Without really intending to, I fairly quickly established a new beat at the Sun-Times: railroads. They blanketed Chicagoland and constituted one of the biggest concentrations of jobs. Five major railroads had their general offices downtown. Yet neither my paper nor the other three Chicago newspapers paid railroads much attention. Myself, I’ve been crazy about railroads all my life, and by 1968 I was peppering the city desk with ideas from my perch in suburban Mount Prospect.
The railroad business, under siege by truckers for freight business and by airlines and new interstate highways for passenger traffic, was visibly shrinking. Especially perilous was the predicament of passenger trains, then privately operated by railroads in that pre-Amtrak era. The October 1, 1967 Sunday Sun-Times put this story of mine on page 3:
LOUISVILLE — A railroad with century-old roots in Indiana ran its last regularly scheduled passenger train Saturday. The last runs of No. 5 and 6, the Louisville-to Chicago Thoroughbred on the Monon R.R., had something of a funeral flavor.
It was as if an old friend lay dying, and at stops along the 324-mile route, men and women came for one last time to see and sometimes to ride a slowly vanishing American creature, the intercity passenger train.
All too often, it developed upon questioning the riders, the last time they had ridden the Monon was the sunny Sunday afternoon when they went to visit Uncle Andy in, oh, was it 1949?
Aboard in impressive numbers, too, were railroad enthusiasts, that peculiar breed of man who can tell you in an instant how many trains leave LaSalle St. Station in Chicago on Sundays, and who can describe the descent of the Fast Mail down Cajon Pass with the sensitivity that a novelist lends to a tender love scene.
The swan song of the Thoroughbred, however, was more than just nostalgic. Many of the passengers were girls en route from Chicago to one of the half-dozen college towns on the railroad to see their boy friends. Others, attending school in Chicago, were headed home for the weekend, sometimes unaware there would be no Thoroughbred to take them back Sunday morning.
Granted, it was a bit out of the ordinary for a reporter stationed in the northwest suburbs to be proposing an Indiana story. But Jim Peneff, the day assistant city editor, snapped up the proposal and brought me into the city room from Mount Prospect for several days to do the reporting. And then of course I rode the final runs. What went unreported in my story was that the president of the Monon had his business car on the rear of the final northbound departure from Louisville. I introduced myself to him and got invited onto his car for breakfast, and then talked my way into a locomotive ride for 104 miles, from Bloomington to Lafayette.
In 1968, I went on something of a tear.
January 13: A Toast: 631 Club on the Rocks
Patrons of the 631 Club were served their last drinks Friday night and then were cut off forever more. It was enough to bring a lump to a dry throat. The 631 Club is the name about 200 well-off and thirsty North Shore residents gave to the lounge car of the Chicago & North Western Railway’s passenger train that leaves Chicago nightly at 6:31 p.m.
The train travels between Chicago and Green Bay, Wis., but has stops at Highland Park and Lake Forest. For years, suburban executives have slouched comfortably in the lounge car’s swivel chairs and relaxed with a drink or two.
But Friday the North Western took the car out of service because it was losing money. The railway explained that the lounge emptied out at Lake Forest and pretty much stayed that way to Green Bay.
The one 631 Club patron who did not want to speak to me on that farewell run was William Johnson, president of the Illinois Central Railroad. He kept sinking lower and lower in his seat until he was pointed out to me, and I approached. “I don’t think it would be seemly for me to tell the North Western how to run its commuter service,” I quoted him as saying.
February 22, 1968: LUXURY TRAIN’S LAST RUN
Golden State Slides Into History
The Golden State, for 66 years the pride of its parent railroad, the Rock Island, went out of railroading and into the history books Wednesday night. The last Golden State slid into LaSalle St. Station from Los Angeles in the grand old manner—on time.
April 25, 1968: Train Men Lose Track of the Cat
This concerned a tabby named Tiger Paws who had been adopted by the maintenance workers at the “Zephyr Pit,” where Burlington Lines passenger trains were serviced just north of Roosevelt Road. The cat jumped aboard trains for a ride one too many times and was lost. My story reported that someone had found a haggard cat resembling Tiger Paws near the railroad not far from Aurora. But nobody from the railroad bothered to go out and retrieve the animal. My story concluded: “Too bad for you, Tiger Paws. Or whoever you are.”
August 4, 1968: Rail Timetables? Collectors Busy Keeping Track
Believe it or not, there was (and still is) an association of collectors of railroad timetables, and they gathered in Chicago for a national convention. I am not making this up! I knew of the convention because I collected them, too, and attended the event at the Ascot House. It was too good an opportunity to write up as a feature, and zap, the 500 word piece was published the next day. The event was the last time I saw Owen Davies, a friend and seller of railroad timetables from a book store on North Clark Street. He died of a heart attack the next week.
September 8, 1968: HE’S LOCO OVER LOCOMOTIVES
My Sunday magazine story featured Dick Jensen, a railroad enthusiast of such devotion that he bought three retired steam locomotives, one of them a former Grand Trunk Western behemoth still in operating condition and used on excursion passenger trains he organized. The “back story” is that his passion did not turn out well. Jensen was unable to finance the maintenance and storage of his GTW locomotive, which was sold for scrap to pay off his debts.
My partner in crime for many of these stories was Dick Takeuchi, editor of Midwest, the Sun-Times Sunday magazine. Dick had a soft spot for trains. And he was always hard up for good feature stories he could commission on his very limited budget. I ended up writing three Midwest cover stories concerning railroads, one of them my 1969 account of riding a freight train from Chicago to Los Angeles in 36 hours, four hours faster than Santa Fe Railway’s famous Super Chief passenger train. It left Chicago one morning before 10 a.m., and its 14 trailers of U.S. Postal Service mail were being unloaded in LA shortly after 8 o’clock the next evening. Top speed: 80 mph. And to imagine I got paid to experience this!
I have a few more railroad stories to recount, one of them a violent tragedy that still makes me shiver at the horror its victims underwent. But enough of railroads for now.
It is interesting to see how Fred covered the last departure of some of the marquee trains from Chicago. Through the 1960s and 1970s, the reporting on railroads by major newspapers in Chicago was first rate and transportation journalists like Young at the Chicago Tribune focused his gaze on issues of prominence in Chicago railroading, like the commuter service and the demise of the Rock Island. But in my book on the Rock Island I covered the last departure of the Quad Cities Rocket on December 31, 1978 and no one covered it. Obviously the departure of such an ignominious train was not worth covering–everyone including the riders– had forgotten about it. Yet, it left in a blizzard, on time, for the last time and while it probably took the train to reach the Quad Cities and its sister train to reach Peoria as long as the Golden State took at one time to reach LA, it is a shame Fred wasn’t around anymore to give the story some glamour and some attention. Love the coverage of the Monon and the CNW service. Now you just have to sneak your beer onto Metra, if you can anymore.