This weekend’s Pullman Railroad Days event marks a celebration of a century-old decision that brought about a boom in ridership for the South Shore Line.
The railroad is participating in an event at Pullman National Historical Park in Chicago that marks the 100th anniversary last Tuesday of the electrification of the Illinois Central trains.
South Shore Line riders are used to the shiny silver trains with orange stripes built by Nippon Sharyo after the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District was created in 1977 to rescue the commuter rail line.
Longtime riders will remember the orange cars that rattled along the rails before that. Those cars were built as a direct result of the Illinois Central electrification.
Norman Carlson, president and managing editor of the Shore Line Interurban Historical Society, is the unofficial historian for the South Shore Line. “I’ll be either here, there or everywhere” at the Pullman event, he said.
Before the Illinois Central cars were electrified to run on 1,500 volts of DC power, the South Shore Line ran on 660 volts of AC power. Electricity was the driving force, in more ways than one, of those trains.
Carlson interviewed Samuel Insull Jr. in 1978 to get perspective on Insull’s father’s imprint on the railroads and Northwest Indiana.
The railroads were part of Insull’s plan to build demand for electricity, which Insull provided. Insull’s Commonwealth Edison acquired Chicago Rapid Transit Co. after it couldn’t pay its electric bills.
The South Shore Line’s counterpart, the North Shore Line, was formed in 1916 when Insull acquired the Chicago and Milwaukee Electric Railway. It’s now the CTA Yellow Line, also called the Skokie Swift.
The South Shore Line was lucrative because it gave Insull access to a coal-fired power plant to be built in Michigan City.
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By building a power plant and operating the railroad, Insull could get a cut on the coal delivered to his power plant. Coal mined in southern Illinois was put on trains, then shifted to barges, then back to trains to transport it to the Chicago area. Each time it was loaded or unloaded, the railroad made money.
“If they control the railroads, they could make even more money. So now the South Shore railroad was looking even better to them,” Carlson said.
“The icing on the cake,” in Insull’s words, was to take the South Shore Line downtown.
South Shore Line trains ended at 111th Street, the Pullman station, and passengers had to have an Illinois Central steam engine take them downtown.
“They always wanted to come to downtown directly,” Carlson said.
Electrification of the Illinois Central had an obvious cause. “It was smoke.”
The Illinois Central was on the lakefront, and they did not like all the smoke from the commuter trains as well as the freight trains, so in 1909, the Chicago City Council passed an ordinance requiring all railroads to electrify their trains. Obviously, it would take time. “You were supposed to have all the passenger service electrified by 1930.”
The Illinois Central met that deadline.
As the Great Depression hit, the freight railroads weren’t going to make their deadline. They contended they complied with the ordinance, though, referring to their locomotives as diesel electric. The diesel drives a generator that provides electricity to a traction motor. Those motors are what drive the trains, Carlson said.
Complicating all this was how the Illinois Central changed Chicago in another way.
“There was a contentious relationship with the Illinois Central from 1856 to 1926,” Carlson said. Everything east of the tracks from 51st Street north was on land filled in by the railroad over a 70-year period.
Taking the train to Millennium Station? “In 1856, that was Lake Michigan,” Carlson said. So were Buckingham Fountain, Soldier Field, Museum Campus and other areas.
While July 21, 1926, was the first service for the electrified Illinois Central cars, Aug. 29, 1926, was the South Shore Line’s first trip direct to downtown.
“That’s when ridership really increased,” Nicole Barker, the South Shore Line’s chief experience and engagement officer, said.
“It was a huge deal.” That allowed South Shore Line passengers to remain in their seats for the entire trip downtown. Ridership soared.
“My sense is he had to spend about $3 million for the overhaul of our system,” putting the rail cars in a state of good repair to operate on the Illinois Central’s 1,500-volt system, Barker said.
The 1926 cars “were fancy; they were luxurious,” she said. “They lasted 55 years or so until they retired in the mid-1980s.”
In 1927, the South Shore Line started parlor car and dining car services. “You could have a full meal on the dining cars,” Carlson said, or grab a sandwich in a parlor car.
“The dining and parlor car service was a victim of the Great Depression,” Carlson said.
Ridership dropped during the depression, “but it was nowhere near the drop we experienced with COVID,” he said.
“Fares were bouncing all over the place” as the railroad struggled to keep attracting riders. Unlike the COVID-19 pandemic, working at home wasn’t an option during the Great Depression. The internet and home computers were still relegated to science fiction.
“They came right off the depression and went right into the war and ran the wheels right off everything,” Carlson said. “It was very hard on the equipment.”
In addition to normal riders, the trains were carrying troops.
The dining cars and parlor cars underwent surgery. “They ended up cutting the cars in half and ended up adding another 17 feet in the middle” to add more seats, Carlson said.
Robert Harris owns some of those rail cars. His interest in them dates back to when he was doing a film for three PBS stations – WTTW in Chicago, WNWI in St. John and WNIT in Elkhart. That’s before Geoffrey Baer began his series of videos exploring the Chicago area, including by rail.
Harris’s video, which Nielsen ratings indicated 4 million people viewed, was on 16mm film. His dad had a friend who worked with Zenith and did a transfer to Betamax, a Sony format that lost the standards war to VHS. Harris later had one converted to DVD.
“It’s a fascinating story how the railroad helped to develop the region,” Harris said.
Insull donated land for Indiana Dunes State Park, he said. North of U.S. 12 on Ind. 49, “you’re actually on what the railroad was anticipating for use as its right of way. They were going to run trains to the beach.”
Frederick Bartlett, who developed Beverly Shores and brought the 1933 Century of Progress homes to his new town, worked with Insull on the North Shore, including what is now Skokie, Harris said.
That film spurred Harris to acquire some of the old orange cars after they went out of service.
How many? “I lost count somewhere,” he said. “We kept some for preservation. We kept some for parts,” including in a couple of warehouses in Michigan City.
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One is in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where it’s nearly done being restored.
“I’d like to do the parlor observation car that we did out of Canada,” Harris said.
Ultimately, he’d like to get some back in operation.
Those cars were replaced when NICTD took over running the South Shore Line in 1977.
One of the “new” cars, built in the 1980s, is on display at Pullman National Historical Park Saturday and Sunday. The 1982 car has been restored to its original look, including putting a metal panel back on.
“We are incredibly proud to showcase Car No. 3 in its original 1982 heritage scheme for this year’s event,” Barker said. “Bringing this vibrant piece of rolling history back to the historic Pullman neighborhood – where so much of Chicago’s rail legacy was born – is the perfect way to celebrate our past while building toward our future.”
“We’re going through end of life on some of our cars, which is those 1982 cars” built by Nippon Sharyo, Barker said. “This gives them another 10 years or so.”
“The end-life rebuild program ensures our 1982-built Electric Multi-Unit cars remain safe and reliable for our riders,” Director of Performance Improvement Gary Babcoke said.
After the festival, the rail car will transition back into revenue service.
“We are definitely examining what options we have for new cars,” she said.
Nippon Sharyo no longer builds that type of car; it now produces bullet trains and other, more modern types.
How the South Shore Line might end up has yet to be determined. Technology is changing fast. Metra has ordered a prototype of a battery-powered locomotive. “We’re very keen to look at it,” Barker said.
Meanwhile, the railroad is modernizing its system, not only extending service to the Munster/Dyer border but also adding substations between Michigan City and South Bend to improve reliability and redundancy where they’re farther apart than elsewhere on the system.
It’s also building a fourth track into Millennium Station with bidirectional signaling to reduce the odds of having to wait for a Metra train to get out of the way.
On Monday, the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District board is expected to discuss its new 20-year strategic plan.
The Northwest Indiana Regional Development Agency’s own 20-year plan, adopted last year, envisions extending South Shore Line service in Gary, Merrillville, Lowell and possibly Valparaiso.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.