MRS 256 - South 2nd Street Tracks - St. Louis, MO - April 2004

MRS 256 - St. Louis, MO

Manufactuers Railway System (MRS) 256 shoves a cut of MRS boxcars off the MRS' 2nd Street trackage toward an industrial siding. The industry that was to receive the cut of box cars was a block over on off of 3rd Street.

The MRS

The MRS was a small switching operation that was owned by the Anheuser-Busch Brewery. When InBev bought Anheuser-Busch, the railroad was sold off. Now Foster Townsend Rail Logistics, Inc. operates the railroad. The railroad still switches the brewery complex and also does a lot of engine rebuilding. However, I believe that all of the 2nd Street trackage has been abandoned.

The 2nd Street trackage isn't used much these days due to most of the customer base going away. In this general area there were three customers who received weekly rail service. The largest customer at this location was a chemical plant which was closed and torn down. At one time the 2nd Street trackage ran for just over two miles from the MRS yard by the brewery down to the southern edge of the Gateway Arch grounds. Over the years the tracks have slowly been paved over, torn out, or just disused. Today only about a mile of track is still operational.

Image details

For this image, I configured a copy slide setup. I mounted a Canon Speedlite at the base of a box connected to the camera via an off shoe cable. Then I placed a piece of translucent plastic over the top of the box and copied the slide with a Sigma 50mm F2.8 EX macro lens. The digital image was captured as a RAW file and then edited in Adobe Photoshop. The quality of the results so far have been very good and very consistent, in my opinion.

Photo taken: April 2004. St. Louis, Missouri.