The iron horse built Chicago, but none of the dozens of rail lines that made the city the nation’s railroad capital has a richer history than the Illinois Central.
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The “Main Line of Mid America,” as the railroad once billed itself, was represented in its early years by an attorney named Abraham Lincoln. Stephen A. Douglas was one of its major backers, and Mark Twain worked on its steamboats.
It provided Union generals in the Civil War and mayors for Chicago. The legendary Casey Jones was an IC engineer, who brought visitors to Chicago’s fabled Columbian Exposition in 1893. It has been memorialized in song, such as Steve Goodman’s “The City of New Orleans.”
The Illinois Central is also the last major railroad that calls Chicago home. But soon it, too, may disappear from the corporate landscape, along with such storied railways as Chicago & North Western and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe.
On Thursday, Canada’s biggest railroad, Canadian National Railway Co., confirmed that it is in talks to buy Illinois Central Corp. and its 3,450 miles of mid-American tracks in a cash-and-stock deal valued at $2.3 billion.
The disappearance of the IC into Montreal-based Canadian National probably won’t affect Chicago’s title as the nation’s rail hub any more than the disappearance of all the other railroads that once were based here.
The 25 railroad lines that still converge on the city handle almost 3,000 freight trains containing 200,000 cars each week– far more than any American city and more than most national railroad systems.
“Where are you going to send your (railroad) traffic if you don’t send it to Chicago?” asked Charles H. Allen, general manager of Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad, the city’s largest switching line.
“Chicago is an incredible center of manufacturing and consumption as well as being a (railroad) gateway,” he said. “As transcontinental traffic increased, most of it was fed through Chicago.”
But if the IC and Canadian National wrap up their deal, a chapter of American history as old as Chicago would come to a close.
Railroad engineers and switchmen may come home to Chicago and its suburbs, but the men who run the nation’s major rail lines will be in cities like Dallas, Ft. Worth and Norfolk, Va.
For the railroad’s employees, the railroads’ joint merger announcement served as a reminder of the painful twists the railroad took two decades ago as the company diversified to become IC Industries Inc., a move that crippled the railroad and led to the layoff of 9,000 people in the late 1980s.
“My team set the table and prepared the stew, but I think the people who took over the railroad have done a superb business of running that railroad in recent years,” said former IC Chairman Harry J. Bruce, who oversaw the massive firings as he struggled to reorganize the company.
Surprisingly, in view of the role Illinois Central played in Chicago’s development, the fates of the city and railroad have not always been entwined.
Illinois Central was originally proposed in 1832 as a line linking Galena in the northwestern corner of the state with Cairo at the state’s southern tip. Chicago, which at the time was a village of 150 souls, wasn’t even considered as a stop on the line.
Since no one was willing to bet on a newfangled technology on what was then the American frontier, the railroad remained a dream until it was rescued by U.S. Sen. Stephen Douglas in 1849, who got a federal land grant for a railroad, the first ever.
Douglas was also instrumental in rerouting the IC to Chicago, where he had moved in 1847 and was speculating in strategically located real estate. He just happened to sell the new railroad a 200-foot right of way on the South Side for $21,310, and construction started in 1852.
In antebellum times, the Illinois Central employed George B. McClellan, Ambrose E. Burnsides and Nathaniel P. Banks, all of whom became Union generals in the Civil War; Allan Pinkerton, founder of the Secret Service; and R.B. Mason, mayor of Chicago during the city’s great fire in 1871.
In 1856, the IC began the region’s first documented mass transit service when it began running a commuter train to a prairie station in what is now Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood.
Lincoln handled IC legal cases before he was elected president, and some historians have argued that the $5,000 fee he got from the railroad for winning a tax case in McLean County enabled him to finance his run against Douglas for the U.S. Senate. He lost that race but won national fame that led to the presidency.
About the same time, a prospective writer named Samuel Clemens was working as a pilot on one of the IC riverboats that connected the railroad with the South. Clemens later wrote about some of those adventures under the name Mark Twain.
Three decades later, an unknown young locomotive engineer by the name of John Luther Jones from Cayce, Ky., was brought to Chicago to help the railroad handle special commuter trains serving the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Jackson Park. His stay in Chicago was uneventful, but Casey Jones became a legend when he ran his passenger train into a freight and was killed.
The IC was also responsible for Chicago’s Grant Park. The railroad, refused a right of way to downtown Chicago, was forced to build a causeway along the lakefront. The land in between the line and Michigan Avenue later was filled in with the rubble from the great fire. The dense office complex north of Grant Park–Illinois Center–is named for the railroad, its original landlord.
The railroad also provided the city with its largest railroad disaster in 1972 when 45 commuters were killed and hundreds were injured when an IC commuter train rear-ended another at 27th Street.
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For IC employees past and present, the possible end of the line for the company made many remember the turmoil they’ve gone through over the years.
“I went from the heydays of the early 1970s when things were real good, to the down-sizing in the ’80s to the spinoffs in the late ’80s, through the rebuilding process over the last 10 years,” said Lawrence Triche, who now lives near the IC’s mainline in Mayfield, Ky.
“It wasn’t a fun place to be at that time,” said Bill Scott, who worked at IC headquarters for 20 years and now heads information services for Cass Information Systems, a provider of freight bill payment systems.
Charles Scholes, a maintenance foreman in the railroad’s Effingham, Ill., yards, says staffing has been the biggest change he’s seen.
“We had a lot more help 28 years ago,” said Scholes.
“I think Canadian National will run it the same way as the IC except it will just be a sideline for them,” he added.