. The subsequent decades brought the erosion of several important interchange partners as merger waves reshaped American railroading. The Penn Central collapse of 1970 complicated the PRR's successor's relationship with the property, and eventually Norfolk and Western and then the Santa Fe's successor Burlington Northern Santa Fe held interests in the line. Through successive ownership changes the railroad was trimmed considerably from its one-time transcontinental aspirations, abandoning its Mississippi River crossing and concentrating operations on its core corridor across central Illinois into Indiana. By the time it came under the ownership of Genesee and Wyoming Inc. it had contracted to approximately 247 route miles linking Mapleton and Peoria in Illinois with Logansport in Indiana, supplemented by trackage rights over connecting carriers to reach Galesburg, Illinois and points in Indiana. Though stripped of its fallen-flag status in a technical sense by its survival as an operating short line, the Toledo, Peoria and Western is remembered historically as a scrappy, independent-minded carrier whose colorful labor history, efficient freight operations, and role as a Chicago bypass route left a lasting impression on mid-century American railroading.