urbanSTL

Don't like the patina?
I think all that is owned by the TRRA. I'm sure SP knows.

quincunx wrote: ↑

Nov 08, 2024

Don't like the patina?
I think all that is owned by the TRRA. I'm sure SP knows

Patina is one thing, lack of structural integrity is another... 

Yeah, MacArthur is TRRA property now. They may have gotten a federal grant to do the work on it, though I seem to recall they did Merchant's with just private money. The city built MacArthur and owned it for years, but the railroads had long owned Eads, so they traded in the late eighties or early nineties. Anyway, they're working on it and have been for a couple of years now, but I don't think anyone much wanted to start heavy work on McA before Merchants was done and could handle the extra traffic. Believe it or not, Merchants was the one in greater need of work, so they did that first. (It was forty or fifty years older.) I'm not really party to the particulars. Just a railfan who knows a few railroaders (mostly retired.) I haven't been following this project as closely as the Merchants replacement, but I don't get the impression it's in any danger of failure just yet. Particularly now that they've reduced the dead load by . . . whatever the road deck weighed. A lot. Suffice it to say it's an ongoing project. They keep replacing bits one element at a time. DB or Dredger would probably know more than me, though.

^ I can't offer much else as I haven't really followed the workings of the MacArthur Bridge, either as another railfan and or from my construction career standpoint. It should be owned by TRRA and therefore the railroads responsibility to maintain and upkeep.  TRRA being a terminal railroad formed by a group of private railroads to handle interchange traffic as well as local regional industrial base.   Believe I got it right but most terminal railroads cost is split among the railroad pwners as a percent of traffic/carloads handle for each of the owning railroad.  From a private owner standpoint really about the bones versus the appearance.   

Merchants bridge project was a pretty significant undertaking within a pretty short timeline to execute so it got some pretty good press and following from construction trade magazines as well.    Eads of course just has some great history whether your a railfan, an engineer or a builder in my opinion

^Oh, that is absolutely true. Eads is one of the two local buildings I've seen most often in architecture texts. (The other being the Wainright, interstingly. I'm always pleasantly surprised when the wicket makes it. I figure its absence is mostly down to historians neglecting the new in all things.) Yes, the Eads is the true landmark among local bridges; the great bridge. I like some of the others,  but that one is important. 

And yes, the TRRA is owned jointly by five of the six class ones, though not, I believe completely equally, since each of the founding railroads had a share and a number of others bought in later, and the current class ones mostly own several. (Or in UP's case a lot.) I've seen the list somewhere in the past, but I don't have it to hand at present, so I'm not going to try to guess who had shares and who didn't.

Anyway, that has in the past reputedly led to problems for the TRRA getting things done, since NS doesn't want to pay to help UP or vice versa. There was this really rather incredible plan from the 70s I found in an archive that would have replaced every yard on the east side and combined them into the world's largest classification yard, save for Gateway, which was to be permitted to remain independent. But instead they just modestly expanded Madison. Crazy Y shaped monstrosity with quite complete plans and lots of flow charts and node network studies and so forth, with the idea that it could reduce local car dwell time from . . . a couple of weeks? . . . down to a day on average. (Getting cars from one railroad to another is a special sort of nuts, and there aren't many places where it happens easily. St. Louis is one of very few thanks to TRRA and A&S, with Chicago being another, thanks to Belt Railway of Chicago and Indiana Harbor Belt.)

But lately they seem to have come to the conclusion that it's vital infrastructure and it will break soon if they don't all do something, so they've ponied up.

TRRA would make a great subject for a model railroad; especially for those interested in urban modeling. 

According to Wikipedia

The Terminal Railroad Association is owned by[2] BNSF Railway, Canadian National Railway (Illinois Central Railroad until 1999), CSX Transportation, Norfolk Southern Railway, and Union Pacific Railroad. All own one-seventh of the railroad except UP, which owns three-sevenths.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termina ... _St._Louis

^They link to a TRRA page that isn't there anymore and TRRA doesn't specify the proportions.  That number is . . . believable? But I couldn't confirm it. TRRA's own site says the following:

The original railroads making up the Association were the Missouri Pacific Railway Company, the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railway Company, Wabash Railroad Company, the Ohio and Mississippi Railway Company, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company, and the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railway Company. Numerous other railroads were subsequently admitted to the Association in later years. These owner railroads, consistent with the entire railroad industry, have grown through mergers and acquisitions over the years.

Iron Mountain was later merged into the MoP and folded into UP along with it. The Ohio and Mississippi is a B&O predecessor, which later merged with the C&O and the Family Lines to become a part of CSX. But L&N was one of the family lines and is now also CSX. The CCC&StL share would be complicated, since it would have gone to Pen Central, which went bankrupt before ConRail got its assets, which were then split between CSX and NS upon the dissolution of CR, with NS mostly getting the NYC System portion of Pen Central. I've generally seen it said that IC bought in, but I think so too did the Frisco and the CB&Q, the MKT, the M&O, the C&NW, the PRR, and the Alton Route, among others. I think that Wiki is probably right, but I wanted to hedge my bets a little. (Especially since I have vague memories of similar, but subtly different numbers. UP was still no. 1, but there was some variation beneath it.)

Anyway, it's a complicated corporate structure and ownership history, to say the least.

And Framer, yes, the TRRA is a remarkably attractive subject. I've got a virtual model railroad that mostly started out as that, though it's grown since. And there are some great HO railroads that draw inspiration from it. I'll pm you with a couple of my favorites. It does, honestly, seem to be a popular subject at least locally. (I suspect it would be even more so if Union Station weren't so absurdly enormous and ridiculously distinctive. You just don't see too many model railroads in any scale tackling passenger terminals with more than a dozen tracks, let alone more than three dozen.)

https://www.stlmag.com/business/techart ... velopment/

Looks like a new tenant signed on.

What’s Next: You can expect “visible progress” at the site in the coming months, Gleicher says, with vertical construction also on track to begin this year.

Just having this site under construction is going to do a lot for perception of the city and Downtown

^Has the chance to just be an authentically cool place in the US. The industrial history, the riverfront trail, mural mile, on the Mississippi, nextdoor to the Broadway music watering holes and Soulard, all in the shadow of the arch. If they can make a connection to downtown, this will be a premier place to experience for everyone eventually. Fits right into my Broadway streetcar dreams

It’s good to see them securing more tenants. They have a housing design competition at the site in late 2025 - I have been surprised they hadn’t started on the site yet considering all of the tenants they’ve secured and the competition. Great to see

I love how this project leverages the Mississippi. It has remnants of the type of project you would see in countries that have surpassed us in manufacturing technology

It’s also been a nice change to see the local media running with the momentum of the project. It seems like this project and the Brickline Greenway really promote positive discourse about our city, instead of the constant negativity (which we still see with many other projects that are moving along like At&t)

They own over half of the parcels, one company owns the remaining parcels, they just announced their first tenant and are nearing multiple more deals with more tenants. Complete non-story for a project that will span the rest of this decade and well into the next.

This is a project that Saint Louis can't let fail. I've only heard positive news so let's hope this really is a non issue.

Gateway South Team Inks Deal with NYC School on Configure-to-Order Housing

https://www.nyit.edu/academics/architec ... -alliance/

Still no building permits

I feel I'm a pretty strong St. Louis optimist... but I really wouldn't be surprised if this entire project falls through. 

Have they done anything to protect the building with the collapsed roof? If no permits I assume not

We need this one and I was super optimistic but now starting to worry.

I wish they had some sort of revenue model... but as it stands, I'm not sure how they actually will make the money to pay back investors / construction lending. Hoping they have that rabbit in their hat / that they can ink some leases soon. 

I see nothing to worry about.  Setting standardization for the modular construction industry would seem to be an important baseline.  I foresee timber being a focus on the production side.  Saint Louis could be "center of the universe" for the modular construction movement in much the same way we lead the charge when brick built America.

I worry 757 S 2nd will fall over in the next storm.

God our port could be so much more if only we could repeal some the cabotage laws in the Jones Act