Chicago & Illinois Western

Company History: The railroad of the Chicago & Illinois Western Railroad was a single-track, standard-gauge, steam, switching railroad, located in northeastern Illinois. The main line extends southwesterly from a connection with the tracks of The Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad Company at Western Avenue in the city of Chicago, to Gary, 10.873 miles, with a branch line to Hawthorne, aggregating 12.027 miles of road. The main line formerly extended beyond Gary to Willow Springs, Ill., but on valuation date the track between these points, 1.723 miles, was temporarily removed. In addition, the carrier has trackage rights over 9.95 miles of the road of other carriers, and leases for exclusive use certain yard tracks and facilities.

First of all, don’t confuse this line with Chicago & Western Indiana of Dearborn Station fame. The Chicago & Illinois Western was a shortline with 33 miles of track serving a number of large industries in Harvester, Hawthorne and Gary in the greater Chicago area. Illinois Central took stock control of the C&IW in 1924 but the shortline remained a separate operation with their own locomotives and freight cars until it was finally merged into the Illinois Central in the run up to the IC – Gulf Mobile & Ohio merger of 1972.

Successor/Parent History: The Illinois Central Railroad (reporting mark IC), sometimes called the Main Line of Mid-America, was a railroad in the central United States, with its primary routes connecting Chicago, Illinois, with New Orleans, Louisiana, and Mobile, Alabama. A line also connected Chicago with Sioux City, Iowa (1870). There was a significant branch to Omaha, Nebraska (1899), west of Fort Dodge, Iowa, and another branch reaching Sioux Falls, South Dakota (1877), starting from Cherokee, Iowa. The Sioux Falls branch has been abandoned in its entirety.

The IC is one of the early Class I railroads in the US. Its roots go back to abortive attempts by the Illinois General Assembly to charter a railroad linking the northern and southern parts of the state of Illinois. In 1850 U.S. President Millard Fillmore signed a land grant for the construction of the railroad, making the Illinois Central the first land-grant railroad in the United States.

The Illinois Central was chartered by the Illinois General Assembly on February 10, 1851. Senator Stephen Douglas and later President Abraham Lincoln were both Illinois Central men who lobbied for it. Douglas owned land near the terminal in Chicago. Lincoln was a lawyer for the railroad. Upon its completion in 1856 the IC was the longest railroad in the world. Its main line went from Cairo, Illinois, at the southern tip of the state, to Galena, in the northwest corner. A branch line went from Centralia, (named for the railroad) to the rapidly growing city of Chicago. In Chicago its tracks were laid along the shore of Lake Michigan and on an offshore causeway downtown, but land-filling and natural deposition have moved the present-day shore to the east.

In 1867 the Illinois Central extended its track into Iowa, and during the 1870s and 1880s the IC acquired and expanded railroads in the southern United States. IC lines crisscrossed the state of Mississippi and went as far as New Orleans, Louisiana, to the south and Louisville, Kentucky, in the east. In the 1880s, northern lines were built to Dodgeville, Wisconsin, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Omaha, Nebraska. Further expansion continued into the early twentieth century.

The Illinois Central, and the other "Harriman lines" owned by E.H. Harriman, was the target of the Illinois Central shopmen's strike of 1911. Although marked by violence and sabotage in the south, midwest, and western states, the strike was effectively over in a few months. The railroads simply hired replacements and withstood diminishing union pressure. The strike was eventually called off in 1915.

Brief History: The U.S. is a country of 50 states covering a vast swath of North America, with Alaska in the northwest and Hawaii extending the nation’s presence into the Pacific Ocean. Major Atlantic Coast cities are New York, a global finance and culture center, and capital Washington, DC. Midwestern metropolis Chicago is known for influential architecture and on the west coast, Los Angeles' Hollywood is famed for filmmaking.