While driving my wife around to quilt stores yesterday, I drove from Pierce City (quilt shop) to Carthage (quilt shop) alongside the abandoned SL-SF secondary track between the two towns (1st time up this way). The southern half is a hair overgrown with weeds, but the northern half is way overgrown with trees and such. Road crossings have been mostly paved over, and fencing installed over the track bed. However, the highway signs warning of rail crossing immediately after turn are still in place. I was wondering when this track was left to die (most rail is still in place). Haven't been able to find a date on several searches. Thanks in advance!
The line linking Springfield to Wichita is a bit of a puzzle. Essentially, the BN - SF Merger eliminated the need for it as a through route. The date I have for the final BN train is 3/16/1996. After that, some stretches were pulled up, and others were sold and survive with short lines. Then, there's the stretch between Pierce City and Carthage. The Missouri and North Arkansas purchased a few miles of track close to Carthage proper. This gave them access to the ADM mill in town, plus a few miles of storage track on each side of town. The track west of Carthage was washed out a couple years ago. I don't think it's been fixed yet. The remaining stretch in question is out of service but not officially abandoned. If you go look at the current system map on the BNSF website, they still show that line as part of the system. I guess since BNSF never filed for abandonment, MODOT is required to keep the signs up. Now the golden question, why did BNSF leave this stretch in place? I don't know the actual answer. I'll have to ask my inside source next time I see them. I can come up with 2 guesses. One, they're using part of it for storage (hence the better management on part of it). The other, and this is totally a guess here, they wanted to leave a direct link to the ADM Mill open.
So, I wrote all that up without looking too close at the map. BNSF pulled the turnout off the main at Pierce City sometime around 2007-2008. In addition to that, there's a bridge a few hundred feet into the start of the Carthage Sub that was taken out at that time too. So that kills my theory on storing cars. I looked through BN and BNSF ETT's that I could find. BN listed it as the Wichita Sub in their final ETT in 1995. There's a gap from 95 to 02 in what I can find, the 02 ETT doesn't list anything for the Wichita Sub. It doesn't even mention the track being there as a location on the Cherokee Sub despite it still being connected.
