Wallace W. Abbey

by Kevin P. Keefe

  SIX

  FIGHTING FOR THE MILWAUKEE ROAD

  EVEN IF THE MILWAUKEE ROAD WASN’T WALLY ABBEY’S favorite railroad, you might have thought otherwise based on the body of work he created once he arrived at Trains magazine in 1950. From the magazine’s office on the north edge of downtown Milwaukee, Abbey ranged across a railroad empire that often dominated the city’s landscape.

  Abbey’s timing was perfect. The Milwaukee Road was flying high. It was the era of the Hiawathas, the railroad’s celebrated orange-and-maroon streamliners, new versions of which debuted in 1948. The Milwaukee was locked in a fierce battle with its key rivals for the Chicago–Twin Cities passenger trade, the North Western’s 400s and the Burlington’s Zephyrs, and Abbey’s newly adopted city was in the middle of the action.

  A favorite vantage point was the Everett Street passenger station, a brooding, gothic rock pile a few blocks south of the Trains office. Behind the building, a lofty train shed was accessible at each end by sweeping curves of track, hemmed in by surface streets on all sides. For the photographer, it was a vantage point loaded with potential, and Abbey made the most of it, contrasting the sleek, modern Hiawathas with a vintage cityscape looming beyond the platforms.

  There was plenty more for Abbey to shoot. Just a mile or so west of the depot, the railroad’s West Milwaukee shops sprawled across the bottom of the Menomonee River Valley, a vast panorama of freight yards, locomotive and car repair shops, office buildings, and two roundhouses, all easily visible from the 35th Street viaduct. Over the years Abbey also ranged far from the railroad’s operating headquarters, photographing Milwaukee Road passenger and freight trains in the Chicago region and, later during his Soo Line years, in and around the Twin Cities.

  Then there was the Beer Line, an Abbey favorite. This industrial branch reached down into Milwaukee from the north, hugging the west side of the Milwaukee River until it fanned out across a narrow corridor near downtown to serve the team tracks of the Schlitz, Pabst, and Blatz breweries, as well as several tanneries. The Beer Line was a singular stretch of railroad, emblematic of the city. An idiosyncratic fleet of exotic Alco and Fairbanks Morse diesel switchers tended its tangle of sidings, and the air smelled of malt and rendering. Abbey returned to photograph this quirky stretch of railroad again and again.

  Abbey left Milwaukee in 1954 and moved back to Chicago for a job with the Association of Western Railways, but he sustained his ties to the Milwaukee Road, which was an association member. He got to know various company executives at countless meetings and conferences. Those contacts continued in his next job as a Midwest editor at Railway Age, and later in his public relations post at Soo Line, which shared much of the Milwaukee Road’s territory.

  Those contacts paid off in 1975. Abbey was a bit adrift, having difficulty drumming up new business for his Abbey Enterprises PR firm and, it seems, losing his passion for working for himself. He had closed an office he was renting and moved his work onto a desk in the basement at home. Then, he heard that the man handling Milwaukee Road’s advertising and public relations was leaving. He knew Worthington Smith, then president of the railroad, and inquired about the position.

  “Worth’s reply to me was neither yes or no,” recalled Abbey, who welcomed a move to 516 West Jackson in Chicago. “It was more like, ‘When can you be here?’ And so I assumed the new position of director of corporate communications for the Milwaukee Road. It wasn’t evident, to me at least, but strenuous times were about to begin.”

  The strain was already showing on the company. By the mid-1970s the Milwaukee was locked in an existential financial struggle as traffic declined and a host of historical bad decisions began catching up on management, notably the railroad’s money-losing Pacific Extension across Montana, Idaho, Washington, and into Seattle, opened in 1909. Deferred maintenance for track and locomotives had become obvious. The railroad’s huge shop complex in Milwaukee was beginning to look rundown.

  Abbey stepped into a public-relations situation that was equally problematic. “I had the responsibility for what had once been a sizable advertising campaign. But I had no advertising budget. I had a staff that on paper contained thirteen job positions, three of which were unoccupied. The Milwaukee was something of a laughing-stock in the railroad public relations trade.” Still, he threw himself into the work, reporting directly to Smith and Chairman William J. Quinn.

  Then came what Abbey called “the fateful, but not fatal, weekend,” December 19, 1977, when the Milwaukee Road filed for bankruptcy. Suddenly Abbey was not only dealing with the usual challenges of running a railroad’s corporate communications, but also explaining the railroad’s troubles to key constituencies, not least of which was the bankruptcy court. He became a constant companion of the trustee, first Stanley E. G. Hillman and later Richard B. Ogilvie, both of whom believed the railroad’s only salvation lay in abandoning the Pacific Extension and retrenching to a core Midwest system.

  Abbey’s responsibilities were weighty, but he embraced them. “The bankruptcy of the Milwaukee Road prompted continuous and nearly always erroneous assumptions, rumor, and misconstructions of fact,” he later recalled. “To control the quality of the information output from his office, the Trustee appointed two official spokesmen: the president and me. The president was too busy at the time to be available very often. I thus became, in effect, the ‘voice’ of the reorganization process outside the courtroom.”

  It was a tough position to be in, but Abbey got high marks for performance under fire. Joseph A. Swanson, a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and a close observer of the Milwaukee debacle, admired his efforts. “Abbey was a guy who could put the best foot forward. The story was difficult to tell in a positive way, but that’s exactly what he did.”

  Frustrating as the job likely became, Abbey still thought like a journalist. He knew he was uniquely qualified to document what was happening, especially with his camera. Thus did he make a number of heartbreaking photographs of the railroad during a multiday inspection trip with the trustee, creating a sad record of worn-out diesels, deteriorating track, and the always-lovely scenery along the doomed Pacific Extension.

  Years later, Abbey planned but never finished a book about the Milwaukee Road. Rarely the sentimentalist, he gave it the working title Leaky Boat.

  Brewery workers load cases of beer into boxcars using roller conveyors at the Schlitz brewery in Milwaukee on April 7, 1952. When loaded, the cars will go out on the Milwaukee Road’s “Beer Line,” which also handled shipments to and from Pabst and Blatz. During the 1950s, the three breweries combined to ship out 50 cars of beer each day. Other industries on the line contributed another 50 daily cars, making this one of the railroad’s most profitable branch lines.

  A Milwaukee Road worker steam cleans locomotive no. 1, a streamlined 4-4-2 from the railroad’s inaugural Hiawatha passenger train of 1935, at the Milwaukee (Wisconsin) shops on October 9, 1951. As the Hiawatha trains became longer and heavier, the 4-4-2 locomotives were assigned to shorter (and still fast) local trains on such routes as Milwaukee to Madison, Wisconsin. No. 1 had little more than a year to go before it was retired from service, but the railroad still took pride in its appearance.

  The station clock shows 1:32 p.m. as a set of new Milwaukee Road diesel locomotives is about to pull out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with the Morning Hiawatha from Minneapolis. The train was scheduled to leave at 1:25 p.m. for the 85-mile, 75-minute nonstop trip to Chicago Union Station. In this era, the train would “make up time” and arrive in Chicago on time. The steam era is not yet over; a water column, to provide water for locomotive tenders, stands at the left.

  Milwaukee Road S2-class 4-8-4 steam locomotive no. 208 leads an eastbound freight train through rolling farmland just outside of Elgin, Illinois, on August 5, 1948. The eleven-year-old locomotive was one of forty of the S2 class, designed in-house and built by the Baldwin Locomotive Works. The S2s typically handled freight trains between Bensenvill
e Yard in Chicago and either Council Bluffs, Iowa, or St. Paul, Minnesota. They were actually slightly larger and more powerful than the later S3 class, to which well-traveled survivor no. 261 belongs.

  Crossing the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern at Rondout, Illinois, Milwaukee Road 4-8-4 no. 221 leads a westbound extra freight train on October 14, 1955. Order boards for the EJ&E stand just beyond the locomotive, while the grade of the electric interurban Chicago North Shore & Milwaukee is visible in the background at far left.

  During a stop at Rondout, Illinois, in 1955, the engineer and fireman of a westbound freight train look down from the cab of S2-class 4-8-4 no. 221. The shadow of Rondout Tower is visible on the boiler, just in front of the cab. The railroad’s main line from Chicago to Milwaukee crossed a branch of the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern at Rondout, and this train may have been stopped for an EJ&E train.

  Two streamlined Hiawatha passenger trains at Chicago Union Station, circa 1950, offer striking commentary on industrial design of railroading’s streamlined era. Leading the train in the background is F7-class 4-6-4 steam locomotive no. 102, styled by Otto Kuhler. One of the famed Skytop observation cars, designed by Brooks Stevens, dominates the foreground.

  A trio of Baldwin AS-616 diesels digs into the grade up Short Line Hill along the Mississippi River in St. Paul, Minnesota, with a transfer freight for Minneapolis on March 24, 1959. Short Line Hill allowed the railroad to bypass a long bend in the river between the Twin Cities. The 1889 High Bridge, which carries Smith Avenue and state highway 149, stands in the background. It was closed in 1984 over structural concerns and replaced in 1987 with a steel arch bridge.

  The Milwaukee Road’s main Twin Cities facility was this sprawling yard in the Mississippi bottomlands below Dayton’s Bluff along the eastern edge of St. Paul. It was locally known as Pig’s Eye Yard, a name going back to Pierre “Pig’s Eye” Parrant, the first European to live in what would become St. Paul. Blind in one eye, he distilled liquor inside a cave and opened the city’s first business—a tavern, naturally. Abbey’s view from 1965 looks southeast.

  A young passenger looks out the window of the full-length dome car on the Morning Hiawatha, en route from Minneapolis to Chicago on October 20, 1965. The railroad still ran five daily trains each way between the two cities, but that frequency would last for less than four more years. Amtrak took over what was left of the Milwaukee Road’s passenger service in 1971, and today runs just one train between Chicago and the Twin Cities.

  The eastbound Morning Hiawatha meets westbound local train no. 55 at the brand-new Milwaukee Road station in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on October 20, 1965. The facility had opened less than three months earlier, replacing the city’s Everett Street Depot, a grand structure in the Gothic Revival style built in 1886 and featuring a 140-foot clock tower. Extensively renovated and renamed Milwaukee Intermodal Station in 2007, the 1965 structure continues to serve Amtrak and bus patrons today.

  Union Pacific, Illinois Central, and New York Central boxcars spotted for unloading at the Schlitz brewery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on April 7, 1952. A Milwaukee Road line—originally the main line of the Milwaukee & La Crosse Railroad—that wound through the north side of the city reached the Schlitz brewery. It also served the Pabst and Blatz breweries via team tracks, leading to its nickname, “The Beer Line.” Both grain and hops arrived by rail.

  The young operator at Grand Crossing Tower in La Crosse, Wisconsin, talks on the company phone line while updating his train sheet on July 9, 1971. Phones were still the primary means of communication, but railroads were beginning to use radios more widely. Radios allow dispatchers to communicate directly with train crews and, along with centralized traffic control, led to the demise of operators at most towers and stations along the line by the 1980s.

  An eastbound freight led by three GP40s rumbles across the Burlington Northern and passes Grand Crossing Tower in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in July of 1971. The high bluffs of the Upper Mississippi Valley stand to the south in the hazy distance. A Chicago & North Western branch line also crossed these two busy main lines here. Those tracks have since been removed, the tower demolished, and a new highway overpass built almost directly above the crossing. The Milwaukee and BN tracks remain, now part of Canadian Pacific and BNSF Railway, respectively, and they are both busy links on main lines to the west coast.

  Three GP40s lead a westbound freight across the Chicago & North Western and past Medary Tower on the outskirts of La Crosse, Wisconsin, on a July afternoon in 1971. Today, Canadian Pacific freights and Amtrak’s Empire Builder still ply the former Milwaukee Road route, but the tower is long gone and the North Western tracks have been removed, the right-of-way turned into the Great River State Park Trail. Abbey was looking east off the state route 16 overpass.

  At its peak, the Milwaukee Road’s network covered more than 11,000 miles, stretching from the Ohio River to Pacific Tidewater, but its largest shops were always in its namesake Wisconsin city. Sprawling out across the Menomonee River bottomlands west of downtown, the shops handled everything from light maintenance to building new cars and even locomotives. In this view from the early 1970s, first- and second-generation diesels from Electro-Motive and Fairbanks Morse line the “garden” tracks surrounding the turntable. Milwaukee County Stadium, home of the Brewers baseball team, stands at right in the distance to the west.

  Milwaukee Road Fairbanks Morse switchers bracket a single Electro-Motive F-unit on the garden tracks at the railroad’s shops in its namesake Wisconsin city. The Milwaukee Road was still a busy and successful railroad when Abbey recorded this view in the early 1970s. The railroad’s fortunes declined swiftly in the latter half of the decade. After the Soo Line purchased what was left of the Milwaukee in 1985, these once-bustling shops became redundant. Scarcely a trace of them remains today.

  To celebrate the nation’s bicentennial in 1976, many railroads painted locomotives in special color schemes. Eight railroads assembled their bicentennial locomotives for a special event organized by Trains magazine at the Belt Railway of Chicago’s 87th Street Yard on July 31, 1975. Milwaukee Road SD40-2 no. 156 is in the middle, flanked by Norfolk & Western and Santa Fe units.

  Passengers disembark from an outbound commuter train at Libertyville, Illinois, on the afternoon of August 4, 1975. The Milwaukee Road operated commuter trains in and out of Chicago Union Station on two lines, west as far as Elgin and north to Fox Lake, Illinois, and Walworth, Wisconsin. Libertyville is on the latter route; it is the first stop north of Rondout, where this line splits off from the main line to Milwaukee. Metra commuter trains still run to Elgin and Fox Lake—and stop in Libertyville.

  Operator Scott Porinsky hangs orders for a westbound Milwaukee Road train at Duplainville, Wisconsin, as the sun sets on September 15, 1979. Abbey was documenting the end of an era. Within six years, what was left of the Milwaukee Road would become part of the Soo Line. The Soo would soon build a new connection at Duplainville and wire up the interlocking for remote control from an office in Milwaukee. The tower was razed in 1987.

  A westbound freight train rounds the horseshoe curve known as Vendome Loop in southwestern Montana during the summer of 1977. Mid-train helpers—an SD40-2 and SD45—are assisting the locomotives on the head end on the climb to the continental divide. The Milwaukee Road crossed the divide at Pipestone Pass with a 2,290-foot-long tunnel at an elevation of 6,347 feet. The line opened in 1908 with a temporary route over the tunnel, which was completed in 1909. Electrification followed in 1915 and lasted until 1974.

  A westbound freight train passes the siding at Donald, Montana, nearing Pipestone Pass and the continental divide in the summer of 1977. The poles of electrification still stand along the tracks, but the wires are gone, the railroad having de-energized its entire Rocky Mountain Division on June 16, 1974, after nearly six decades of electric operations.

  An eastbound freight train negotiates the narrow canyon of the St. Regis River near the Montana town of the same name in September of 1977. Interstate 9
0 is visible across the river. The poles that carried electric catenary still stand, but the wires are gone.

  Two SD40-2 diesels lead westbound freight train no. 211 across the snow-covered fields near Lanark, Illinois, on February 8, 1980. This is the Milwaukee Road᾿s main line west from Chicago, crossing the Mississippi River at Savanna, Illinois, and ending at Council Bluffs, Iowa, where it connected with the Union Pacific. From 1955 until the creation of Amtrak in 1971, the Milwaukee handled UP᾿s cross-country passenger trains on this route.

  A trainman watches the coupling of two freight cars at Wheaton, Minnesota, on a summer day in the mid-1970s. The weed-grown track speaks volumes for the state of the soon-to-be bankrupt Milwaukee Road, despite the best efforts by its proud workforce to keep the trains running. Wheaton was a branch that ran north from the main line to Fargo, North Dakota. Train service ended in 1976, and the railroad pulled up the tracks four years later. Wheaton’s depot became a museum in 1977 and gained recognition on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985 as a strong example of standard design and the railroad’s impact on rural communities.

  As business declined in the 1970s, Milwaukee Road’s managers put locomotives into storage at yards all over the system. The extreme perspective of a fisheye lens takes in more than twenty stored diesels in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1980 at another railroad’s facility. This yard belonged to the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. That same year, these two railroads made the two largest trackage abandonments in U.S. history.