Minneapolis and St Louis Railway: "The Peoria Gateway"

Last revised: October 27, 2026

The Minneapolis & St. Louis may have been the smallest of the classic grangers, and The Peoria Gateway was the railroad that looked most like the Midwest it served. Grain, livestock, coal, and the local freight of four states carried it. In 1952 the property was 1,409 miles. At its greatest extent it had been about 1,600. The traffic was agricultural, the on-line cities were modest, and the customer base in the postwar years was stagnant. The company still earned a profit straight through to the day the Chicago & North Western bought it.

Don L. Hofsommer tells that story in The Tootin’ Louie: A History of the Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway. The nickname stuck to the railroad the way the flour dust stuck to Minneapolis. The corporate ambition, a line of its own from the mills to St. Louis, did not. What the company did build reached Peoria, Des Moines, Albert Lea, Fort Dodge, and Watertown, South Dakota. Chicago, Omaha, Kansas City, and St. Louis stayed on other railroads’ maps. The officers were wary of poking the larger carriers, and the larger carriers were already in the Twin Cities.

There were two long receiverships, a plan in the 1930s to carve the railroad up among its neighbors, and then Lucian C. Sprague, who brought it out of bankruptcy and gave it the Peoria Gateway name in earnest. Ben W. Heineman took the company away from Sprague in 1954, left for the North Western in 1956, and came back for the property in 1960. The North Western spent the years after that taking up most of what it had bought. A few scattered pieces are still in service. Steam locomotives built since 1900 are a separate roster. The quantity column there is 170. The diesel roster counts 97 locomotives, each frame once.

Minneapolis and St. Louis F7As led by 408 with a short train at Albia, Iowa, on May 26, 1961

A pair of Minneapolis & St. Louis F7As, led by 408, have a short train at Albia, Iowa, on May 26, 1961. Photographer unknown. American-Rails.com collection.

On this page: At a glance · The falls and the charter · Iowa and the Gateway · Dakota · Passenger trains · Receivership and Sprague · Heineman and the sale

At a glance

Item	Detail
Headquarters	Minneapolis, Minnesota, 111 East Franklin Avenue
Reporting mark	MSTL
Slogan	The Peoria Gateway. The railroad was the Tootin’ Louie
Charter	May 26, 1870. Minneapolis & St. Louis Railroad
Operation	August 7, 1871–October 31, 1960. The North Western took the property November 1, 1960
States	Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota, Illinois
Mileage	1,409 in 1952. About 1,600 at the greatest extent
Main lines	Minneapolis–Albert Lea–Oskaloosa–Albia. Minneapolis–Watertown, with the Dakota branches beyond. Des Moines–Oskaloosa–Peoria. Albert Lea–Fort Dodge–Des Moines
Gauge	4 feet, 8½ inches
Steam	Quantity column 170, built since 1900. Roster
Diesels	97 frames, each once. Roster
Successor	Chicago & North Western

The falls and the charter

The Minneapolis & St. Louis owes its start to the Falls of St. Anthony as much as to the two cities. The post above the falls, Fort Snelling, was begun in 1819 and was in service through the 1820s. A sawmill Franklin Steele opened in September 1848 cut the pine that came down to the river, and flour milling, already underway in the fort years, overtook the lumber. St. Anthony was incorporated on the east bank in 1849. Minneapolis took shape on the west bank and was organized in 1867. The two joined in 1872. Somebody had to haul the wheat in and the flour out, and the railroads then building toward Chicago were still a long way east of the falls.

The Falls of St. Anthony, a painting by Albert Bierstadt from the 1880s

The Falls of St. Anthony, in a painting by Albert Bierstadt from the 1880s.

The first train in Minnesota was the St. Paul & Pacific, later a piece of James J. Hill’s Great Northern, which linked St. Paul and St. Anthony on June 28, 1862. It gave the falls a connection with St. Paul and no eastern outlet of their own. An earlier local scheme, the Minnesota Western Rail Road of 1853, had been chartered to build “from some convenient point to be selected on the Lake St. Croix, or St. Croix River” over to St. Paul and St. Anthony. It stalled for lack of money. Hofsommer’s account of those years is the one to read. The millers were not interested in waiting on Chicago.

On May 26, 1870 the Minnesota legislature authorized the Minneapolis & St. Louis Railroad, again to serve the flour and sawmills. Henry Welles, William D. Washburn, John S. Pillsbury, R. J. Baldwin, R. P. Russell, W. W. McNair, Isaac Atwater, and Levi Butler put money into it. Pillsbury, with his brother and father, had a hand in the milling firm that became C. A. Pillsbury & Company. By then the neighbors were closing in. The Lake Superior & Mississippi opened between St. Paul and Duluth, about 156 miles, in 1870. The Milwaukee Road’s predecessors had a through line from the Twin Cities to Milwaukee and, in 1873, to Chicago. The new company’s answer was a short railroad of its own to an interchange, and then a longer one aimed south.

The Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway logo. Author’s work.

The Minneapolis & Duluth Railroad was incorporated on May 16, 1871 to build from Minneapolis to White Bear Lake, using the St. Paul & Pacific bridge, and to reach the Lake Superior & Mississippi. Regular service began on August 7, 1871. That is the date the company counts as the start of operation. The same season a line ran south to a connection with the St. Paul & Sioux City, later part of the Omaha Road, and opened in November 1871 about a mile south of Carver. The Panic of 1873, set off by the failure of Jay Cooke’s banking house, stopped the work. It also ended a brief period in which the Northern Pacific held the property while it was still trying to build its own road to Puget Sound.

Construction south from Merriam resumed in the spring of 1877. Rails reached Albert Lea on November 12, 1877, and a connection opened there with the Burlington, Cedar Rapids & Northern, a Rock Island predecessor. The point of the extension was grain for the Minneapolis mills, and anything else a shipper would load: wheat, oats, nails, butter, and a steady trickle of less-than-carload freight. Pushing farther meant arguing with the North Western, the Burlington, the Milwaukee Road, and the Rock Island. There was talk, over the years, of Lake Superior, of St. Louis, of Chicago, and once even of a line toward the Pacific in the Milwaukee’s manner. None of it was built. The caution kept the peace. It also left the railroad without a second large terminal of its own.

Iowa and the Gateway

Iowa came by way of a small road, the Fort Dodge & Fort Ridgely, acquired in 1879 and building north out of Fort Dodge. The Minneapolis & St. Louis met it, through a subsidiary called the Minnesota & Iowa Southern, at Livermore in the summer of 1880. South of Fort Dodge the traffic was coal. Mines in Webster County fed the railroad for a time, and the line reached Coaltown, later Angus, in December 1881. The same year the company started what it called a Pacific Extension, west from Hopkins. It opened to Morton in November 1882. A lease of the Rock Island’s Wisconsin, Minnesota & Pacific carried the map on to Watertown, South Dakota, and for a while the railroad could claim nearly 400 miles. The Morton–Watertown piece was purchased from the Rock Island on February 20, 1899. The other piece of the Wisconsin, Minnesota & Pacific, Red Wing to Mankato, had been operated as the Cannon Valley Division and was sold. It became part of the Chicago Great Western on June 1, 1899.

The company went into receivership on June 28, 1888, with W. H. Truesdale as receiver. The property was sold at Minneapolis on October 11, 1894, and reorganized on November 1, 1894 as the Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway. Edwin Hawley then took the new company back into Iowa. A 158-mile line from Winthrop, Minnesota, to Storm Lake was opened on August 19, 1900, for the grain. Hawley had become president of the Iowa Central Railway on June 20, 1900. The steam chapter dates the lease of that railroad to 1903. Hofsommer’s history of the Iowa Central, The Hook and Eye, carries the sale itself: the stockholders voted on December 18, 1911, and at 12:01 a.m. on January 1, 1912 the Iowa Central ceased to exist as a corporation. Its line ran from Albert Lea through Hampton, Marshalltown, and Oskaloosa to Albia, and east from Oskaloosa across the Mississippi at Keithsburg to Peoria. The branches were Hampton–Belmond, Minerva Junction–Story City, Grinnell–Montezuma, and New Sharon–Newton. Hofsommer puts the Iowa Central territory at 510 miles. Peoria was the gateway the slogan later advertised, a way around Chicago for freight the eastern roads and the western roads would hand to a bridge line in the middle.

Minneapolis and St. Louis RS-1 209 at the shops in Peoria, Illinois, on June 4, 1956

Minneapolis & St. Louis RS-1 209 at the shops in Peoria, Illinois, on June 4, 1956. Author’s collection.

The Des Moines & Fort Dodge was purchased in 1915. It reached Des Moines, ran north to Fort Dodge, and then northwest to Ruthven. A gap of about 14 miles remained between that line and the Storm Lake route at Spencer. Trackage rights over the Milwaukee Road closed it for through trains. With the Iowa Central and the Des Moines road in the family, the Tootin’ Louie was, for practical purposes, finished east and south.

An official Minneapolis and St. Louis system map from about 1940

An official system map of the Minneapolis & St. Louis, about 1940. Author’s collection.

Dakota

West of Watertown the extension was the Minnesota, Dakota & Pacific, incorporated on December 18, 1905, with construction the next year. One line ran to the Missouri River at LeBeau, 171 miles. A branch left Conde and ran northwest to Leola by way of Aberdeen, 57 miles. The new mileage was 228. Rails reached Leola on December 21, 1906. The LeBeau line opened the following year. The Minneapolis & St. Louis bought the Minnesota, Dakota & Pacific in 1912, the same season it took title to the Iowa Central. LeBeau was a livestock town on the river. It did not stay one. The railroad abandoned Akaska–LeBeau in 1924, and the Missouri River end of the Pacific Division was gone.

In the good years before the First World War the freight was mixed: time freight, merchandise, lumber, coal, and, above all of it, grain and flour. Net income in a fair year ran above a million dollars. The exceptions were the seasons just after the war and the years after 1929. Livestock was part of that prosperity and then it vanished. Hofsommer records 291,713 tons of livestock in 1922, and 1,117 carloads in 1959.

Passenger trains

A railroad that served so few large cities was never going to be a passenger railroad in the eastern sense. The high year was early. In 1888 about 40 percent of the revenue came from tickets. Through the 1920s passengers still accounted for nearly a quarter of the annual earnings. The train people remember is the North Star Limited, Minneapolis to Albia, and from Albia on the Wabash to St. Louis with through sleepers, chair cars, and a diner. It was the closest the company came to the city in its name. The depression ended it on May 30, 1935.

The replacement on the branches was the gas-electric car, the doodlebug. Eleven of them, numbered GE-1 through GE-4 and GE-25 through GE-31, arrived from December 1929 into July 1931. GE-1 was named Peoria. They were cheap to run, and the patronage no longer supported a steam train. In the late 1950s the company tried Budd Rail Diesel Cars between Minneapolis and Des Moines and found little use for them. Passenger service ended on July 20 and 21, 1960, when trains 13 and 14 made the last runs, the Minneapolis–Watertown train. The public timetable for August 1952 is a separate page.

Hofsommer’s passenger counts show how fast the business left. In 1915 the railroad carried 2,574,797 passengers. In 1932 it carried 150,017.

Receivership and Sprague

Federal control began at noon on December 28, 1917. The United States Railroad Administration ran the Minneapolis & St. Louis, as it ran the rest of the industry, through the war. The Transportation Act was signed on February 28, 1920, and federal control ended at 12:01 a.m. on March 1. The property came back worn out. Operating ratios that had sat in the 60s climbed into the 90s. The track had already been light, and the company had never had the money to make it anything else. Record livestock in 1922 did not pay the bills. On July 26, 1923 the railroad went into receivership again.

The crash of October 24, 1929 found the company already in court. The freight figures Hofsommer gives are the measure of what happened next. Tonnage peaked at 7.3 million in 1923, was still just under 7 million in 1929, and fell to 3.6 million as the depression took hold. A railroad that size, with a thin density and a worn plant, looked to its neighbors like a candidate for dismantling. By 1935 a plan was on the table under which the Burlington, the Great Northern, the North Western, the Rock Island, the Milwaukee Road, and the Chicago Great Western would each buy a piece. The Interstate Commerce Commission refused the dismemberment in June 1938. That decision saved the corporation. It did not save every mile.

Lucian C. Sprague arrived on January 1, 1935. He had a reputation as a doctor for sick railroads, and the Minneapolis & St. Louis was sick. He cut where the Commission would let him. The list from those years is specific:

St. Benedict–Algona, 8 miles. The last train ran on April 3, 1936. The line was cut farther, Corwith to St. Benedict, in April 1948.
Spencer–Storm Lake, 36.9 miles. The last train ran on April 25, 1936.
The original main line south of Fort Dodge, a little over 36 miles, largely gone by 1938.
Grinnell–Montezuma, 13.6 miles. The last train ran on August 1, 1936.
Fosterdale–Tracy, 5.25 miles, in 1949. Laurel–Newburg, 9.5 miles, stopped in 1950. Denhart–Corwith, 4.3 miles, and Roland–Story City, 5.2 miles, in 1952.

The 1930s cuts came to about 94 miles, and more followed. Abandonment had started earlier. After Akaska–LeBeau in 1924, the Commission in 1925 allowed the removal of about 10 miles in Iowa between State Center and Van Cleve. The last train on that piece ran on August 22, 1925, and in 1939 another 6.8 miles came up, back to Laurel. On the Pacific Division the company wanted everything west of Watertown and settled for less. The last train on Conde–Akaska, 103 miles, ran on November 18, 1940. The attempt to abandon Aberdeen–Leola failed.

The war, and Sprague’s hand on the throttle of the company, finished the receivership. After more than twenty years in court the railroad was reorganized on December 1, 1943. From that date through the end of the war in 1945 the net income came to $5.4 million, labor costs and all. The last decade as an independent railroad was, for this company, a prosperous one.

Diesels were part of how Sprague made the numbers work. Switchers had been coming since 1938. The road freight engines were a consequence of a request the War Production Board did not grant. Early in the 1940s the company sought five 2-6-6-4s. The Board assigned Electro-Motive FTs instead, four cabs and two boosters, in April 1945. Alco RS-1s, thirty-five of them between 1944 and 1951, took the local freights. F3As and F7As followed. Two SD7s, 852 and 952, later 300 and 301, were the only six-axle diesels the railroad ever owned. Steam was finished in 1951. The public goodbye had come earlier: Pacific 502, skirted and striped, appeared at the Chicago Railroad Fair in September 1949 and left the roster that year. The last new locomotives were GP9s. Nine, numbered 600–608, came in 1956 and 1957. Fourteen more, 700–713, came in September and October 1958.

Minneapolis and St. Louis GP9s 709 and 702 laying over in Minneapolis in October 1958

A pair of recently delivered Minneapolis & St. Louis GP9s, 709 and 702, lay over in Minneapolis during October 1958. American-Rails.com collection.

Minneapolis and St. Louis SD7 300, built as 852, at Peoria, Illinois, in the 1950s

Minneapolis & St. Louis SD7 300, built as 852, at Peoria, Illinois, in the 1950s. American-Rails.com collection.

Minneapolis and St. Louis RS-1 446 and SD7 952 on February 2, 1955

Minneapolis & St. Louis RS-1 446 and SD7 952 on February 2, 1955. The location was not recorded. American-Rails.com collection.

Minneapolis and St. Louis RS-1s laying over in Minneapolis in the 1950s

Minneapolis & St. Louis RS-1s lay over in Minneapolis during the 1950s. American-Rails.com collection.

Heineman and the sale

Sprague ran a tight railroad and treated the people who worked it as if the property were still theirs. He did not see Ben W. Heineman coming. Late in 1953 a group around the Chicago attorney began a fight for control, and the argument ran through the newspapers into the spring of 1954. Heineman’s case was that the management was standing still. At a meeting on May 11, 1954 he received 311,479 of the 589,229 shares and was declared the winner. Sprague, who had been chairman since the company left bankruptcy in 1943, was out.

Heineman was not a railroader in Sprague’s sense. For the short time he had the Minneapolis & St. Louis he kept the profit above a million dollars a year, brought in IBM machines for the accounting, and looked for a way to make Peoria matter. The piece he wanted was the Toledo, Peoria & Western, 242 miles, which the Minneapolis & St. Louis already touched at Peoria. John W. Barriger III had sketched a larger version of the same idea, with the Monon and the Chicago & Eastern Illinois in it. Heineman’s version, as Hofsommer describes it, was a giant Elgin, Joliet & Eastern, a belt clear of Chicago on which the eastern roads and the western roads could exchange freight. The Santa Fe, the Pennsylvania, and the Toledo, Peoria & Western’s own owners fought the purchase. The idea died.

Heineman left for the Chicago & North Western in 1956. On April 1 of that year he became chairman and chief executive there, after a fight that ended faster than the one in Minneapolis. He tried the same approach in the long contest for the Rock Island and did not win it. He did not have to fight for the Minneapolis & St. Louis a second time. The Peoria Gateway was still making money. Over the last five years, 1954 through 1959, average annual net income after taxes was more than $1.7 million. The North Western, in the same seasons, was losing nearly $886,000 a year.

The Minneapolis & St. Louis disappeared as an operating railroad after October 31, 1960. The Chicago & North Western took the property on November 1. People who had worked the Louie noticed the difference at once. One of them said, “They run a railroad a lot different than we did, believe me.” The financial help the smaller company gave its buyer did not protect the branches. Abandonment ran on through the 1990s. What is left is scattered.

Former Minneapolis and St. Louis F7s 411 and 407 at Cedar Lake Shops in Minneapolis on April 25, 1961

A pair of former Minneapolis & St. Louis F7s, 411 and 407, lay over at Cedar Lake Shops in Minneapolis on April 25, 1961. Robert Johnson photo.

Minneapolis and St. Louis RS-1 215 in service at Minneapolis about 1963

An aging Minneapolis & St. Louis RS-1, 215, still in service at Minneapolis, about 1963. American-Rails.com collection.

The two SD7s outlived the railroad and eventually worked for the Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern as 6620 and 6621. Consolidation 471, a 1910 Baldwin, is displayed at Janesville, Minnesota. The rest of the steam was scrapped, and most of the map went with it. Hofsommer’s title is still the right one. The Tootin’ Louie was a railroad people in the towns along it could hear coming, and then, after 1960, a railroad they could not.

Sources

Hofsommer, Don L. The Tootin’ Louie: A History of the Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Hofsommer, Don L. The Hook and Eye: A History of the Iowa Central Railway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. The sale of December 18, 1911, and the corporate end at 12:01 a.m. on January 1, 1912.
Hofsommer, Don L. The Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway: A Photographic History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Drury, George H. Guide to North American Steam Locomotives. Revised edition. The Minneapolis & St. Louis chapter.
The New York Times, May 3, 1954. The May 11 meeting, and the discharge from bankruptcy in 1943.
History of Polk County, Iowa. Truesdale’s appointment on June 28, 1888, the sale of October 11, 1894, and the reorganization of November 1, 1894.

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