The St. Louis-San Francisco Arthur Subdivision (Paris, Texas)

Yes Virginia, there IS a Paris, Texas- it's not just a title for a movie. This community of 25,000 souls is located in northeastern Texas, about 100 miles or so from Dallas. It is the home of a large Campbell Soup plant (if you eat Campbell Soup, Prego spaghetti sauce, or Pace picante sauce, it was made there), Sara Lee, and Kimberly-Clark (they make Huggies). Also, football greats Raymond Berry and Gene Stallings are from this area. So are my two youngest sons, Kyle and James, born at the former McCuistion Regional Medical Center.

At one time, Paris was served by five railroads: the Texas & Pacific; a Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe branch from Dallas; the Texas Midland from Terrell (later became a Texas & New Orleans line); the Paris & Mt. Pleasant; and a subsidiary of the St. Louis-San Francisco from Monett, MO. Starting in 1956, changes came to the railroad scene:

• The P&Mt.P abandoned its entire line between these two cities


• The T&P became aa subsidiary of the Missouri Pacific, and its identity was slowly being absorbed by the Mop


• The TNO line was washed out north of Commerce around 1970 or so, severing connections- not sure if they ceased operations into Paris at that time, but IIRC they abandined the track in the 1970s


• The GC&SF line was sold to shortline Kiamichi Railroad as its subsidiary Chaparral, running between Paris & Farmersville. It stopped operating & abandoned several years later


• The Frisco was merged into Burlington Northern in 1980, and BN sold off the line into Paris (along with trackage in SE Oklahoma and SW Arkansas) to the Kiamichi Railroad


• The MP became part of the Union Pacific, which spun off the T&P line to Texas Northeastern. TNER pruned back excessively to operations bewteen New Boston and Texarkana, TS, allowing UP tgo rip up trackage between New Boston and Paris- the line west to Sherman is still intact, but except for a short segment Sherman-Bells, is dormant

Which leaves just one railroad- the Kiamichi- serving customers in Paris these days.

However, my modeling focus is going to be on the Frisco, which served Campbell Soup as well as several other shippers, and interchanged with Santa Fe and SP (GCSF and TNO, respectively) in Paris (it indirectly swapped cars with MP through the Santa Fe).

I model in HO scale, and obviously I model the Frisco. I did have plans to build a model railroad based on one of the busier subdivisions, but due to the available space I found myself forced to model one of the on-line cities. Since I lived in & near Paris for 13 years, I became familiar with operations there, and through the frisco.org website as well as conversations with former Frisco railroaders in Hugo, OK (the juction point of the Arthur and Arkinda & Ardmore Subdivisions and base for Frisco operations in this area). I had also researched the area in & around Miami, OK, a town of 12,000 in the far northeast corner of the Sooner State, since it had a large B.F. Goodrich tire plant and was the onetime home of the Northeast Oklahoma Railroad serving the lead & zinc mines in the region. However, I had already "been there, done that" with another model railroad, and wanted to move on to something new. Since I had information on Paris, I went with that.

In my next post, I'll go over the research I did, why I chose Paris, and what trackplan I came up with for my "room".