Wabash Cannon Ball (train)


The Wabash Cannon Ball was a train line on the Wabash Railroad which ran from 1950 to 1971. The train was named after the song "Wabash Cannonball". It was the second train to bear the name "Cannon Ball", the first was the fast express Cannon Ball which ran in the late 1800s to early 20th century.

History

First ''Cannon Ball'' trains

There had been several Wabash Cannon Ball trains traveling throughout the middle and western United States as early as the 1880s. The first Cannon Ball express train, and it traveled from Chicago, Illinois, southwest to El Paso, Texas. This express train traveled throughout the western part of Midwest and the eastern part of the Southwestern United States. In addition to traveling on the Wabash Railroad, it also traveled on the "Great Rock Island Route" in the late 1800s and into the early 1900s.

Song and reinstituting of a new train and new route

J. A. Roff wrote a song, The Great Rock Island Route, in the 1880s. In the 1930s, after a rewrite as Wabash Cannonball, country and western singer Roy Acuff gained great popularity with the song. Subsequently, the Wabash Railroad in 1950 resurrected the train in an entirely different route that capitalized on the railroad territory between to two major Midwestern cities, St. Louis, Missouri and Detroit, Michigan.
The new route was one of the Wabash company's prestige trains. The Wabash Cannonball, number 4 eastbound, and number 1 westbound, had a parlor car, a dining-lounge car, chair cars and reclining seat coaches. In St. Louis it made connections with the Wabash's City of Kansas City, bound for Kansas City, and the Wabash's City of St. Louis for Denver and points further west. A nighttime counterpart, the Detroit Limited, made the trip eastbound, and another night train counterpart, the St. Louis Limited, went westbound on the same route.
The train was under the administration of the Norfolk and Western Railway from 1964, as the Wabash company merged with the N&W that year. The train did not survive the conversion of private passenger lines to administration of the trains by Amtrak in May, 1971.

Major stops of the ''Wabash Cannon Ball''