Photo by Joe Blackwell (September 1995)
This is a great snapshot of the type action seen at Roodhouse, and a lot can be taken from this photo.
We see GP38 2032 working the north yard at Roodhouse while the three times a week KCSL manifest is working the yard as well. I would guess the switcher is working a block of cars for Curran based on the open hoppers which I would assume are destined to the pit at Curran. I might need some direction from yall, but I think the tank car might be liquid fertilizer for Curran as well. For the small size of Roodhouse, the Gateway really managed to squeeze quite a bit of operation into the space.
Another item to note is the lone TOFC car at the head end of the KCSL. I do not know the exact date, but around the end of 1994 – beginning of 1995, the Gateway Western re-opened its intermodal ramp at the old 12th Street Yard in the West Bottoms of Kansas City. The state of the art facility featured a gravel ramp with a flat car minus one truck that was buried into the ground forming a ramp up. If memory serves me right, they also had a Mi-Jack crane on the property as well. This was an early attempt to prepare for the forthcoming BNSF merger. The Gateway Western sought to build its own intermodal base up in conjunction mainly with Conrail as a form of protection against the potentially lost traffic a BN-ATSF merger would cause.
Gateway Western 