A CARLOAD OF LIVE POULTRY TO SPIRO, OK
By H. E. Huber

Just before the Spiro-Ft. Smith branch line was washed away in the flood of May 1943 on the Arkansas and Poteau Rivers, I was privileged to ride with the crew in a side door caboose made from a forty-foot boxcar on an extra trip to Spiro and return to take a carload of live poultry to the main line.

A poultry car is similar to a cattle car. Where the doors were located there is a bare essential type accommodation for an attendant to travel with the car in order to feed and water the poultry enroute. Also in this space, feed and water were stored. Feeding and watering were done with an aisle running parallel with the car down the center to each end.

It was late in the afternoon when Conductor Roberts got the word that an extra trip was ordered, just about quitting time. This brought groans of dismay from the crewmembers since they had already made one trip to Spiro, had gotten all the Ft. Smith switching done and were ready to go home. I was invited to go along with them since it would be over and back or so everybody thought. To a teenage boy a ride in the caboose was just short of going to heaven.

The crew consisted of Conductor Roberts, Engineer H. S. (Jack) Foster, Rear Brakeman Bill Brown and Head Brakeman Tommy Moore. The name of the fireman escapes me. Fireman on the Ft. Smith branch line came and went with a great deal of regularity but the crew mentioned above were all these during the 1940's until death and/or retirement.

They gathered up all the cars that were ready to go to the mainline, pulled down to the Frisco connection, which is near SF Junction and waited on the Frisco switch engine bringing the car from their yards. SF Junction is located on the south end of the KCS yards in Ft. Smith where the KCS, Missouri Pacific and the Frisco all cross each other. You might add the Midland Valley to this list since they had trackage rights over the Frisco from Rock Island, OK into Ft. Smith. And, just a few years back, the Ft. Smith and Western. The FS&W had trackage rights over the KCS to Coal Creek, OK via Spiro. During the wartime years, SF Junction was quite a train watching spot.

Soon the Frisco switch engine arrived and KCS engine 85 got the car off the connection, coupled up with the rest of the train, whistled off and headed west, crossing the Poteau River bridge, the long trestle just west of the river and soon turned southwest through the Peno-Braden bottoms.

Just before getting into Braden, the line made a curve around a bend in the Arkansas River. This bend had been eating away at the riverbank for several months and had just about reached the KCS' roadbed in the early spring of 1943. This was a major concern of the branch line crew for the past several months. At this time the river was within 25-30 feet of the railroad. You could look down from the caboose window and see the river swirling around the caving bank, which was approximately 20 feet below. Needless to say, our speed was just barely above a crawl; they did not want the vibrations from the engine and the rumblings of the train to start the bank to cave in while passing. I could see why the crew was very apprehensive the past months about what the river was doing to the roadbed. I can recall they had quite a few choice words about the management of the KCS allowing them to continue operations when it was getting so dangerous to do so. In just a few short months, the major flood on the Arkansas River in May of 1943 would solve all these problems permanently for the KCS.

Coming our of Braden, the line starts to climb out of the Braden bottoms which could be quite a chore for engine 85 even with a good fireman, good coal and a short train. That day, they had just over 20 cars in the train's consist. Just about where the old US Highway 271 crossed the KCS on an S-curve overpass, 85 died for the lack of steam. We sat there at least 20 minutes, getting up enough steam to continue on into Spiro. Arriving in Spiro, the crew set their train off in the yards on the main line to be picked up later by either north or south bound trains, as the case may be.

Conductor Roberts had all the information on the waybill as to where the poultry's point of origin was, who shipped it, where it was going and to whom, but I wasn't interested in all that. I was too thrilled to ride to Spiro and back in a KCS caboose, albeit the side door type sans cupola and bay window.

The branch line is gone, engine 85 has been scrapped long ago, all crewmembers are deceased, and cabooses are things of the past. Everything is gone except the memory of a ride in the caboose behind engine 85 taking a carload of live poultry to the KCS main line at Spiro, OK in the spring of 1943.

FC: KCS.102
Published by the KCSHS 1989
Volume 8-Nos 3&4