It served a large area, including track in the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, and Missouri and the province of Ontario.

The Wabash's major freight traffic advantage was the direct line from Kansas City to Detroit, without going through St. Louis or Chicago.

Financier John Whitfield Bunn was one of several capitalists who were instrumental in the consolidation of the Wabash System.

However, in 1902 President J. Ramsey Jr. announced that a new shop site was needed to handle the increased demand for repairs.

Seventy-eight acres of land were purchased on the east side of Decatur, Illinois, which became the primary back shops until the end of steam.

[6]: 93–94 In 1897 the Wabash leases the eastern lines of the former Great Western Railway between Windsor and Buffalo, which was amalgamated with the Grand Trunk in 1882.

The line out of the Illinois River valley from Griggsville to Baylis had the steepest ruling grade on the Wabash, almost 2%, which required helpers in steam era.

[8] The Maumee-Montpelier, Ohio, section was abandoned by NS in 1990, and makes up the North fork of the Wabash Cannonball Trail.

The Wabash was part of the Union Belt of Detroit, a joint switching operation started with the Pere Marquette and later the PRR joined.

Passenger trains: This line has the highest point on the Wabash at Dumfries, Iowa (1242' above sea level).

[9] The Wabash trackage between Brunswick and Council Bluffs comprised the 18th and 19th Districts, with the dividing point being Stanberry, Missouri.

The Wabash Railroad ran their passenger trains that came into St. Louis on a 7-mile stretch of track that ran from Grand Ave (through a rail yard near Vandeventer Avenue), through University City (at Delmar Station) to a junction at Redmond Ave. in Ferguson, where the Ferguson station (now an ice cream parlor) was at North Florissant and Carson Ave., and where it met up with the current Norfolk Southern mainline.

After passenger service was discontinued, trains on this stretch were reduced to one westbound symbol freight and one local per day.

MetroLink light rail trains run on the portion from north of the University of Missouri - St. Louis (UMSL) to Grand Ave, while the north portion is now the Ted Jones Trail, which runs from Florissant Road at UMSL up to Redmond Ave., where the old junction was located.

[12] Norfolk & Western abandoned the track between Lock Springs and Chillicothe in 1983, and salvaged this portion of the line in 1985.

The line was leased, by order of the ICC, to the Chillicothe-Brunswick Rail Maintenance Authority (CBRM) on July 24, 1987.

In 2003, during a dispute caused by inter-community rivalries and jealousies over industrial development along the line, the owner, Green Hills Rural Development, Inc. "sold" the railroad to the City of Chillicothe, MO, (all real estate, rails, tools, rolling stock and locomotives) for $32,500.

Freight traffic included coal mined in Iowa (prior to 1960), agricultural goods, farm machinery, and paper products.

A change of personnel in customer service at Des Moines brought about a resurgence in business in the late 1970s and into the 1980s – so much so that NS largely re-built the line with newer, heavier steel and continuous welded rail in the mid-1980s.

During the early 1990s, NS began to look for ways to save on track outlays and maintenance, and a deal was hammered out with the Burlington Northern (BN) to share access to Des Moines over the old Chicago, Burlington and Quincy (CBQ) "K Line" which paralleled the Mississippi River from Hannibal, Mo.

A portion of the line north of Moulton was saved in order to provide access to the national rail system by the Appanoose County Community Railroad (APNC).

The name of this legendary train became famous with the 1904 revision of an 1882 song about the "Great Rock Island Route."

On October 26 and 27, 2013, Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society's Nickel Plate Road 765, in conjunction with the Norfolk Southern Railway's "21st Century Steam" program, pulled a 225-mile (362-km) round-trip excursion, retracing the Cannon Ball's former route between Fort Wayne and Lafayette, Indiana.