I live on the east side of the metro, and the last analog public-safety stuff I monitored, several years ago, was the Jackson County park rangers. They have now joined the MARRS P25 (digital) system, along with most everything else in the area.
The railroads are still on analog VHF and you should be able to find the frequencies in the Radio Reference database. Or, if you have plenty of available channels, just look for a list of the standard AAR frequencies and program those in. If your radio can also do 450 MHz, you might consider adding the head-of-train and end-of-train frequencies; if you live near a rail line, the EOT, in particular, will tell you when a train is nearby. (That red flashing light on the last car of a freight train is the end-of-train device, and it has a transciever in it.)
One of the digital scanners already mentioned will let you pick up the MARRS (KC-area) and MOSWIN (Missouri-wide) digital systems, but they are uncheap. If you don't mind using a PC, and are willing to do some setup work, you can get an RTL-SDR tuner stick that has an antenna jack on one end and a USB connector on the other for about $50 +/-. You connect an antenna, plug the stick into your PC, and run some software on the PC to track and decode the audio from the digital system. I use the OP25 software (free) on Linux (free) but I think there is Windows software for this as well. There is a whole forum here dedicated to this type of monitoring:
Software Defined Radio
Some agencies, like the Kansas City, Missouri, police, encrypt pretty much everything now. There isn't any way around the encryption, either on a hardware or software scanner; you'll just hear garbled beeps and boops.
