Throughout Kansas, there are many opportunities to learn and experience from small scale to large how the railroad was a key ingredient in the settlement of the plains.

From monuments to museums to restored depots, communities in Kansas offer numerous ways to engage with our railroad history.

One such opportunity is found at the Huck Boyd Community Center in Philipsburg with the C&R Railroad.

My name is Michael James.

I help with the trains here.

I sit on the board of Directors.

And my name's Merlyn Schick and I come out here and play the trains.

Well, Mr. Clark, long time resident of Phillips County, grew up in Kirwin, Kansas.

Always loved trains.

He was a photographer in Philipsburg.

He started building his first set there above his studio.

This is what developed out of that.

He donated all of his trains to the foundation here so that it could keep it.

We're blessed to have it.

His first train was a Super Chief and it's out here on the on the track.

So we still have his first train.

And we all got our particular trains.

You know, mine is the the work train with the equipment on it.

You know, I pretty well run the freight yard.

Merlyn runs the passenger trains.

With the old railroads.

They had to have water, period.

And as you can see out here, we have a couple of tanks.

And when we run our steamer, we'll pull under there and drop the stout down like we're filling water.

This roundhouse was modeled and scaled after the roundhouse in Philipsburg, as well as Goodland.

And these streets.

This is a replica of the downtown Philipsburg brick street.

Sign Solutions are the ones that did the brick for us and the ladies down there went out in front of their store and took a picture of the brick on the streets in Phillipsburg and then printed this off.

You know that's that's some commitment to detail.

Yeah.

He has a lot of stuff from the railroad timetable sheets, you know, that go back to the 1800s and we found some tickets over here, plates and stuff from the Rock Island Railroad and the original hats from the Santa Fe and Rock Island and lamps from all over the different railroads.

And how Bill collected all them I have no idea, you know.

Red means stop.

The yellow is caution, you know.

And they said the whites were to be able to keep on going.

You know, a red green one, you know.

The blue ones, they put them around a car or an engine.

And when they were serviced and they were working on it, you know, nobody's supposed to use it, you know.

You know, all the railroads.

Had their own lantern.

They may look similar.

The colors were basically the same, but every railroad had their own lantern.

Well, this here says R. I. line.

That'd be Rock Island.

Oh, yeah, it's right there on top.

Rock Island.

And the little ones, when it comes to the trains, they just love it.

But I'm here to tell you, there's there's.

Older kids out here, too.

That are still into this.

There's kids of all ages that love the trains.

This interest in trains can make a connection for understanding the role the railroad played in our history.

Don Rowlison talked trains with Dr. Leo Oliva, whose presentation on railroads is part of the Humanities Kansas Speaker Series.

If you talk to historians in the Great Plains there's a lot of ideas, if you pin them down, what was the most important invention that was used out here?

Some people will say barbed wire.

Others will say windmills and wells.

Others will say, no, it was the railroads that made the whole thing.

My point of view is that if it hadn't been for railroads, Kansas territory wouldn't have been created.

So the whole the whole thing started with railroads.

I have to back up a little bit.

And in 1820, as they were organizing this land, there's this problem, of course, of slavery and the division developing between North and South.

And in the compromise of 1820, because of the issue of slavery, said that there could be no settlement west of the boundary of Missouri.

That was all reserved to Indians.

In fact, it was commonly known as the permanent Indian frontier.

But everything changed with the Mexican War.

The United States and Mexico went to war in 1846.

The war ended in 1848 with a big section of about 3/5 of Mexico, and that includes Texas coming to the United States.

Almost immediately thereafter, gold is discovered in California, and there's this great movement to California.

The idea is we've got to build a railroad to the Pacific Coast.

Nobody could settle west of Missouri.

It was closed.

But most of the railroad interests in the United States were in the North, not the south.

And they were determined that they didn't want a southern route to California.

So they came up with a plan - create a new territory that can be opened to settlement.

And as a result of that, they created two territories, Kansas and Nebraska, and left it up to the people residing in those territories to decide whether they would be slave or free states when they joined the union.

What they didn't anticipate was that this was going to touch off a major warfare over the control of Kansas, and it led almost directly to civil war.

Yet the whole purpose was railroads.

So Kansas territory was very much the result of this new technology.

And I think it's important that we keep that focus on technology as well, because that's sort of the key to understanding so much development.

So the example that I worked out, if you were going to ship 50 times of freight 600 miles, if you went by wagon train, it would cost $8,400 and it would take 40 days.

But if you could go by rail, it would cost $1800 and take three days.

Well, you obviously are going to ship everything by rail that you can.

And that's why everybody wanted a railroad, every town and even towns that didn't exist.

They hoped for a railroad.

One western Kansas stop and the Union Pacific was the town of Ellis, where you can now find the Ellis Railroad Museum.

Good morning.

My name's John Lashell and I'm an employee of the Ellis Railroad Museum here in Ellis, Kansas.

We're standing in the entrance of the railroad museum.

This waiting bench actually came out of the depot in Hayes.

Behind me directly is the schedule board that you would find in the in the depot.

We have the agents desk, telegraph equipment.

We have a students set that they had to practice on.

If you didn't know Morse code well, then chances are you didn't get hired back then, the railroad relied heavily on telegraph.

We have a display of different tools.

I would hate to have to try to manhandle one of those wrenches for eight or 12 hours.

What we're looking now is a line of towns.

This was up on the Plainville branch.

Those are all towns that were served by the Union Pacific on that branch line.

The railroads came up with an idea that for families you could flip the seats and you faced each other.

Now we're looking at just a small example of what the track workers, the type of tools that they used to maintain the tracks.

You carried derail by hand, you carried ties by hand, you drilled holes in the rail, everything was done by hand.

Our model railroad club layout.

We meet the second Saturday of every month, but if any model railroad enthusiast out there, especially kids, if they have some of their train engines or cars broken, they're welcome to bring stuff in here on that Saturday and we will repair it for free.

Now we're looking at an exact replica of what Ellis used to look like.

Ellis was a division point and a terminal for Union Pacific.

We're located halfway between Kansas City and Denver.

Ellis at one time had a 14 stall round house, a 92 foot long turntable to turn the engines.

The big brick building that was the repair shop.

Coaling tower, the depot, the district office and the railroad hotel.

On the subject of railroad hotels, the Midland Railroad Hotel inn Wilson, Kansas, is an opportunity to experience a popular historic stay over for train travelers in full scale.

Originally constructed in 1899, it was restored to its early glory in an effort that earned a Kansas Preservation Award.

Another overnight experience for the locomotive history buff is the Railroad House in Wallace, Kansas.

Deb Goodrich, historian in residence at the Fort Wallace Museum, visited us and Ellis to share about Wallace's railroad connections.

From 1870 to about 1890.

Wallace, Kansas, was the section headquarters for the railroad.

There was a house built.

The superintendent's office, actually.

And it is so cool.

The Fort Wallace Museum owns that building now, and we actually rent that out as an air B and B. Fred Harvey, of course, has become such a famous name in the West and he gets credit for civilizing the West and he did that through one of the original, if not the original franchise, the Harvey Houses.

And we know them now along the Santa Fe route, the Atchison, Topeka, Santa Fe.

But his first two Harvey houses, one of which was in Wallace, of course, on a different railroad line.

But that's one of our claims to fame there in the Wallace Hotel that served so many folks traveling on the railroad.

You cannot overstate the significance of the railroad.

The impact on the native tribes cannot be overstated.

Nothing displaces those plains tribes more than the coming through of the railroad.

The great buffalo slaughter would not have been possible without the railroads because they could kill them, but they had no way to ship all those hides out.

From 1872 to 1874.

The railroads on the Great Plains shipped approximately 7.5 million hides.

So the buffalo slaughter is connected with the Indian removal.

And the railroads are very important part of Indian removal.

First of all, they wanted the Indians removed because they wanted that land for other settlers.

They were willing to do almost anything to persuade the government to get the Indians on reservations.

And with with the railroad hauling military supplies and troops.

They were the great unequalizeer.

The army had been on equal footing with the Plains Tribes.

The railroad transforms logistics.

You can move, man and materials exponentially quicker now than those plains tribes.

And by 1870, when that railroad reached Denver, those tribes in western Kansas were on reservations, and the railroad had made that possible.

And and of course, needed it.

That first railroad that built across Kansas.

Union Pacific Railway Eastern Division, they got a land grant.

They had over 6 million acres in Kansas and about 2 million acres in Colorado to get to Denver.

So they were advertising.

We have 8 million acres of land for sale.

And if they couldn't sell that land, it was really no value.

So they immediately are looking for people to buy that land.

Railroad companies set up land offices and sent land agents to various countries in Europe to recruit people to come settle in Kansas.

Well, at the Cottonwood Ranch, they purchased Section 13 from a railroad.

Abraham Pratt, in the 1880s, was promoting Studley as a railroad town, had a lumber yard and all that sort of thing.

The railroads were important and it was very important for the settlement because Kansas was homesteaded so much in the 1860s and 70s.

With the homestead you had to plant crops.

And yes, there were, there were mills.

But you can only grind so much flour to serve the people.

You need to take it to market.

And so you had to have the train to do it.

You cannot transport wheat or corn with draft animals in a wagon any farther than 100 miles, and you have used up the value of the commodity you're carrying.

And this holds true if you're talking about the Roman Empire or western Kansas.

You talked about homesteaders.

The railroads needed labor.

I mean, they would hire anybody to help build the roadbed.

And many families that settled, the man of the family spent some time working for the railroad.

This was not uncommon at all.

And railroads, you know, we talk about the cattle trails and the cow towns of Kansas.

The only reason they were here is because of the railroad.

They were driving cattle from Texas to come to Kansas to catch the railroad.

We didn't have Standard Time until railroads.

Every community had its own time.

The sun at its meridian height was noon.

And, you know, you might go 50 miles away, and they were on a different time schedule all directions.

Hard to run a railroad without a time schedule because it moves.

And it became very difficult.

In 1883, the railroad interests in the United States and Canada got together and created the time zones in North America that we still use today and set up Standard Time.

When I was in rural grade school and right after World War Two, we had a passenger service on our rail line, one of the doodlebugs.

Yeah.

We got a car out here.

It's a doodlebug.

You know, a lot of people don't know what a doodlebug is, but a doodlebug was.

an engine with a passenger car in one.

So a lot of times it would run up and down the tracks in local areas and picking up milk, dropping off goods.

Somebody need to come to town.

The first lines, most of them, they ran passenger and freight.

But at one point, that passenger service didn't justify keeping passenger trains in service.

So they started organizing these these small trains.

But those continued to provide that service that had been available as part of the whole system.

And here the doodlebug was called the jitney.

Went from Plainville on on west of Hoxie.

The doodlebug around here and on the Missouri Pacific Line.

And the Rock Island line had what they called the jersey.

My mom used to take the jersey to town to go to school.

Also, the railroads made possible for the first time regular mail service.

There had been mail service prior to that, but it depended on draft animals and weather and so on.

But railroads made efficient mail delivery, and almost every railroad, and they were encouraged by the US Postal Service to do this, contracted with the Postal Service to deliver the mail.

And in the process they developed a plan that that mail would be sorted on railcars.

And so this was common practice.

In fact, when I was a kid, a train went through our town in the morning going west and came back in the evening, going east and dropped off the mail both ways and it was sorted on the train.

It was the most efficient mail system we've ever had.

That mail service made possible.

The mail order catalog.

It wouldn't work without the railroad to deliver the products.

You know, you're not going to order something if it if it takes six weeks to get here.

But that mail order catalog provided supplies that were just not available locally.

The steam engine itself was a marvel.

And so that that was fascinating.

But to be able to move without animal power was just fascinating and to move quickly.

That fascination continues for many and can be experienced with organizations like the Abilene and Smoky Valley Rail Association.

My name is Ross Boelling.

I'm the president and general manager of the Abilene, Smoky Valley Railroad in Abilene, Kansas.

It started in 1992 with a couple of gentlemen that had the foresight to think that this would be a good tourist railroad.

The railroad that we operate on was originally in Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific.

It was built in a 1886, 1887 time period, and it was a line ran from Harrington to Salina.

We are a we are a moving museum.

Basically.

We're a museum that's 100 feet wide and five and a half miles long is what we tell people.

And what we try and do is to help people remember that Kansas, a lot of Kansas is here because of the railroads.

Most towns exist because there was a railroad through there at one time or another.

So then the railroads also brought people to Kansas, and then they also helped the farmers.

So what we're trying to do is to help people understand the symbiotic relationship between agriculture and railroads.

What we do is we travel along here between Abilene and Enterprise and see farm fields grow.

Sometimes it's wheat, sometimes it's corn, soybeans, things like that.

And then over to enterprise, we built a operating gristmill.

Enterprises was big milling presence in the late 1800s to early 1930s.

We do a lot of educational programs for kids, schools.

We do dinner trains, like we're doing tonight for entertainment.

So our primary objective, our mission is preservation, education and entertainment.

Tonight specifically, this is our last heritage train.

We had four heritage trains this year.

The first one we had was a Katy, Missouri, Kansas, Texas dinner train.

That was for our 1903 wooden couch that we have that's 120 years old.

Still operating today.

Then we had a Chicago Northwestern dinner train, which is for the car behind me, the Chicago Northwestern 400 Streamliner passenger car.

We had a Santa Fe dinner train in honor of our Santa Fe 3415 steam engine and tonight is the Rock Island in honor of the tracks and they're operating on.

Kevin Bailey and Steve Smithers went back and researched the menues for those specific railroads and those specific time frames.

The Rock Island tonight is a Rock island off of the Golden State.

We're currently the only excursion railroad that regularly operates in Kansas.

And so we've had people from this year from 40 states and probably 40% of the zip codes in Kansas have been on our train this year.

There's something about a steam engine.

I mean, you can go look at it sitting in the park or and engine house, and it a dead...

I mean, it just sits there.

But you put a fire in the belly and it becomes a living, breathing machine.

For any of you that have been in Abilene, it sat in the Eisenhower Park since 1953, I believe.

1996, the two guys that originated this railroad talked the city of Abilene into giving it to them, and they actually moved down here to where our engine house is and then they rebuilt it and got it back into operation.

And we're using it today.

The big thing is every 15 years or 1472 days, you have to completely disassemble the boiler.

That is, take all the flu tubes out, replace them, ultrasound the boiler to make sure it's okay and do other mechanical inspections and things to put it back in tip top shape.

When I was growing up, it was kind of on the downward side of passenger trains.

But I mean, that was the way people traveled.

In fact I've got a newspaper that I'll be giving out on board tonight talks about the Hollywood movie stars that traveled on the Rock Island and such, and that was the way to travel before airplanes took over.

In early, early 1900, Kansas had a little over 9000 miles of railroad track in operation.

They say it was more traffic per capita than any state or nation in the world.

Well, you got to have that per capita in there.

But it was that.

And the reason was our geographic location.

We were in the center of the nation.

So a lot of things at the cross here to get someplace else.

December 5th, 1854, the senator from Missouri, Thomas Hart Benton, was making a speech in Maryland talking about settling Kansas.

And what's the big push about settling Kansas, the railroads.

And we're going to cross this continent straight through Kansas.

There is no way to overstate the impact of the railroads on the American West and on Kansas, especially.

It was joining the country and everybody was united once you had the main artery of travel.

Years ago, Jasmine West wrote that the railroad was like a giant needle stitching the nation together.

And if you look at a map of, say, early 20th century railroads in the United States, it looks like it's all been tied together.

It's what built the West because that was how they got from east to west.

And, you know, if you take a wagon and it's going to take days upon days, but with the train, you can be there in a day.

You know, in a lot of areas it.

It built the country.

A lot of people are lovers of railroad, a lot of the older ones.

And I get a lot of the young people now too that that are fascinated by trains.

Everybody shipped by rail.

that was pretty much your only mode of transportation.

They hauled all the passengers, they hauled all the freight.

We didn't have the interstate systems that we have now.

So you had the railroad.

It was it was a connection to the rest of the world that had never existed before.

Yeah.

It seemed like in the United States it was that you didn't... you weren't civilized until you had a railroad.

Yeah.

Because of a civilization.

You had contacts with these people, and you didn't without a railroad.

But the steam power itself, I think, was a romantic thing.

And then to be able to make all these connections.

It was just like this is this is something, well, we might say today, this is like something from outer space.

You know, it had it has made it possible for us to do so many things.

And it was just like there was the world before railroads and the world after.

And they're not the same world at all.

So I would say the major shaping form of Kansas from beginning until the 1920s was the railroad.

It had more influence on what towns survived, who settled here.

The whole economy was wrapped around the railroad.

Without an understanding of the railroad, I think you can't understand how Kansas developed in that time period.