Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad

Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad

Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad, 1860
Locale	Missouri
Dates of operation	1846–1883
Successor	Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad
Track gauge	4 ft 8 1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge

The Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad was the first railroad to cross Missouri starting in Hannibal in the northeast and going to St. Joseph, Missouri, in the northwest. It is said to have carried the first letter to the Pony Express on April 3, 1860, from a train pulled behind the locomotive Missouri.

The line connected the second and third largest cities in the state of Missouri prior to the American Civil War. The stage route that it paralleled previously been called the "Hound Dog Trail".

Construction on the railroad (formed during an 1846 meeting at the Hannibal office of John Marshall Clemens, father of Mark Twain) began in 1851 from both cities. Bonds from counties along the route along with the donation of 600,000 acres (2,400 km²) in land voted by Congress paid for construction. The lines met in Chillicothe, Missouri, on February 13, 1859. A marker the railroad placed at the site was discovered in 2009 at the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railroad Museum in Galesburg, Illinois.

The line started westward from Hannibal and ran through the Missouri cities of Palmyra, Monroe City, Shelbina, Clarence, Anabel, Macon, Bevier, Callao, New Cambria, Bucklin, Brookfield, Laclede, Meadville, Wheeling, Chillicothe, Mooresville, Breckenridge, Nettleton, Hamilton, Kidder, Cameron, Osborn, Stewartsville, Hemple, Easton, before arriving in St. Joseph.

John Rogers, well before he became a popular 19th-century American sculptor, worked in 1856 and 1857 as a mechanic on the railroad.Abraham Lincoln rode the route in 1859 en route to a speech in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

The first assignment of Col. Ulysses S. Grant during the American Civil War was protecting the railroad and Pony Express mail. Grant was promoted to brigadier general in August 1861 after the assignment. Shortly after Grant left his assignment, the railroad experienced its worst disaster of the war on September 3, 1861, when bushwhackers burned a bridge over the Platte River, causing a derailment that killed between 17 and 20 and injured 100 in the Platte Bridge Railroad Tragedy.