Removal of MKT Bridge at Boonville "removes a margin of safety" for the Katy Trail

Union Pacific railroad wants to move the MKT Bridge at Boonville, currently part of the Katy railroad corridor, to a different location and use it as part of an active railroad line.

The MKT Bridge is not currently used as part of the Katy Trail, but it is part of the underlying "railbanked" corridor that the Katy Trail is built on.

As the statewide bicycle advocacy organization in Missouri, the Missouri Bicycle Federation's position on the MKT Bridge issue is that the state of Missouri must do nothing that may endanger the Katy Trail as a whole.

This is the most important principle, important above all others, in the debate about the fate of the MKT Bridge.

The Missouri Bicycle Federation has obtained copies of the original "Interim Trail Agreement" that created the Katy Trail in 1987 and the Amendment to the Agreement signed in April 2005. These documents shed important light on the importance of the bridge to the entire Katy Trail.

A summary and verbatim copy of these original documents can be viewed here.

The important points:

• The Katy Trail is a rail line that is "railbanked". That means that the rail corridor is reserved for (possible) future use as a rail corridor. In the meanwhile, the corridor can be used as a trail--the so-called "interim use". The terms and conditions of railbanking are spelled out in federal law.
  
  
• Primary among the federal requirements for railbanking is that each segment of a railbanked line must be connected seamlessly to an active line within the national railway network. This is only sensible--the whole point of railbanking is to allow for possible future reactivation of the line as part of the national rail network.
  
  
• The Katy corridor, as a long corridor that intersects seldom with active rail lines, is by its very nature exposed to the risk of long stretches of the corridor becoming "separated"--disconnected from the nation's active rail network. Such segments lose their railbanked status.
  
  
• The central part of the Katy Corridor is connected to the active rail network in two places: St. Charles and Sedalia. Since the integrity of Katy rail corridor is complete between St. Charles and Sedalia, each point of the corridor between the two cities is connected to the active rail network twice--once at each end. This provides a double margin of safety against any eventuality that may create a severance in the line, or against the possibility of one of these two currently active lines becoming inactive.
  
  
• Removing the MKT Bridge from rail service--the action Missouri has now given Union Pacific permission to undertake--will sever the Katy rail corridor at that point. This will not immediately remove any part of the Katy corridor from railbanked status. What it does, however, is remove a margin of safety. The segment of the Katy between St. Charles and Sedalia, which previously had two connections to the active rail network, now has only one.
  
  
• Any further severance of the Katy rail corridor between St. Charles and Sedalia would create a section of the corridor that is completely severed and which would lose its railbanked status.

In short, having the MKT bridge in place provides the corridor with a margin of safety for retaining its railbanked status. This is the reason the state, in its original negotiations with the MKT railroad, required that the bridge be left in place and kept available for transportation purposes.

Removing the bridge severes the Katy rail corridor and removes a margin of safety for the future existence of the Katy Trail.

Previous MoBikeFed News coverage of the MKT Bridge at Boonville issue can be found here and here.