Railroads and Chicago

RAILROAD PATTERN IN 1950 (MAP)

Chicago is the most important railroad center in North America. More lines of track radiate in more directions from Chicago than from any other city. Chicago has long been the most important interchange point for freight traffic between the nation's major railroads and it is the hub of Amtrak, the intercity rail passenger system. Chicago ranks second (behind New York City) in terms of the volume of commuter rail passengers carried each day.

The first railroad in Chicago was the Galena & Chicago Union, which was chartered in 1836 to build tracks to the lead mines at Galena in northwestern Illinois. The first tracks were laid in 1848, and then not to Galena but to a point known as Oak Ridge (now Oak Park). The Galena & Chicago Union's terminal stood near the corner of Canal and Kinzie Streets.

THE PIONEER

Other railroads soon completed lines of track linking Chicago with the wheat fields of northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin. Later lines connected the city with Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, New Orleans, St. Louis, Kansas City, Omaha, and St. Paul. Railroads were especially important as haulers of grain and livestock, which helped Chicago gain a primary role in the grain marketing andmeatpacking industries.

Many of the railroads built west of Chicago had their corporate headquarters in the city, as well as yards and shops. Chicago became a center for the manufacture of freight cars, passenger cars (Pullman Company), and, later diesel locomotives (Electro-Motive Division of General Motors, in La Grange).

RAILROADS AND THE LOOP, C.1930 (MAP)

Freight moving across the country is funneled through the railroad yards of Chicago, where it is classified and then transferred to the yards of other railroads within the metropolitan area. The largest of these yards include Proviso and Bensenville on the western edge of the city, Clearing Yard in Bedford Park, Barr and Blue Island Yards on the far South Side, and Corwith Yard near the Stevenson Expressway. Although the nation's railroads now have been merged into just a few large systems, Chicago remains the hub where the tracks of one company end and those of another begin.

Until the 1960s the Chicago Loop contained six major railroad terminals for intercity rail passenger traffic. Passengers traveling between the East and West Coasts often had half a day to spend in Chicago between trains and took advantage of the time by sightseeing. Journalists sometimes met trains arriving from New York or Los Angeles to spot the celebrities. The decline of intercity rail passenger travel brought about by the advent of jet airlines led to the decline of the passenger train and the eventual consolidation of remaining services under Amtrak in 1971.

RAIL YARDS WEST OF LOOP, 1930S

Hundreds of thousands of Chicago-area residents still commute to the Loop by train each day, now under the auspices of Metra, the publicly owned regional railtransportation authority. Twelve such commuter-train services extend outward along the radiating routes of Chicago's rail network. The Burlington Northern Santa Fe line to Napervilleand Aurora carries the heaviest volume of passengers.

John C. Hudson

Street Railways - History

HORSE-DRAWN OMNIBUS, C.1890S Chicago had one of the largest street railway systems in the world before it was replaced bybuses in the 1950s. In 1929 on the eve of the Great Depression, red streetcars operated by Chicago Surface Lines (CSL) were a familiar sight on arterial streets and carried almost 900 million riders—more than the city's other transit systems and automobiles combined. Yet within 30 years the streetcars were gone. Omnibuses, large carriages seating up to 30 people, first appeared in Chicago in 1852 to haul travelers between the new railroad stations and hotels. The first street railway, or horsecar line, opened in 1859. Horsecars, which typically seated 20 passengers on benches, were pulled by one or two horses along rails laid on the streets. They survived on lightly used lines until 1906. WRECKED HORSE-DRAWN BUGGY, 1909 Soon after the introduction of the city's horsecar lines, their owners began looking for some sort of mechanical traction system to replace them. Not only did the horses last only a few years in heavy service, but the estimated 6,600 horses owned by the street railways in the 1880s dumped a considerable amount of manure and urine on the streets. Many horses were killed in the Chicago Fire of 1871, and an influenza-like equine epizootic decimated the surviving horses the following year. The street railway systems in 1867 tried replacing horses with small steam locomotives called “dummies,” but the public objected to the smoke, noise, and sparks they generated. Chicago City Railways (CCRY) on the South Side in 1882 acquired cable car technology from San Francisco. The CCRY cable line on State Street proved so successful that Chicago's street railways eventually built more than 80 miles of lines—one of the largest such systems in the world. Large steam engines mounted in central power plants pulled miles of cable through channels dug into the streets. The cable car operator, or gripman, applied power to the car by attaching his grip to the continuously moving cable. STREETCAR TERMINUS AT HOWARD ST., 1911 Charles J. Van Depoele demonstrated an electric streetcar system in 1883 at the Chicago Exposition of Railway Appliances, and Frank J. Sprague built the first successful electric streetcar system, in Richmond, Virginia, in 1888. Chicago's street railways began converting from cable cars to streetcars after 1890, a task completed in 1906. Electric cars were cheaper to operate than cable cars, were larger, and could accommodate more passengers. From 1864 the city had streetcar companies on the West, North, and South Sides, and a number of minor ones in outlying areas. Charles T. Yerkes bought the West and North Side systems in the 1880s and began consolidating them—a task not completed until after 1900. By 1920 there were two major systems and three minor ones. These five companies operated in areas that had been suburbs before they were annexed to Chicago in the late nineteenth century. They also owned subsidiaries that ran smaller operations in the suburbs. PLAN OF CHICAGO CAMPAIGN (RAIL LINES) The conditions that were to prove the street railways' undoing appeared long before the turn of the century. Traffic congestion in the Loop slowed overcrowded streetcars to a crawl. Public disenchantment was aroused by the corruption of traction magnate Charles T. Yerkes, of the city council's infamous “Gray Wolves” faction, and even of property owners who had to give their consent before streetcar lines could be built in front of their land. Beginning in 1907, the city and then the state began to regulate and tax street railways. The city and state continued the 1859 cap on fares at five cents despite inflation that drove up costs, and taxed profits at a 55 percent rate. The railways, which had been highly profitable in the last decades of the nineteenth century, had difficulty after 1907 raising capital to modernize or expand. Although the automobile did not become a factor in commuting in Chicago until the middle 1920s, the city's largest street railway, the Chicago Railways Company operating on the North and West Sides, filed for bankruptcy in 1926—a time at which ridership was at record levels and nearly three years before the onset of the Great Depression drove the remainder of the railways into bankruptcy. When it proved impossible to reorganize the street railways as a private enterprise, the state created the Chicago Transit Authority to buy them.

Rapid Transit System - History

By the end of the nineteenth century Chicago's explosive growth had generated street traffic congestion that threatened to choke further expansion. Rapid transit enabled residential development to continue for several decades at a heady pace several miles from downtown in various directions. CHICAGO'S RAPID TRANSIT LINES (MAP) New York built the world's first elevated railroad in 1868, but Chicago did not follow until 1892, when the Chicago & South Side Rapid Transit Company opened. Steam locomotives hauled passengers from Congress to 39th Street, along a right-of-way over the alley between State and Wabash. The line was extended to Jackson Park in 1893, and by 1910 branches had been built to Englewood, Kenwood, and the stockyards. Three other companies constructed elevated lines: the Lake Street Elevated Railway, which went into operation in 1893 from Market Street (now North Wacker Drive) west to California Avenue, reaching suburban Forest Park by 1910; the Metropolitan West Side Elevated Railroad, which began operating electric trains from downtown to Logan Square in 1895, and by 1915 to Forest Park and Cicero, with branches to Garfield Park, Humboldt Park, and Douglas Park; and the Northwestern Elevated Railroad, which opened from downtown to Wilson Avenue in 1900 and reached Wilmette in 1912, with a branch to Ravenswood. By 1898 all elevated lines had converted from steam locomotives to electric power. In 1897 streetcar magnate Charles T. Yerkes, Jr., who owned the Lake Street “L” and the uncompleted Northwestern “L,” completed the Union Elevated Railroad, a downtownloop connecting all four lines. The existing “L”s abandoned their individual downtown terminals and circled the loop. In 1911 the four Elevated companies were brought together under the Chicago Elevated Railways Collateral Trust, and in 1913 the trust finally provided through routing and transfers among the four “L” routes. In 1947 the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) took over operation of the rapid transit lines. The CTA revamped the operation of the “L”s and closed stations with low ridership. Between 1948 and 1957 the Douglas Park and Humboldt Park lines, the outer end of the Garfield line, and the branches to Niles Center (restored in 1964 as theSkokie Swift), Normal Park, the stockyards, and Kenwood were abandoned. Chicago's first subway had opened in 1943 under Clybourn, Division, and State Streets, 80 years after the London Underground and 46 years after the first U.S. subway in Boston. The busy North-South elevated line was rerouted through it, relieving congestion on the loop. A second subway under Dearborn Street was completed in 1951, enabling the CTA to abandon part of the Logan Square “L.” In the 1950s the Garfield “L” was replaced by a rapid transit line in the median of the Congress (later Eisenhower) Expressway. The Congress line inspired similar projects in other freeway medians. In 1969 the CTA opened a nine-mile extension via the Dan Ryan Expressway to the city's far South Side at 95th Street; in 1970 the Dearborn line was extended from Logan Square five miles to Jefferson Park in the median of the Kennedy Expressway, and in 1984, to O'Hare Airport. An entirely new line to Midway Airport opened in 1993. At the turn of the century the old elevated structures, some more than a century old, were being rebuilt, ensuring their survival well into the twenty-first century.

Getting Around on the CTA Train

Traveling on the CTA is simple. You need to know what direction you need to go and what stop you need to get off on.  For example if you are down town and you want visit Oak Park Illinois to see the Frank Lyod Wright houses - using Moovit you will discover that you need to take the Green line to Harlem stop (the end of the line).  The final stop or direction is "Harlem".  If you are at the Adams station in downtown Chicago, you would climb the stairs marked Harlem which is on a Green background:

On the station platform stand near the sign marked Harlem with a green background:

Get on the train marked Harlem with a green background:

Inside the train you will see the stations announced. When the sign says "Harlem is next" it is time to get organized to leave the train: