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Morning Open Thread Saturday Jan. 25, featuring the Chadwick Flyer train [1]
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Date: 2025-01-25
Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.
Hello MOTs. This is a bit of local rural SW MO history related to a train called The Chadwick Flyer, which was active 1883 until 1934.
The Chadwick Flyer was the nickname wryly given to a railroad train that traveled 33 miles from Springfield, Missouri to a small town named Chadwick, located in an area of oak woods SSE of Springfield. The section from Springfield to Chadwick was completed in1883. In 1885, the railroad was added to the St. Louis and San Francisco Railroad (Frisco) system, and was known as The Chadwick Flyer.
For more than half a century, the train ran from Springfield to Chadwick each morning and then made the return trip that afternoon. The train was known as The Chadwick Flyer because it took all day to make the 33-mile trip to Chadwick and then back to Springfield. Of course, in all fairness, that train made stops at a number of stations along the way, both coming and going, and unloaded and loaded passengers and freight. The mixed train left at 9:00 every morning and came back at 4:00 in the evening with about all the weight the locomotive could handle.
The train hauled lumber and railroad ties from local sawmills at Chadwick to Springfield, for use in the westward expansion of railroads. Chadwick was a logging boomtown with boarding houses, stores, saloons, and gambling houses.
Men working at the various sawmills had pockets full of money and that created an Ozark's style "Wild West kind of Town". The Hobart-Lee Tie and Timber Company, in 1890, was one of the largest business firms in southwest Missouri.
With the removal of much of the local timber, the line was abandoned by the Frisco Railroad in 1934. Prior to the closing of the line, business was so poor that on occasion the engineer would stop the train so that the train crew could pick blackberries and shoot quail.
Aside 1: Portions of the abandoned route is being converted into walking and bicycling trails within the Greenways Trail system of the Springfield area. Much of the more remote RR tracts appear to have been ceded to adjacent landowners, the tracks and ties are all gone.
Aside 2: Chadwick is still a town, unincorporated. It has a few retail stores and schools, no railroad anymore. There are a few small-scale sawmills near there, and their main product is still railroad ties (from red oak, mostly). There is a multi-block staging area for stacks of railroad ties, near the BNSF tracks in Springfield.
link: Railroad ties Springfield
Aside 3: much of the info above came from several links, but the links are filled with embedded references to local areas, so would not make much sense if you are not familiar with the area, so I did not include all of them. Here’s a brief one: Chadwick Flyer
After that intro, here’s some ‘train’ songs:
Take The A Train
Last Train To Clarksville
Long Train Running (this is a well-performed cover of the Doobie Brothers song)
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