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The Depot Inn &
Suites early in the morning after we arrived at La Plata, Missouri.
WE WERE MET at La Plata
station by a courtesy minivan and whisked right to the
Depot Inn & Suites a quarter of a mile from the picturesque old
Santa Fe depot. The hotel is a foamer's heaven, with a décor so
rail-buffy
it's hard not to emit small-boy choo-choo noises while walking around
the lobby.
One big lobby TV displays real-time images from a video camera
mounted near the station. Below it another shows the dispatcher's
board for the Fort Madison Subdivision of the Chicago Division of the
Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway, with red markers indicating where
trains occupy the blocks of the subdivision.
I've stayed at the Depot Inn before, and you can read more detail about
it here
and see more photos here.
We overnighted gratis in the luxurious Pullman Suite, thanks to my
official connection with TrainWeb, part of the outfit that owns the
Depot Inn. Debby was unexpectedly delighted with its
amenities, which includes a deep jacuzzi, an aircraft-carrier-sized
mahogany bed, a flat-screen television on which you can watch cable TV
or the trackside webcam at the La Plata station, and a price tag
astonishingly well below
that of a mere
standard hotel room in the big city.
During my previous visit two years ago I hadn't strayed from the hotel
property except to park myself and my cameras at the Chris Guenzler
Million Mile Lookout, an enclosed cabin with a deck a few yards above
the BNSF Transcon line. It’s named for a railfan who a few years ago
logged his millionth mile riding trains.
This time Debby and I rented a car from Enterprise in Kirksville ten
miles north of La Plata (the agency brought the car to the hotel, which
has a discount arrangement with Enterprise) so we could see a bit
of “Silver Rails Country,” as the TrainWeb group calls the area.
Our first stop was at the Silver Rails Art Gallery in an old storefront
in downtown La Plata. It's a small gallery, but the exhibits, mostly
railroad-related photographs and poster art, are first-rate. I
was especially taken with the enormous bas-relief oaken carvings of
steam locomotives by Jackie Hadnot, a folk artist who deserves to be
nationally known.
The top carving by Jackie
Hadnot is about seven feet wide; the bottom one four feet wide.
Copies of many of the photographs are for sale, and I
bought four postcard-sized train shots by TrainWeb veteran Carl
Morrison.
Of course I had to pay another visit to the Lookout, and was
immediately rewarded by the noisy appearance of a long, long auto
carrier train pulled by four mighty Union Pacific locomotives. This is
the Burlington Northern Santa Fe, and I wondered what foreign power was
doing on it. Turns out that the UP and BNSF have a run-through
agreement on each other's rails.
A SD70MAC-H2 roars
past the Chris Guenzler Lookout. Union Pacific on BNSF rails? Yes.
I returned to the Lookout later in the day and found it a train
photographer's heaven. More than 60 freight trains plus two Amtrakers
thunder by each day, most of them hotshot “stack
trains”—made up of more than a hundred deep-well cars carrying
double-stacked steel containers. The
containers emblazoned “J.B. Hunt” for the famous trucking company carry
domestically manufactured goods, said Bob Cox, the Amtrak station
caretaker, while those with “Hanjin” and other Asian trademarks are
packed with freight from China and other points on the Pacific Rim.
On the BNSF these fast trains typically are headed by four
4,400-horsepower
locomotives and are often pushed from the rear by two older engines of
3,600
or so horses. All told, nearly 25,000 horsepower working a single train
makes a glorious noise.
Four 4,400-horsepower GE
ES44C4s on the point of a domestic stack train.
To our delight “Silver Rails Country” isn't just a mecca for railfans.
Bob’s wife Amy, who runs the Silver Rails Gallery, suggested that we
drive a few miles west of La Plata into Plain People country, full of
horses, buggies, Amish and Mennonites.
Buggies-share-the-road signs abound on the highway, and twice we
overtook enclosed horse-drawn conveyances.
Horse-drawn buggies on the
highway are a staple of Missouri's Amish countryside.
We were delighted by the Amish Country Variety Store four miles west
of town. It’s a kind of rural Woolworth's for Plain People that’s
jam-packed with gewgaws, gimcracks, pots and pans, dishes, baking
goods, candy and other survival
items. Its dirt parking lot is just big enough for a few pickups and a
couple of horse-drawn buggies. One must step carefully among the
horseapples.
There for $9.95 Debby bought a homemade spiral-bound cookbook, Amish
Cookin,' edited by Mrs. Henry L. Yoder with
contributions from "Mrs.
Jonas E. Borntrager, Mrs. Jacob N. Gingerich, Mrs. Jacob M.
Hochstetler"
and a score of other Mrs.
One wondered about their given names, and one wondered about the size
of the gatherings they hosted. Their recipe for bologna starts with “75
lbs. beef, 25 lbs. pork,” and there is one for “Meatloaf for 200.”
An open buggy with its motive
power at the Amish Country Variety Store.
The
Plain People are extraordinarily photogenic, but hate
being
photographed. What's a photographer to do? My solution was to capture
them surreptitiously, with long lenses, and to do so in a way that
individuals could not be identified, safeguarding their privacy. So I
got a few long shots of an
Amishman with his horse-drawn plow and some close-in photos of an Amish
horse with its muddy buggy—a reasonable compromise that, I think,
respects both sides of the lens.
An Amishman with his
four-horsepower plow turns over the soil a few miles west of La Plata.
Later in the afternoon, the job
done, the Amishman returned his team to its barn.
We stopped in La Plata to photograph the exteriors of a couple of
magnificent old Victorian houses, both on the National Register of
Historic Places. Neither the Gilbreath-McLorn House nor the Doneghy
House was open to the public—tours are by appointment only—but their
brilliant colors glowed in the lowering sun.
The picturesque Doneghy House
in La Plata, a Queen Anne design built in 1896.
There is more, much more, to be seen in these parts: Truman College in
Kirksville, a corn maze, the home of pulp fiction writer
Lester Dent, railway museums in nearby towns, farm museums, even
wineries. We didn't have time on our one-day jaunt—I wanted to tarry by
roadside crossings to catch oncoming trains with my camera—but on our
next visit October 16-21, when Carl Morrison and I co-teach a workshop
on rail travel writing and photography at the Depot Inn & Suites,
we'll see much more of what this rich countryside has to offer.
We dined on sturdy Midwestern chicken salads at the Red Rooster
Restaurant door to the Depot Inn, and shortly before train time the
hotel van took us to the station, where we chatted with Bob Cox about
trains and the train show he'll put on in October right after the
workshop. I took a few more shots of eastbound hotshot stack trains
before the westbound Southwest Chief rolled in at 7:45 p.m, just a few
minutes late, and we boarded it for the overnight trip to our next
stop, Winslow, Arizona.
La Plata station has been
restored to its original Santa Fe Railway livery.
Immediately we asked our sleeper attendant, Joan, to make up our
roomette for the night. We were pooped from the long day's activity under a
high Missouri sun, and fell asleep almost instantly.
As dusk approached, Amtrak 3
pulled into La Plata station on the outside track.
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