( courtesy of a posting in alt.obituaries )
Remembering The CA&E Railway
Bob Roberts Reporting
It happened July 3, 1957, a day that was unique in Chicago history.
It was the day the Chicago Aurora & Elgin Ry. (CA&E), a line that had served Chicago's western suburbs, DuPage and eastern Kane Counties since 1902, quit operating in the middle of the day.
The railroad essentially took more than 6,000 people to work that day and no one home, an unprecedented act that was front-age news and created such chaos in the western suburbs that both of the Chicago area's major rail museums will commemorate the event with 're-enactments' this weekend.
"It was pure, unadulterated hell that day," said Ed Allen, now 73 years old and in retirement following an electric railway career that took him after the CA&E to Iowa and then Cleveland. "But it's a soul experience I will never, ever forget."
In 1957, Allen lived near the railroad's nerve center, its Wheaton shops. Three days a week he was an electrical inspector in the shops. Two days a week, he was an inspector/switchman at the Forest Park terminal, making up or uncoupling trains, performing electrical repair work and loading newspapers aboard trains. That put him in the eye of the storm the day the railroad quit.
There was no warning that trouble was at hand when the eastbound express from Forest Park pulled in at 11:52 a.m. Then Allen saw the railroad's trainmaster, M.O. Caliahan, step from the train onto the platform.
"He went into the phone booth while the motorman and conductor were looking at me," Allen recalls. "I was looking at them and thinking, Why aren't they bringing it down for loading? There are a lot of people down here."
It was at that moment that officials in Wheaton pulled the plug.
"(He) walked back into the train, they closed the doors, they put white flags on the front, which meant it was an extra train with nobody on it, and they went tearing through the station and on their way back out to Wheaton. So I called the Wheaton dispatcher's tower and told them, 'The 12:25 train just went through here with the crew and trainmaster. What's going on? I've got a lot of people here waiting to get on.'"
Allen says the response was a shock -- and not just to him.
"I haven't gotten around to calling you yet", the dispatcher told Allen. "We're temporarily suspended.'"
Everything else continued to run like clockwork at the Forest Park terminal. Only there were no CA&E trains.
"Another (CTA) train pulled through there, and more people got off the elevated line and were on our platform, and before you knew it, the whole platform was loaded with people from one end to another and here the ticket agent was still announcing trains, and we had no more trains," Allen said.
Allen pushed his way through the crowd to tell ticket agent Malcolm Lyons what was up. The reaction as riders overheard them and the word spread through the crowd was unlike anything you've ever seen in a
1950s-era Saturday Evening Post Norman Rockwell painting.To put it politely, Allen said, it was a mini-riot.
"We had benches on the platform, and they pulled the benches off and threw them down on the track," Allen said. "They were hoping to short out the third rail against the running rail with those metal benches. Then they came down and got the lanterns we used to carry on the back end of the train and the headlights, because we had portable headlights, and they threw them off against the third rail."
Soon, everything that could be thrown had been. The roiling mob still hadn't shorted out the third rail, and Allen was becoming anxious. It was at about this time that a newspaper photographer arrived and snapped a photo of Allen with one phone up to his right ear, and another in his left hand. To call the look on Allen's face perturbed is an understatement.
It was time to plot an escape route, and the CA&E provided him one.
"The Wheaton tower called ... and said to get the train out that's stored down there for evening service," Allen said. Ever the good employee, he had a dilemma.
"I said, 'Where will I take it?' because I was not allowed to run on the main line," Allen said. "I was told there were no more trains so what's the difference where I'm running."
The dispatcher told him to take the train to a spot opposite the Public Service Co. material yard, east of 1st Avenue in Maywood, where a crew would be driven in from Wheaton to pick up the train. Allen said the dispatcher told him to stop short of the trip for the crossing protection, so the gates wouldn't stay down.
"I went running out of the place," Allen said. So did Lyons. The angriest in the crowd were right behind.
"People were trying to follow me down there to get on that train, because they thought it would be a way to get out," said Allen, who endured a two-hour wait. "Then, here comes a car with a driver, a motorman and a conductor. We brought the last train out of Forest Park."
There was warning. In fact, the CA&E had threatened to suspend service several times and had informed the public that after June 30, 1957, service was day-to-day. Cook County Superior Court Judge Donald S. McKinlay presided over a highly-publicized hearing the morning of July
3, at which railroad officials stated that the CA&E had lost $3 million since 1953, when service had been cut back from downtown Chicago to Forest Park to facilitate the construction of what would become the Eisenhower Expressway.The era of public subsidies had not yet arrived, and the CA&E made the case that it cold no longer stand on its own financially as a passenger carrier.
Contemporary newspaper accounts state that Aurora Mayor Paul Egan offered to put up his home, valued at $14,000, to keep the railroad in business through the holiday weekend, but Judge McKinlay said it would be "embarrassing" to take away the mayor's home. Still, former CTA Executive Director George Krambles said in a 1997 interview, it was difficult for the public to believe the railroad would shut down so suddenly.
"There was a feeling of, 'You've cried wolf so many times. Are you really going to do it?' The public was a little incredulous that it was actually happening."
Krambles said the CTA found out about the suspension in service about the same time Allen did. They had to race into action.
"CA&E riders all went to work without the slightest idea that anything was wrong," he said. "The CTA got caught in the mess a little bit because we had also carried all those people to work. We could carry them back to Desplaines Avenue, but then what? How do we get the word to them?"
At that time, Krambles notes, television was not a source for breaking news. Chicago had no all-news radio station, and the afternoon newspapers were not yet on the streets.
Krambles' title at that time was operations planning engineer. He was one of the CTA people who planned operations mighty fast that afternoon.
"All of us, including myself, were out on elevated platforms where people were boarding to go home and we were warning them that there wouldn't be any Aurora & Elgin trains out there," Krambles said.
It was a job made more difficult in an era before widespread loudspeakers on 'L' platforms. Only a fraction of the CTA's rapid transit fleet even had on-board speakers.
The West Towns Bus Co. provided service from the Desplaines Avenue terminal to the Harlem Avenue terminal of the Lake Street "L" line. From there, the Leyden Motor Coach Co. rushed buses into service to take riders as far west as Wheaton. The paralleling Chicago & North Western Ry. (today's Metra Union Pacific West Line) soon modified service and quickly became a major commuter carrier in the western suburbs, a status it could never achieve until the CA&E's end was in sight.
The CA&E couldn't bid its employees goodbye so quickly.
"That happened so fast that the employees never got a notice through the union. They had to keep us employed two weeks further, even though no service was running," said Allen, who recalls that during those two weeks he reported to Wheaton Shops and essentially did "nothing."
The CA&E's death throes would be protracted.
"I personally prepared plans for how the CTA might handle that property if we had a way to finance it," Krambles said. "There was no way at that time."
The plan would have utilized some of the streamlined streetcars being retired from Chicago's streets at that time, running as far west as Wheaton.
Contemporary accounts quote Kenneth A. Van Sickle, CA&E board chairman, as saying, "We hope that the service may be restored promptly."
Allen remembers the tax referendum that was narrowly defeated as the CA&E's freight service staggered on, but he believes the railroad's owners hoped for defeat.
"Nobody (in management) really wanted that railroad to run again," Allen said. "The Aurora Corporation had bought all the stock of the railroad. The Aurora & Elgin was worth more to the Aurora Corporation out of business than it was in business."
Amazingly, though, the railroad was not allowed to go to seed as it awaited the scrapper's torch.
"We were called back to work," Allen said. "We started to rebuild cars, some of the better cars. We put new roofs on cars, new floors, aluminum window frames, windows, reupholstered seats and painted a lot of cars. In fact, they painted everything on the Aurora & Elgin ... red and gray. Even the phone booths, the fences, the stations. Everything had a fresh coat of paint on it."
The CTA even built its new "L" line down the Congress (now Eisenhower) Expressway with the CA&E in mind, leaving room for a third express track in many places, including concrete portals where the "L" line passes underneath the expressway from the south near Cicero Avenue and at Halsted Street, where it heads into the Dearborn subway. In addition, CA&E trackage was relocated west of the Forest Park terminal and the Des Plaines River bridge was moved, to a location just north of the expressway.
Nonetheless, it was "a ruse," Allen said, charging that the railroad that proclaimed "courtesy always" on its employee timetables had done what it could before cessation of service to undermine its chances for survival.
"They systematically dynamited the railroad out from under itself," Allen said. "They made schedules on timetables purposely so they would not meet a CTA train (at Forest Park). A CTA train would pull out and then we would pull in. Now all the people had to stand on the platform in the rain or the cold or everything else at Forest Park and wait for the next train."
The CA&E lasted as a freight carrier until the spring of 1959. Formal abandonment was granted in 1961. Allen stayed with the moribund railroad until 1962, becoming its last employee. He still mourns what happened that hot, July day.
"The western suburbs all the way to the Fox River lost something worthwhile," Allen said. "You know, in 1957, that was a lot of cornfields west of Wheaton and now it's all built up ... Think of what it would have been like to have a suburban commuter service running through there."
Krambles took a slightly different view in his 1997 interview, but agreed.
"The commuters in this area are very lucky that the North Western Railway was here to pick up some of that load for the commuters," he said. "The property values of the area no doubt suffered from the removal of that service. So there is a cash justification for people supporting public transportation."
Today, where CA&E trains once streaked along the rails at 70 miles an hour, the Illinois Prairie Path has taken its place. CA&E interurban cars can be seen in two Chicago-area museums, the Fox River Trolley Museum, in South Elgin, and the Illinois Railway Museum, in Union. The Fox River collection includes CA&E 20, the last surviving car from the railroad's first day of operation in August 1902, which will be featured (weather permitting) at the museum's CA&E Days celebration this weekend, including a re-enactment both days at noon of the sudden cessation of service. The Illinois Railway Museum has a similar re-enactment scheduled at noon Sunday.