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From the wreckage, The Eastern Missouri Railway is born...
The tornado of May 27, 1896, which devastated portions of St. Louis and East St. Louis, gave birth to the EMR.
The Union Railway Company's terminal facilities were largely destroyed, and more than 50 steamships were wrecked. The
steamship company operators, in a doomed effort to salvage their ferry operations, chose to sell their rail assets to rebuild
their steamship operations. Poor choice. The EMR was thus formed to purchase the railroad operations by a consortium
including the Wabash Railroad; the Missouri Pacific; the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, & St. Louis; the Louisville &
Nashville; the Ohio & Mississippi; and the St. Louis, Iron Mountain, & Southern Railroad. And the
rest, as Chicagoans are fond of saying, is history.
The (fictional) EMR is a grandiose version of what the (real) Terminal Railroad Association (TRRA) might have become.
The TRRA still exists today ( http://www.terminalrailroad.com/ ) but the EMR operates on a much grander scale in a much smaller space.
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