Centerville rail service

I have looked at rail maps of Centerville, IA and found that no other railroad than the Iowa Southern now serves that town. Two major carriers, BN and NS, used to serve this town. Why did they abandon these lines, and why did NS pull up its line below Albia, IA in favor of trackage rights? Was it because of maintainence costs?

Thank you for any information you can provide.

Looks like granger territory to me, which means look at what happened to the granger roads and that will explain a lot.

The topo maps on Acme Mapper can be a real mash-up in terms of their dates - sometimes you’ll follow a rail line and see it listed as one RR on one portion, and another on a different section.

The N&W line between Albia and Centerville (now apparently completely gone) is marked “Southern Industrial” for those sections just north of Centerville that still show up as active on the topo.

The topo shows both the spur off the Rock Island and off BN (probably Burlington, possibly Milwaukee) as dead-ending in Centerville. The Rock Island spur, and the line it ran off are now both completely gone. The RI line looks to have continued north and east through Udell (where it crossed N&W), Unionville, and may have reconnected with the RI main south east of there - there appears to have been a road built on portions of the old ROW.

The reason I say possibly Milwaukee is because what shows as Southern Industrial touches the Milwaukee north of Centerville, but… The same line arrives in Albia as N&W. And tracing the BN line from what shows up on the topo at Centerville ends up as N&W…

That’s what I get from the topo maps. Maybe it’ll help you sort some of this out. Good luck!

Iowa Southern is old Appanoose Community Railroad. If the locals had not bought the railroad it would all be gone. The business on line is all relatively new and a function of local industrial development. (Walking around what’s left there is quite a throwback to the 1930’s)

Wabash pulled out of there (still has the “island” in Des Moines) and consolidated with CB&Q after a series of nasty floods in the 1960’s, daisy-chain consolidation and abandonment started in the late 1920’s and USRA had been advocating consolidation since WW1 because of the spiderweb of lightly used branches between Albia and Des Moines of 5 railroads. The joint line is the best of what’s left, there was zero economic sense in rebuilding both railroads… River floodplains make for nice grades, but if you are not well above the 100 year flood plain, you’re “had”. Wabash wasn’t the best engineered line most places it went and that often the reason why so much of it is gone now. Then again, northern Mo and southern Iowa have really ugly flood and drainage disaster histories.

The Wabash Line was a cobbled together mess and had a weird history as Gould’s dealings compounded the problems of the Chariton river and all those creeks and swamps. (Take a look in Heimbergers Wabash book or the ICC valuation dockets)

USACE is still at war with this river and its tributaries. (Very flat with big meanders which is hard to deal with when moving large volumes of water.)

The Appanoose County/

Check out the Iowa D. O. T. railroad abandonment map. What a web your will find around Centerville, IA

https://www.iowadot.gov/iowarail/railroads/maps/Chronology.pdf

Thanks!