| In 1956 the Union Tank Car Company began to design a revolutionary tank car maintenance shop which would be constructed along the Kansas City Southern “D” Line at Alsen, just north of Baton Rouge. The shop would be enclosed in a geodesic dome 384 feet in diameter and 128 feet high; and when it was completed in October 1958, it was the world’s largest clear-span structure. The main feature of the shop was a circular transfer table which served 30 maintenance positions; and the design was considered so successful that Union built a similar structure at Wood River, Illinois in 1961.Unfortunately, the transfer table was designed for 1950-size cars, and it could not accommodate the longer cars which came along soon after it was built. Union sold the property to the Kansas City Southern in 1990; but the railroad was more interested in the land than the dome, which sat vacant and deteriorated. In November 2007, just one year before it would have been eligible for placement on the National Register of Historic Places, KCS obtained a demolition permit from the City of Baton Rouge and quickly razed the dome. |