by John Emley/photos by the author
Welcome to my world! It is a world I knew many years ago, back in my college days in Indiana. After graduation, I moved to Michigan but still managed to visit a number of times since, and each time it has changed — sometimes a lot and sometimes a little. Most of the rails are still there, though some have been taken up, while others have even been laid anew. But when I return to my basement, the world that I knew back then is still there, just in a smaller form. Welcome to the Soo Line Latta Subdivision.
Yes, Soo Line did serve southern Indiana, even though it is best known as a “Granger Road” stretching from Chicago to North Dakota. The origin of the route into Indiana was the Evansville & Richmond Railroad, which never generated much money nor reached either of its namesake cities. John Walsh took control of it after foreclosure in 1897, named it the Southern Indiana Railway, and proceeded to extend the line first to Terre Haute and then Chicago. It grew into a busy coal and limestone hauling line. After Walsh was imprisoned on federal banking charges, the line was sold and renamed Chicago, Terre Haute, & Southeastern Railway. In the 1920s, The Milwaukee Road bought it to serve as a source of coal for its locomotives. In the 1970s, trackage rights were granted from Bedford to Louisville on the former Monon as a condition of Louisville & Nashville’s purchase of the road. This resulted in two trains each way of overhead traffic from the Southern Railway and other rail lines in Louisville.
ABOVE: The Milwaukee used an old baggage car for storage on the south end of the engine house. An SD60M and SD60 are on the ready track while a GP38-2 sits outside the engine house.
Soo Line purchased the bankrupt Milwaukee Road in 1986, and by the 1990s the traffic to and from Norfolk Southern in Louisville was still about a train each way daily, in addition to local traffic and unit coal trains. The line north of Terre Haute to Chicago had been abandoned in favor of trackage rights. This made the Latta Sub an isolated section, extending from Terre Haute 92 miles southeast to Bedford, with CSX trackage rights on each end. It certainly wasn’t a speedway, but it was busy in its own right with most of the main line laid with welded rail.
Terre Haute had a number of industries, including Public Service of Indiana’s Wabash Generating Station, a couple of large plants using plastic resin, a tie treatment plant, grain elevator, and others. Farther south on the line there were a number of coal loadouts, including one just north of Jasonville and several near Odon, Ind. Two spurs to Minnehaha Mine and Hawthorn Mine generated significant traffic, yet were the domain of four-axle locomotives due to track conditions. Also near Odon is Crane Naval Weapons center, which has a fair amount of traffic, even unit trains of munitions.
ABOVE: The “XL,” the name of a job that ran from Latta Yard to Terre Haute and back, heads north through the soybean fields around Lewis, hauling coal to the Public Service of Indiana generating station in Terre Haute. The scene takes place on the author’s HO scale Soo Line Latta Subdivision.
The Bedford limestone traffic was gone by the 1990s, but it still had the GM foundry and a scrap metal facility. Linton was the interchange with the Indiana Rail Road, while the Indiana Southern Railroad interchanged at Bee Hunter and Elnora. These interchanges were busy, often including entire unit coal trains. There were only three passing sidings, including one near Crane, one in Latta Yard, and one just south of Terre Haute (which was split by a few roads so it wasn’t used often). Dispatching could get interesting!
In 2006, the line was sold to Indiana Rail Road and, while still busy with coal and local traffic, the little through traffic that was left disappeared after CSX ceased their own operations from Bedford to Louisville and the section from Crane to Bedford was abandoned.
This railroad in the 1990s was what I knew when I attended college in Terre Haute. I liked its secondary status, yet it had some good-sized main line action and a number of local operations. It was enough action in a small area, but not so much as to break the bank to build a basement empire. Thus was born the concept for modeling the Soo’s Latta Subdivision.
ABOVE: The mine run from the Minnehaha mine returns to Latta Yard, slowly rounding the wye before heading on to Linton with more IP&L coal loads. The Soo loaded coal at a number of points, including Latta Yard. The front-end loader would load cars with coal from small local mines that trucked their coal to Latta.
The Layout
I started building models planning for a future Latta Sub layout in the late 1990s. However, I was living in an apartment at the time, so by necessity I built my layout in sections so that it could move with me. I have moved four times since then and have always kept my layout construction sectional. This way I always had something to start with in my new abode. The whole layout may not have fit my new space, but part of it always did.
Not a single section of the original is in the current layout, and that is okay since my modeling standards have improved since I started. Even though we are currently living in a house that we don’t want to leave, I keep modeling in sections. This way, if something does come up, I won’t have to think about destroying my layout to make a move…
