One-Way Fare to St. Joe, Please

BY DAVID MARTIN

The Kansas City, Clay County & St. Joseph Railway collected fares from more than 2 million passengers in 1923. Known as the “maroon line” for the colors of its cars, it stretched 78 miles and touched four counties.

Today, of course, Amtrak is the only passenger rail option in these parts. But a century ago, five independently owned and operated companies connected Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri, to suburban areas.

Ed Conrad, a retired technical writer who lives in Blue Springs, tells the story of Kansas City’s interurban lines in a book titled Heartland Traction. With Mayor Mark Funkhouser attempting to muster support for a regional light-rail plan, I decided to chat with Conrad about the days rail tied Olathe, Leavenworth and Liberty to the urban core.

We think of rail as a means of ameliorating sprawl. But your book seems to suggest that interurban lines played a part in spreading us out.

[City] streetcars, you might say, contributed to some what we now think of as suburban sprawl. But it was the interurban that contributed even more so, because interurbans allowed people to live in communities much further removed from the city than what the streetcars would allow.

Interurbans, having their own private right of way, could go fast, and that means people could travel longer distances in the same amount of time they could on a city streetcar. So that’s when started we seeing outlying places like Lenexa, Overland Park, Olathe, Leavenworth, Bonner Springs and to the north, Excelsior Springs, and to the far north, St. Joe. And then communities in between all those began to develop as a result of the interurban.

You have the ability to time travel. Which of the five lines you describe in your book would you want to ride first?

Well, I’d probably want to ride the Kansas City, Clay County & St. Joe, because that was built to such high standards. It was a very fast line. There is evidence that in the flats area north of Kansas City, going up to St. Joe, it could reach speeds of 70 miles an hour. Seventy miles an hour to people around the turn of the [last] century would be almost like supersonic travel today in an airplane.

Cable car employees in 1895 Kansas City.

What’s the condition of the tracks these lines used? Can they be of use to transportation planners today?

Well, no, the tracks are all gone. All of these interurban lines – with the exception of some tracks that have been relaid in one of the parks in Overland Park, where the Strang Line used to run, and they’re only there like museum pieces – but all of the tracks that the lines ran on are all gone.

What about the right-of-way?

Some of the right-of-way still exists, particularly on the Kansas City, Clay County & St. Joe, because the northern part of Kansas City was not developed as much and as fast as the southern part. So there are places, especially along the line that ran between Kansas City and Excelsior Springs.

I’m making you king. Give me a practical light-rail proposal.

Well, I’m not a real proponent of light rail… I feel that light rail has to serve all parts of the metro area, which means Missouri but also Kansas. But the folks in Kansas are really dragging their feet. Which is unfortunate, because right now that’s where the wealth of Kansas City is… So right now we need their support – their financial support, their political support, and we’re just not getting it. Mayor Funkhouser has work cut out for him trying to bring them into the fold.

Beyond that, I really don’t have any preferences about particular routes. I think the routes that would have to be considered, though, would basically be the corridors of our freeways. [Interstate] 35 South, that would be the route I would start with first, because that’s where so much of the traffic is. And then I would probably look at 35 North and portions of 29…

So when you say you’re not a fan of light rail, does that mean you don’t think the starter route would really accomplish anything? You think we have to build something monumental.

That would be the preference. But from a practical point of view, we’re going to have to get in line to get the federal money to do all this. There are lot of other cities that are in line already. I would think it would probably be somewhere between five years at the very least and probably more like 10 years before we get the money to do very much. Because of that, some people say that what we ought to do is build a starter line within the city that we could finance through our means. But a starter line like that is just nothing more than another streetcar line, and it’s not going to have all the attributes that a real light-rail system is going to have. [Light rail] does have some street running, but it also has a lot of private right-of-way running. And that’s what you need — you need the speed so that people can travel from outlying areas easily and rapidly into downtown Kansas City.

There are a lot of obstacles that have to be considered. The other obstacle is we have such a low population density here. Even though light rail in none of the cities makes money, they have to make a certain amount of money in order to quality for matching funds. And it would be difficult for us because of our light population density to achieve even that minimum. We have a lot of strikes against us here with trying to build a light-rail system here in Kansas City.