The Burlington & Missouri River Railroad

Thomas Doane, the plaque's chief engineer, was born at Orleans, Massachusetts, on September 20, 1821. As chief engineer of the Hoosac Tunnel from 1863 he made his name with compressed air and high explosives. He came west in 1869 as the B&M's chief engineer and superintendent, built 240 miles of road, set up a steam ferry at Plattsmouth and named the towns between Plattsmouth and Kearney. Settled at Crete in 1871, he arranged for the railroad to give 600 acres for a Congregational college that took his name. He returned to Charlestown in 1873 and died in 1897.

What the plaque says

The Burlington & Missouri River Railroad The Burlington & Missouri River Railroad entered Nebraska at Plattsmouth in 1870 and built west to join the Union Pacific at Kearney Junction (now Kearney city) on September 3, 1872. The railroad bridge into Kearney was used for 104 years. It linked southern Nebraska traffic with the transcontinental Union Pacific. In 1872-73, thousands of trailed-in Texas Longhorns were shipped from Lowell, 5½ miles east of here. Sugar beets and prairie hay were once primary freight items. During World War II as many as 200 carloads of gravel were shipped daily from the Platte Valley to Hastings Naval Ammunition Depot. When I-80 was constructed in 1962, hundreds of carloads of cement, steel, and Weeping Water lime- stone were carried here for highway construction. This 24-mile Kenesaw-Kearney segment of Burling- ton track carried its last train on November 3, 1976. Except for 1.8 miles of right-of-way, including the Platte bridges, designated as a Nebraska Game and Parks Commission hike-bike trail, the land was sold. This marker is erected on the grade between Lowell and Newark. In an early forestation experiment, Chief Engineer Thomas Doane in 1872 hired nursery- man Ezra F. Stephens of Crete to plant 750,000 trees along 100 miles of this line between Lincoln and Lowell to prevent snow drifts. Buffalo County Historical Society Kearney County Historical Society Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Kearny State Historical Park — 2.9 mi
  The 1848 army post on the Platte, built on a strip of Pawnee land bought for $2,000 in goods, where emigrant wagons passed by the thousand and only the cottonwoods outlasted the fort.
• Rowe Sanctuary — 3.9 mi
  Audubon's sanctuary on the Platte near Gibbon, where the river's sandbars are kept bare so that sandhill cranes, more than a million in the valley each spring, can roost safely at night.

More markers nearby

• Fort Kearny — 2.8 mi
• Dobytown — 4.9 mi
• 1872 Lowell 1972 — 5.5 mi
• The Great Platte River Road — 7.0 mi