A pair of GP9s leads a local freight train across the Robert Street Bridge over the Mississippi River in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota, on October 14, 1968. Built in 1913 by the Chicago Great Western (CGW), the bridge became part of the Chicago & North Western when it acquired the CGW on July 1, 1968. As a condition of the merger, the Soo gained access to industries in Roseport, just south of St. Paul. This is the first day of that service, and the second Soo train making the run.
The winters of 1967–68 and 1968–69 were especially challenging for the Soo Line. Deep cuts, like this one at Wendell, Minnesota, were particularly prone to filling up with drifting snow. When locomotives and plows could not keep the line open, the Soo had to get creative to keep its trains running—like loading an excavator onto a flatcar and pushing it into position to clear the snow. The February sun on this clear day in 1969 casts a perfect shadow of the photographer at lower left.
Toward sunset on a February day in 1969, the lead F-unit of this eastbound freight train plows drifted snow at Wendell, Minnesota. Snow posed challenges to Soo operations every winter, with this one being particularly difficult. Tread marks visible at lower right show that the railroad had to bring an excavator here to clear the worst of the snow before any trains could pass.
Workers wade through spilled grain from a 1969 derailment at Duplainville, Wisconsin, while steam crane no. W2 tugs on the wrecked hulk of a covered hopper car. Abbey photographed several derailments during his time with the Soo Line. The railroad likely would have wanted photographs for insurance purposes, but Abbey’s journalistic sensibilities led him to also portray the hard work that went into these clean-up operations.
Soo Line trains pass at Prentice, Wisconsin, on a June day in 1969. The view looks east, where a westbound train led by F3 no. 2200A waits as the wooden caboose of a southbound clears the crossing. The caboose hides the depot, which still stands, built to serve both railroads. The north–south line, originally part of the Wisconsin Central, connects Ashland and Spencer, Wisconsin. The east–west line was the original Soo’s main line to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan.
Track workers unload new continuous welded rail at Wheeler, Wisconsin, on September 2, 1969, as part of an upgrade to the main line east of the Twin Cities. Wisconsin and Minnesota residents often joke about having two seasons, winter and construction. The same is true for the region’s railroads, which struggle to keep their lines clear of snow and ice, and then hustle to do as much maintenance and upkeep as possible during the warmer months.
Shoving cars into Shops Yard in North Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, RS-2 no. 371 has just cleared the Lake Shore Drive crossing next to the yard office, allowing a group of kids to scurry across the tracks in the summer of 1971. The location and their equipment suggest they are returning from fishing in Lake Winnebago, the largest lake located entirely within the state.
Running south in the setting sun, train no. 418 led by GP38-2 no. 4421 rolls through Duplainville, Wisconsin, and across the Milwaukee Road main line on September 15, 1979. The Milwaukee had filed for bankruptcy two years earlier and faced an uncertain future. While much of its western lines would be abandoned, its core in the Midwest would ultimately become part of the Soo Line in 1985, giving the Soo a much shorter route between Chicago and the Twin Cities—and making Duplainville the spot where the “New Soo” crossed the Old Soo.
Brand-new SD40s nos. 750 and 751 lead a westbound train past cows and a horse at Turtle Lake, Wisconsin, in the summer of 1971. Electro-Motive’s SD40/SD40-2 model series was among the most successful lines of North American diesel locomotives; more than 5,700 were built for some forty railroads between 1966 and 1988.
Santa Fe passenger train no. 23, the westbound Grand Canyon for Los Angeles, led by streamlined 4-6-4 steam locomotive no. 3460, crossing the Pennsylvania and the Chicago & Western Indiana railroads at Chicago’s busy 21st Street Tower on June 22, 1946. Painted light blue and nicknamed the “Blue Goose,” no. 3460 was the only streamlined steam locomotive on the Santa Fe roster. It was originally intended to pull matching streamlined passenger trains, but as diesels took more of those assignments, the “Goose” often powered trains with older, heavyweight equipment.
FOUR
CHICAGO AT ITS ZENITH
CHICAGO ALWAYS LOOMED LARGE IN WALLY ABBEY’S MIND. How could it not? Growing up in the north shore suburb of Evanston, Abbey spent a significant part of his childhood watching trains at the Chicago & North Western station over on Davis Street, just a few blocks from his house, or boarding Santa Fe trains downtown at Dearborn Station for family visits to Kansas. For a child growing up in Chicago in the 1930s, trains were a pervasive, inescapable, awesome presence.
The love affair intensified in high school as Abbey began to experiment with a 35mm Argus camera, a step up from the Kodak Brownie of his earlier years. High-school friends introduced Abbey to the wonders of Roosevelt Road, the wide, elevated east–west avenue that crossed the throat tracks leading to four of the city’s great stations, Union, Grand Central, LaSalle Street, and Dearborn. There, Abbey could spend hours watching and photographing literally hundreds of passenger trains.
Abbey started making a paycheck off Chicago railroading in June 1944 with his summer job at Santa Fe’s 21st Street engine-house. He tried something completely different the following summer when he hired out with Chicago, Burlington & Quincy as a filing clerk in the freight claims department at the railroad’s general offices on West Jackson Boulevard.
It was in the immediate postwar years that Abbey and Chicago made their mark together. This was the railroad capital at its zenith, with the postwar flood of GIs returning home and business booming in the Loop and along Michigan Avenue, the “magnificent mile.” The city’s train stations hummed with life as many of the twenty-one passenger-carrying railroads serving Chicago enjoyed the last great surge of varnish before the interstate highway. A passenger train left the city every fifty-one seconds, a freight train every thirty-five seconds. The streets were crowded with Parmelee taxis ferrying travelers from station to station. It was the sprawling, brawling city writer Nelson Algren captured perfectly in the title of his epic prose poem of 1951, “Chicago: City on the Make.”
For several years, from the late 1940s into the 1950s, Abbey himself was on the make in Chicago. It became his artistic stomping ground, just as he was coming into his own as a significant photographer, first as a college student coming home every summer, later as a professional journalist.
In June 1947, Abbey hired out with the Chicago & North Western for the first of two summers as a relief leverman, which means he managed train movements through junctions, called interlockings. The job required Abbey to learn the railroad’s operating rules, master its various signal indications, and control traffic under extremely busy conditions. The places he worked were icons of the Chicago scene: Canal, at the junction of a branch line in Evanston; Clybourn, a tower near the city’s Wicker Park neighborhood; Barrington, in the northwest suburbs where C&NW crossed the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern; and, perhaps most memorable of all, Mayfair, on the northwest side, the junction with the Milwaukee Road’s main line, a racetrack for both the C&NW’s 400 fleet and the Milwaukee’s Hiawathas.
Those leverman’s jobs were like a graduate education in railroading. Later he looked back in amazement: “Comfortable though I was with my abilities and growing experience, sometimes, when a train full of people roared past the tower windows while another train waited impatiently on an intersecting track, I wondered, should a kid really be doing this?”
When he wasn’t working, Abbey roamed the vast city. By this time he had an intimate knowledge of Chicago’s dense railroad network, so he always knew the best places to go. Some of his favorites were the expected postcard panoramas: views of the city’s iconic skyline from Roosevelt Road and the sweeping curve into North Western Terminal; dark, moody glimpses of life under the train sheds of the big stations, where passengers scurried past locomotives, observation cars, and bumping posts.
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br /> But Abbey loved the gritty, operational side of railroading and the workers who made it tick, so he also descended on engine terminals, freight yards, and interlocking towers. He was a habitué at 21st Street, the multitrack crossing of several railroads along the Chicago River south of Union Station. He made wonderful images at the North Western’s Chicago Avenue roundhouse on the north side, and Santa Fe’s engine terminal at 21st Street where he worked. He often headed for the edge of the city, shooting the Burlington on its racetrack through the western suburbs, or the Santa Fe and the Rock Island from the spacious platforms at Joliet Union Station, or the interior of the gigantic State Line tower in Hammond, Indiana, where crossed the Erie, Nickel Plate, Monon, Chesapeake & Ohio, and Indiana Harbor Belt.
Although Abbey apparently never wrote specifically about his love for Chicago, his affection for the city was often palpable in short, occasionally poetic phrases that appeared in his feature articles. In “The Last Outpost” from the December 1952 issue of Trains & Travel, he described a pressure-packed night at Mayfair, where snow and sleet had conspired to wreak havoc on train operations, especially for a callow, third-trick, fill-in operator forced to contend with late trains, urgent train orders, and fifty-five interlocking levers. Finally, when the storm subsided, he found a moment to reflect.
“The snow and sleet had stopped; it wasn’t cold at all—just below freezing I estimated. The world was gray and quiet; down on Cicero Avenue there was next to no traffic and the street was rutted and snow covered. The reflection of countless neon signs tinged the sky a subtle red over downtown Chicago, and a searchlight was playing on the low clouds. I began to feel some of that relaxed, satisfied feeling I’d felt on less trying nights when the busiest part of the trick was past and the city was asleep.”
Of course, Chicago was rarely asleep. The Windy City landscape was abuzz in those halcyon years with crowded station platforms, gleaming streamliners, bustling freight yards, simmering roundhouses. Abbey’s visual document of that world is definitive.
In a view befitting Chicago’s title of the nation’s railroad capital, one of its most famous trains—New York Central’s 20th Century Limited—leaves the Windy City amid a flurry of activity in August of 1950. At right, an inbound Rock Island train heads for LaSalle Street Station, while a switcher moves two passenger cars on the track at left and a second switcher works in the yard at far right. Another Chicago icon, the Board of Trade Building from 1930, dominates the skyline in the distance.
One of Chicago & North Western’s E7A locomotives stands at the head of train no. 28, the eastbound San Francisco Overland, which has just arrived at the North Western Terminal in Chicago on November 2, 1951. Steam from the train’s heating system silhouettes a lone passenger on the adjacent platform. Long-distance passenger trains no longer use these tracks, but they remain busy with Metra commuter trains in what is now the Ogilvie Transportation Center.
Steam and diesel passenger trains on the Chicago & North Western pass at Canal Street Tower, where Abbey had worked as a college student, in November of 1951. At left, an A-B pair of Electro-Motive E7s brings in train no. 28, the eastbound San Francisco Overland from the Union Pacific, while a 4-6-2 at far right steams away with an outbound commuter train heading for North Side suburbs.
Two streamlined passenger trains from the West Coast rest at North Western Terminal on November 2, 1951. No. 106 is the City of Portland and no. 102 is the City of San Francisco. Both are Union Pacific trains, which at the time used the Chicago & North Western between Omaha and Chicago.
A pair of Illinois Central diesel switchers leads a transfer freight train through the spaghetti bowl of track that was Chicago’s 21st Street Tower—one of the most complicated railroad junctions in the world. At its peak, the junction had twenty-six diamonds and hosted more than 150 trains per day. The two IC tracks cross five curving tracks of the Chicago & Western Indiana, and all of those are crossed by two tracks of the Pennsylvania Railroad, whose lift bridge over the Chicago River stands at left. Connecting tracks added to the total number of crossings and complexity. Abbey spent two days here in October of 1950, photographing the activity for his employer, Trains magazine.
One of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s legendary K4-class 4-6-2 steam locomotives leads an eastbound passenger train out of Union Station at 21st Street Tower on October 3, 1950. The cars are strung out across the lift bridge over the Chicago River, and the locomotive is crossing the tracks of the Illinois Central Railroad. The Pennsy was the major eastern railroad at Union Station, and its trains offered direct connections to much of the Midwest and the West via the Burlington; Gulf, Mobile & Ohio; and Milwaukee Road, which also used Union Station.
With optimism for rail passenger traffic that would sadly prove unfounded, the Great Northern Railway ordered all-new cars for its premier train in 1951. Dubbed the “Mid-Century” Empire Builder, the fifteen-car train passes the 14th Street coach yards on its inaugural run to Seattle on June 3. Two Chicago, Burlington & Quincy E8A locomotives lead the train, which ran on the Burlington from Chicago to St. Paul, Minnesota.
Passengers alighting at LaSalle Station face a little longer walk than usual on this summer day in 1951. New York Central’s New England States from Boston exceeds the platform by a few car lengths, but a “red cap” baggage handler at left is approaching to assist these heavily-laden travelers. The iconic Chicago Board of Trade Building rises directly behind the center platform.
Grand Trunk Western streamlined 4-8-4 no. 6409 storms out of Dearborn Station with a Michigan-bound train on a damp day of heavy skies in February of 1952. The Canadian National subsidiary’s passenger service may not have been as well known as that of some other roads in Chicago, but engines like this one would make even the casual observer take notice. The 6409 was one of six in the U-4-b class delivered by Lima in 1938.
A man and his machine: Wabash engineer and 4-6-4 no. 702 under the train shed at Dearborn Station on February 2, 1952. They have just brought eastbound train no. 10, the Banner Blue, in from St. Louis. The Wabash’s five 4-6-4s were originally 2-8-2s built by Alco in 1925 and converted to passenger engines by the road’s Decatur Shops in 1943. They were scheduled to make the 285.7-mile run from St. Louis in as little as five hours and twenty-five minutes.
One of steam’s last great citadels in the Windy City was the North Western’s Chicago Avenue roundhouse on the near north side. There the C&NW maintained a sizable fleet of 4-6-2s for suburban commuter service in a half-circle structure. Halstead Street passed almost directly above the turntable, providing easy access for spectacular views like this one of no. 514 in 1952.
In this view of the famous curve just north of the North Western Terminal, frequently used for Chicago & North Western company photographs, the afternoon rush is underway as 4-6-2 no. 514 leads a westbound commuter train. Another steam-powered suburban train is visible in the distance, while Fairbanks Morse “Erie Built” diesel no. 6001B is on the far track. The truss bridge in the background carries one of Chicago’s famous rapid-transit “L” lines over the North Western tracks.
Santa Fe steam and diesel power congregates at the road’s 18th Street engine facilities in Chicago in 1947. No. 90 leads a brand-new A-B-A set of Fairbanks Morse “Erie built” diesels, the only ones the Santa Fe would ever own due to their reliability issues. Abbey had spent a summer in high school working at the shops, which primarily serviced power for long-distance passenger trains.
On a summer afternoon in 1947 on Chicago’s North Side, Milwaukee Road passenger train no. 6, the Morning Hiawatha from Minneapolis, approaches Grayland Tower near the end of its 421-mile, six-hour and fifty-minute run to Union Station. The tower controlled an at-grade crossing with a Chicago & North Western line, visible at right; both lines cross West Irving Park Road on overpasses.
Chicago & North Western outbound train no. 401, the Twin Cities 400, hustles through the interlocking plant of Canal Tower in Evanston, Illinois, on a sunny July afternoon in 1948. E7A loc
omotives nos. 5010B and 5006B lead the train, which is undoubtedly outpacing the traffic below on Green Bay Road. Leaving Chicago at 2:45 p.m., the train was due into Minneapolis at 9:30—407 miles in 405 minutes and the reason behind the train’s name.
Morning sun streams into the concourse of Union Station, silhouetting a single traveler studying the lockers on March 29, 1957. A dozen years earlier, at the end of World War II, the station had handled as many as 300 trains and 100,000 passengers a day, but traffic had declined sharply by the time Abbey made this picture. A dozen years later, the concourse would be demolished and replaced by a much smaller structure to make way for a modern office tower. Business has partially rebounded, though, with more than 50,000 people using the station on an average day in the twenty-first century.
Wallace W. Abbey: A Life in Railroad Photography Page 6
