Old St. Louis

[Terry Toenges]

The photo caption said "Switch Yard 1913 Chouteau & Pacific". It's in St. Louis.

[Terry Toenges]

[Terry Toenges]

[Terry Toenges]

Not so old St. Louis
https://youtu.be/5IkluJ0mb7I

[Terry Toenges]

Wellston train terminal in St. Louis in the 50's.

[jward]

Gotta love the single point switch in the middle of the street.

[Trainman203]

And the WIRES.  Especially in the first yard photo.  No one ever models those accurately and to the extent they were, everywhere.

[Terry Toenges]

I don't know that I had ever seen a picture of one of those real life towers, only plastic models. I do rem the all the wires from when I was young and street cars were abundant.

[Len]

Interestingly Chouteau Yard still exists, although a bit larger than in the 1913 pic. If you pull up St. Louis in Google Maps it's bounded by Chouteau Ave to the north, Vandeventer Ave to the west, Tower Ave to the southwest, and S. 39th St to the east. It's part of the "Hannibal Subdivison".

Len

[Terry Toenges]

That street is Tower Grove.
Here is the current view. The empty wedge is where the feed store was.

[Trainman203]

Those towers sheltered a guy with a stop sign who would, when he'd hear or see a train coming, go down and stop road traffic.  That's what they did before automatic crossing gates.  That went on well into the 20th century.  This was mostly in cities with dense street traffic.

Those guys were called "crossing tenders".  Great entry level job back when there were lots of them on the railroad.

[RAM]

Some of them had manual gates.  C&NW still had some in 1952

[Terry Toenges]

Boats and trains on the St. Louis riverfront in the late 70's or in the 80's after the tunnel and  Arch were built.

There were tracks that used to run along the street and on a trestle before they built the Arch. This is from 1938.

[Trainman203]

That looks like a USRA MP 0-8-0 shoving the cut of cars in the second photo. TRRA had them too but the big number on the tender says MP.