A railroad, a river, an expedition.

The Katy

The Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad picked up its nickname from its stock ticker, K-T, and "the Katy" stuck for a century. Its Missouri River line, built in the early 1890s, threaded the narrow ground between the bluffs and the water, which is exactly why the trail feels the way it does today: the railroad did the hard work of finding the flat line through a valley that doesn't have much of it. The stone tunnel at Rocheport, cut in 1893, is the only tunnel on the line and still carries the date over its portal.

Floods battered the river line for decades, and after high water in 1986 the Katy ran its last train through the valley. The corridor could have been sold off in pieces. Instead, under the National Trails System Act's railbanking provision and with a landmark gift from Ted and Pat Jones, the state acquired the right of way, and the first section of Katy Trail State Park opened at Rocheport in 1990. Extensions through the 1990s and the 2011 addition east to Machens brought it to about 240 miles, the longest developed rail-trail in the country.

Lewis and Clark country

For most of its length the trail runs the north bank of the Missouri, which makes it a riding-pace retracement of the expedition's 1804 outbound route. The Corps of Discovery worked upstream through this reach in early June 1804, poling and rowing against the current the trail now parallels at twelve unhurried miles an hour. At the mouth of Moniteau Creek by Rocheport, Clark recorded pictographs on the limestone, images already ancient when he saw them. The Katy is an official segment of the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, and the interpretation gets richer the farther west you ride into the Boonslick country, where the salt springs, Arrow Rock, and the river towns carry the story forward.

Terrain360 has captured the Missouri River itself by boat, end to end, for the National Park Service's Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail. The Katy capture puts the land route beside the water route: the same valley, both ways the expedition would have seen it.

The trail keeps growing

At Windsor, mile 248, the Katy meets the Rock Island Spur, another rescued rail corridor running northwest toward Kansas City. Work continues on the broader Rock Island line, and the long-term map is hard to look away from: a loop of connected rail-trails crossing Missouri twice. It's part of why we're capturing the Katy now, one section at a time, starting with the 36 miles between Rocheport and Jefferson City.

The Katy Trail 360 project has the full story of the capture effort.