At this point, I’m wondering if we need another high-class hotel and gift shop, another corporate-sponsored translation of America, under the guise of Route 66.

Across the street, Ted Drewes still sells his famous frozen custard from a stand, as he has for nearly a half-century. But all that’s left of the Coral Court are 2 towers, "MOTEL" "ENTRANCE," like the statues of Romulus and Remus at the entrance to Rome.

"The Coral Court Motel had such a bad reputation in St. Louis that we’ve gotten complaints about mounting an exhibit," says a curator at the Museum of Transport, Jennifer Crets.

Cars at the Museum of Transport were an afterthought. They pale in drama next to the thundering hulks of railroad history outside the K-Mart-sized car exhibit. In the Route 66 corner sits a 1941 Cadillac and a 1939 Packard, complete with built-in matched luggage: a fold-down panel and four suitcases with matching handles in nubbly black. The 1939 Packard was large enough, and Missouri wild enough, that a chauffeur seemed like a good idea.

"You had to be crazy or wealthy to drive to central Missouri in the 1920’s. It was a place for adventurous people who wanted to fish and shoot," Crets says. Families, mainly Scotch-Irish and German from Kentucky and Tennessee, took the lands offered by the railroad and settled the hill country of Missouri. It was the railroad that brought them there, and the railroad that brought their goods, until Route 66 was finished.