The UP-MP merger is not quite a done-deal, but an MP GEBB is at the head of UP's McPherson turn as it heads south and out of town.

The Abilene & Smoky Valley Alco S1 leads the afternoon excursion train back towards Abilene on the weedy rails.

Five geeps and a GEBB sit on the engine ready tracks in Coffeyville. That's the railroad YMCA in the background.

Salina was on a looping branch off MP's Pueblo main, and normal service in the early 1980s was a local with a geep or two and a handful of cars. When grain was moving, MP would send as-needed ext... (more)

GP15-1 on a local out of Coffeyville has a split personality.

BN power pulling coal empties waits as one of MP's coal service SD40-2s leads four more SD40-2s and a loaded coal train. I spent a lot of time in southeast Kansas in the 1980s, and saw lots of PR... (more)

When UP and MP merged, a decision was made to pull most through traffic off the former MP line to Pueblo. That reduction was offset by Rio Grande (and later SP) trains running on rights between P... (more)

School kids line up to tour GP15-1 1563, which is powering the HERBIE safety special.

MP 2300 is less than a year old, but still draws less than glamorous assignments, like working the Salina branch. The crew will perhaps make a run down to the Pueblo main at Gypsum, and that will... (more)

On the former MP Pueblo line, an eastbound is in the hole to meet an opposing empty coal train. It's a beautiful spring day, so everybody seems to be on the ground to give the coal train a good l... (more)

At merger time, it was hard to believe MP would disappear. All these years later, it is sometimes hard to remember what it was like to have so many Class Ones.

An MKT/OKKT crew works former Rock Island trackage in Salina with a pair of geeps.

Just south of Fort Scott there is a zero population/railroad-only place called Edward, where the ex-Frisco mainline splits, with one track heading to SL-SF hub Springfield, MO, the other to Afton,... (more)

A UP grain train passes through 18th street yard.

When the SD50s and C36-7s were new, it seemed that MP/UP made an effort to run the two new types together, but - for a while, at least - to not mix them with older C-Cs. Here, a trio of new SD50s... (more)