Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis - 1922 dated Specimen Railway Bond
Inv# SE3272 Specimen Bond
Specimen Bond printed by Security-Columbian Banknote Company. Rare! The Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis (reporting mark TRRA) is a switching and terminal railroad that handles traffic in the St. Louis, Missouri, metropolitan area. It is co-owned by several Class I railroads that reach the city. It was founded in 1889 in a deal orchestrated by Jay Gould with:
- Missouri Pacific Railroad
- St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railway, later part of the Missouri Pacific
- Wabash Railroad, later part of the Norfolk and Western Railway
- Ohio and Mississippi Railroad, later part of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad
- Louisville and Nashville Railroad
- Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railway, later part of the New York Central Railroad
The railroad's predecessor companies in St. Louis date to 1797, when the town was still part of Spanish Upper Louisiana. James Piggott was granted a license to operate a ferry between St. Louis and Illinoistown (now East St. Louis, Illinois). In 1819, Piggott's heirs sold the ferry to Samuel Wiggins, who operated the service with eight horses until a steam-powered ferry took over in 1828.
In 1832, Wiggins sold the Wiggins Ferry Service and 800 acres (3.2Â km2) of land in East St. Louis, including Bloody Island, to new owners, who began developing a rail yard on the Illinois property. In 1870, the ferry began porting rail cars across the river one car at a time until the 1874 completion of the Eads Bridge.
When the Terminal Railroad was incorporated in 1889, railroads owned most of the Wiggins Ferry property. In 1902 when the Rock Island Line joined the Terminal Railroad, the ownership of the Wiggins Illinois property was complete.
The Association built Union Station. It owns the Merchants Bridge and MacArthur Bridge, the latter which it received in 1989 in a swap with the City of St. Louis in exchange of title for the Eads Bridge.
In the early years the Association was at odds with the St. Louis Merchants Exchange. The Exchange built the Eads Bridge but lost control to the Terminal Railroad. The Exchange then built the Merchants Bridge to keep the Terminal Railroad from having a monopoly. The Exchange then lost control of that bridge also to the Terminal Railroad. Read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_Railroad_Association_of_St._Louis
Stock and Bond Specimens are made and usually retained by a printer as a record of the contract with a client, generally with manuscript contract notes such as the quantity printed. Specimens are sometimes produced for use by the printing company's sales team as examples of the firm’s products. These are usually marked "Specimen" and have no serial numbers.
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