A classic group of railroad dining cars that formed the once-popular Kansas Belle dinner train in Baldwin City, Kansas, is moving to Abilene, where they will have a new temporary home on the Abilene and Smoky Valley Railroad.
The six-car train will leave the rails in Baldwin City and be moved by truck to Abilene this week.
According to A&SV President and General Manager Ross Boelling, the cars were recently sold by Kansas Belle owner Bruce Eveland to American Heritage
Railways of Durango, Colorado, the parent company of Heritage Rail Management, which is the consulting partner for the Abilene and Smoky Valley. Boelling stressed that while the cars will be moved and stored at the Abilene railyard, the cars will not belong to the A&SV.
“Our agreement with HRM is to store the cars,” Boelling said. “We expect that HRM will allow use of some of the cars to expand our seating capacities for our upcoming Cowtown Santa Express trains in December and some of our dinner trains.”
Eveland has been operating dinner trains, including the Kansas Belle, as an independent business for more than 36 years. He first started operations on October 12, 1988, when he began operating the Freemont Dinner Train on the Fremont and Elkhorn Valley Railroad in Nebraska. That railroad ceased operations in 2012, forcing Eveland to look elsewhere for a railroad willing to accommodate his business. He reached an agreement with the Midland Railway and moved his rail cars to Baldwin City to begin operating the Kansas Belle on that line in January 2013, using Midland locomotives and train crews to run his weekly trains to the nearby city of Ottawa located 16 miles away.
Eveland’s last Kansas Belle ran in 2020 before operations stopped due to the COVID-19 pandemic. To complicate the matter, the Midland Railway then ceased operations in March 2022, which left Eveland without a host railroad to operate the Belle. Accordingly, the decision was reluctantly made to sell the historic trainset.
“The Kansas Belle is a grand collection of railcars used by American and Canadian railroads in the 1940s,” said Boelling. The four Kansas Belle passenger cars provide seating for over 150 passengers. The cars include the “Marais des Cygnes River” coach that was built in 1947 by the Pullman Company, used by the Illinois Central Railroad as a passenger coach and later sold to the Rock Island Railroad, which converted it into a dining car. The other three cars—the “Maple Creek,” the “Rose Creek,” and the “Fontanelle” ––all worked for the Canadian National Railroad. Eveland purchased the vehicles and did most of the remodeling himself to create a train that gives modern day passengers a taste of the luxurious train travel that society enjoyed in the mid-20th century. Boelling said the two other cars from the Kansas Belle contain generators and other equipment to provide electrical power for the passenger cars.
Heritage Rail Management will likely use some of the Kansas Belle vehicles on its owned and operated rail lines outside of Kansas. However, those arrangements remain to be worked out, and the A&SV will be able to use the cars in the meantime. It is also very possible that some vehicles will remain in Abilene to permanently expand the size of A&SV excursion and dinner trains.
“We are excited about the additional seating capacity. Many of our dinner trains are near capacity, so this will give us a welcome bump in available seating.” Boelling concluded.
A&SV’s 2024 season has already seen record ridership of over 13,000. Kansas Tourism’s Sunflower Summer program was a huge boost for the railroad this year, and A&SVs popular special event trains for Halloween and Christmas will help push the 2024 ridership to even higher levels.”
“Bruce Eveland is to be commended for his decades-long efforts and dedication to keeping elegant passenger train dining experiences alive,” said Boelling, “and while the Kansas Belle name remains with his company, we plan to carry on his legacy by recounting the history of these dining cars as long as they reside in Abilene. Our passengers will have still another chance to experience fine dining on the rails just as American society did 80 years ago. Overall, this further solidifies our mission as a transportation museum on wheels and should be what passengers expect from Kansas’ newly designated heritage railroad.”
