Next stop on my tour was a fun change of pace. While many garden railroads are fanciful creations of imagination, this one was modeled on a specific place and time. And it’s a place I’ve been to before! So in addition to sharing photos of the garden railroad I'll also include a couple pictures of the real place and spend some time talking about its history.
The Burlington & Missouri River Railroad is loosely based on the Creston Division of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy (CB&Q) from the 1930's through the 1960's, prior to the Burlington Northern Merger in 1970. This garden railroad includes around 600 feet of mainline track running in a continuous loop around three sides of the house, and in the middle is the city of Creston, Iowa, including a large train yard, an absolutely beautiful replica of the train station, and several dozen more buildings, some of which are also modeled after actual structures in the town.
Needless to say, all the locomotives and almost all the rolling stock were CB&Q.
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| The central feature of the layout is a replica of the CB&Q Station in Creston. And stopped in front is a Zephyr, which looks ready to speed westbound out of town at any moment. Zephyr service was introduced by the CB&Q in 1934 in an effort to modernize passenger train travel. Burlington had nine Zephyr train sets which were used on its key passenger routes between major cities. Two Zephyr routes passed through Creston so these would have been seen frequently when they were in use. |
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| A view of a freight passing through the train yard. The one-story freight building to the right (east) of the station was removed and replaced in 1969 with a small station that is used by Amtrak today. |
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| A pair of silver box cars on a siding by another freight shed. |
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| Every town needs a water tower with its name on it to remind residents where they are. |
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| Here's another view of the all-CB&Q freight local. Remember my recent post when I was so excited just to have three pieces of CB&Q rolling stock? Clearly I need more. |
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| At one end of the main line it makes a loop around a village which I believe is based on Emerson, another small town along the CB&Q mainline about 60 miles or so west of Creston. |
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| There were also farms along the line including this cattle ranch. Note the two stock cars set out on the siding, waiting to take the week's haul to market. |
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| In front of the house the main line makes a graceful loop around the yard on a beautiful poured concrete viaduct. |
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| Also in the front yard is a nice grain elevator, complete with a pair of covered grain hoppers. And where are they from? The Creston, Iowa Farmers Co-Op Co. of course! |
The real Creston was established by the Burlington & Missouri Railroad (which was eventually absorbed into the CB&Q) around 1868 and quickly became a significant railroad town and division point along their mainline across southern Iowa. Creston is the high point along the line between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers and earned its named from being on the crest of the divide between the two drainage systems, although the town is not actually right on the divide but about mile or so to the west.
The Creston Division encompassed southwest Iowa including the CB&Q mainline between Creston and Council Bluffs plus several branch lines. As it was a division point, Creston had sizable train yards and shops, including one of the largest roundhouses in the entire CB&Q system. The remains of the roundhouse burned in 1981 but you can still make out the outline today on Google Earth as the area has not been redeveloped. Other railroad buildings have burned, been dismantled, or in some cases destroyed by tornado, leaving little physical evidence of what a significant railroad town this once was.
The most visible and beautiful remaining structure is the large station, built in 1899 at a cost of $75,000, at the time the largest and most significant station the CB&Q had built in Iowa. At that time, around 50 passenger trains a day passed through Creston. This building was significantly larger than what was needed for passengers, however, and the upper two floors were used as offices for numerous railroad departments and officials responsible for the Creston Division.
This building hasn’t been used for passenger service since 1969, when a small, one-story building was opened by the CB&Q just to the east of the old station. That small building is still used by Amtrak today and also houses a few BNSF offices. The main building was sold to the city and today it houses municipal offices as well as a senior center and gallery space on the ground floor. It has been on the National Register for Historic Places since 1974.
For more information if you're interested:
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| Here's a picture of the real station in Creston which I took when passing through in July, 2005. This is the west end of the building. |
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| This CB&Q caboose is preserved in a Creston park by the Union County Historical Society. They have preserved several historic structures that have been moved to the park, including this tiny train shed that once stood in Brooks, a local stop along the CB&Q mainline about 25 miles west of Creston. |
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| Finally, for reference here is a detail of a 1967 map of the Creston Division of the CB&Q. The lines this Division were responsible for are shown in bold. Some CB&Q branch lines had already closed by this time. Note that you can identify both Emerson (in Mills County) and Brooks (in Adams County) on this map. |
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