Railroad Park is a mostly undeveloped 33-acre park that is locked in by the South end of the Monarch-Chesterfield Levee to the East, North and West, and railroad tracks to the South. In the center of the park there is a largely open area with a scattering of trees, and that is where the disc golf course lives.

The design is geared toward recreational players, with five holes under 200' and 15 of the holes under 250'. The site is board flat, really no elevation comes into play. There are tee signs listing the distance, and the tees are short, boxed in areas filled with gravel. The baskets are Latitude 64° ProBasket and there is one pin placement per hole.

Given the limitations of no holes in the woods and no elevation, about all you can do is try to set up tees and/or baskets in a way that will reward you if you can get that turnover/flick shot going. This course does manage to do that; there are several "lefty privilege" shots where the smart play is the finesse touch turnover.

Fun factor is a very subjective thing, but IMO this course is no fun. Like at all. I like disc golf and I appreciate recreational courses, so I really tried to like this course but…this course is just boring. Like really, really, boring. Like "If this was the only course near me, I wouldn't play disc golf" boring. The site is so flat and so open that the course just really does not deliver any fun.

The flow is OK once you play the course, but the holes are close together and the tee signs in a lot of cases were oriented so you couldn't see which tee you were walking to until you walked past the sign. It leads to some issues such as leaving 6's basket and wandering back to the tee for hole 3 before finding the tee for 7. Once you get to 7's tee you realize how you were supposed to get there (which would keep you from wandering around and getting in the way of people trying to play hole 3) but my first time around I was in the way of people playing other holes a lot. It's a byproduct of the flat/lightly wooded site; you can see baskets and tees literally everywhere so it's easy to head to the wrong one.

Holes 11-15 shoot back and forth in a pretty small area; they are all putter shots so from an experienced disc golfer standpoint they seem fine. We all know that beginners are going to be flailing high-speed drivers at those shots, which gives me some safety concerns. There seemed to be enough room to move two of those shots out and spread the remaining three out.

The course itself is difficult to get to. The parking lot is for the trail, and makes you walk away from the course before you start walking to the course. The walk to the course was a lot longer than your average parking lot to course trek (my app had us at 0.4 miles from the car to the course). Once you get to the path down the embankment, that thing is steep. You take a long walk across the levee, take a treacherous path down an embankment and back up into the course, and walk directly into two baskets. One is a practice basket, the other is 18's basket. If you don't know anything about the course and walk in, you can quickly end up in the way of people throwing at 18.

The issue with 18's basket could be easily fixed because 18 in the context of this course is stupid. There are three holes over 250'. Hole 3 is 284'. Hole 4 is 359'. Hole 18 is 559' for no reason. The basket should be 100' short of where it is and the tee 50' up from where it is; I can see a 400ish foot ending shot. 559' on a course like this dumb. The course is so mind-numbingly boring that no one who can throw a 300' drive is going to bother playing this course, so you are just going to torture new/recreational players with a needlessly long hole.

The tees are just bad; boxes of gravel always end up washed out messes. Even at the young age of this course, they are uneven and hard to throw from. I teed off from the side to stay off them; from the look of the ground there, I wasn't the only one.

The site has a bad mosquito issue, when it rains or when the sun starts to set you should have a plan or not be in this park. There is also not a lot of shade, so sunscreen and water are necessary.

The Missouri Greenway has a trail head parking lot that de facto serves the park, so there is ample parking but no real indication that you are at anything called Railroad Park when you get there. There are currently no directional signs to get you to the course.

There is a TON of heavily wooded property in the park that would be much better suited for a disc golf course than the land they are using but given the course designer I'm confident that the restrictions against using that land was made by the City. I don't think any qualified course designer would have passed up a chance to tuck some holes up into the woods. It gives the site some potential; you could rework the course so that holes 2-3-4 were tucked into the woods on the West side of the park, rework the design to take advantage of the freed up space, tuck a couple more holes in on the East side of the park and Voilà!; you have some variety and can move the holes in the open area away from each other. Maybe after a few years, the City will warm up to the idea that they have a bad course with bad tees and be open to trying to fix those problems. Maybe.

Until then, for me Railroad Park sits just above Meadowridge and T.R. Hughes so far as courses in the St. Louis area go. Meadowridge and T.R. Hughes are both really, really bad, so being just above them is not good. There are other "bad" area courses like Citizens Park and Arnold City Park that are a lot more fun than Railroad Park, which makes it really hard to rate this course any higher than I rated those courses.