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| Photo By Glenn Anderson - Used In This Article For Reference Purposes. |
In the 1970s the city of Alexandria, Louisiana was one of the busiest railroad hubs in the American south. The city was served by four railroads (Missouri Pacific, Kansas City Southern, Southern Pacific and the Chicago Rock Island & Pacific) which all operated in the same section of town. The Missouri Pacific had a large depot downtown and and large railyard nearby, the Southern Pacific had a railyard just to the east, the Kansas City Southern had a passenger depot and yard literally across the street and the Rock Island had a yard and engine facilities on the opposite side of a cotton storage complex. That's four major railroads lined up in row running north to south.
In the 1980s things began to change as the economical fortunes of central Louisiana started to sour. The Missouri Pacific ceased passenger operations, the Southern Pacific stopped serving Alexandria all together, the KCS also stopped serving passengers and pulled up tracks choosing to skirt the city rather than travel through it and the Rock Island simply went bankrupt.
Flash forward to modern times. The Missouri Pacific was gobbled up by the mighty Union Pacific railroad which still operates the same railyard, the area where the Southern Pacific called home now lies underneath Highway 167, the area that the KCS had their depot is now just a concrete slab and a raised section of earth while what's left of the old Rock Island facility is hidden from view by a large forest of overgrown vegetation just off the I49 freeway.
This past week I was lucky enough to stumble upon the old Rock Island Railroad facilities while working. The first day on the property I didn't quite know what I was looking at. The area is a collection of rotting structures, piles of ties and rails, parts of old railcars and a long stretch of property that is overgrown with trees and other fauna. One of the men working there mentioned that the location was once a railyard.
That made me very curios to find out if this could indeed be the long lost Rock Island railyard. I went online to see if I could find out any evidence to support my theory and that's when I discovered the photo above taken in the early 1980s by photographer Glenn Anderson. Many of the structures that can be seen in the far right matched up with what I discovered. The old cotton storage buildings that can be seen on the left side of the image still exist as does the water tower to the right. The area that I stumbled upon is in the shadow of that tower (actually there are two) and if you squint real hard you can see a beige colored building that I took several photos of.
Here is that structure.
Here are the water towers.
Just to the left of the water tower in the photo is the yard tower which is just a pile of bricks today.
Most people wouldn't recognize this piece of twisted metal, but a railfan like me can identify it as the end panel of a boxcar painted in the Rock Island's signature powder blue "The Rock" paint scheme from the 1980s.
At the far north end of the old railyard sits the locomotive fueling and maintenance facility. It is hard to see in this photo but there are bays here for the locomotives and the crews working here are extracting soil samples to see how far the oil and diesel fuel has seeped into the soil.
The area where the two locomotives in the photo above are sitting is somewhere in these trees. It's amazing what a difference forty years makes. Here in Louisiana, mother nature will quickly reclaim anything man can create. Note the power lines seen in the original photo.
Check out the rest of my photos:
Check Out:
Tracing The Rock Island Railroad Through Lecompte, Louisiana
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