Passenger Trains on UP

There was some overlap during the transition from the RR-owned/operated trains to Amtrak. Amtrak became the operator of record for some of UP's trains, while others were cancelled. For a while, Amtrak trains were quite colourful, with cars from many different roads in the consists, until it caught up with repainting and replacing the cars it had bought from the RRs.

Subscribe to alt.binaries.pictures.rail, and post a request for train photos from that time period. Someone is bound to have some, and may be willing to post them there.

Good luck.

Actually, UP operates some of the commuter trains here in Chicago. When I buy a ticket, 10-trip or monthly, I write the check out to UPRR.

mark

Are these the ones that used to be operated by the C&NW?

I remember riding from Decatur to Chicago on the Illinois Terminal and then the "Roarin' Elgin" to visit a friend of hers in Chicago and go to see the

1951 Railroad Fair. Santa Fe had Navajos making sand paintings.

God damn the car companies and oil companies and tire companies who bought up and destroyed all the trolley and interurban systems.

Yup. If I go one way, into what's now Ogilvy, the C&NW logo is still in the marble.

mark

On 12/12/2008 2:57 PM Steve Caple spake thus:

Sure you don't mean the Illinois Central? I thought IT was an industrial belt RR (not sure, though).

I second that emotion.

When we went to Chicago it was on an older large trolley style, not one of the 1950 streamliners. At Peoria or somewhere nearby we transferred to the Chicago, Aurora & Elgin, and from there rode right into the Loop.

Our neighbor in Decatur in the late '40s and early '50s, Earl Malerich, worked in the ITRR shops.

You missed companies like Goodyear. My father told me that back in the thirties, they hired thugs to literally pull up the trolley tracks.

mark

You mean Goodyear, one of the "tire companies"?

It is a crying shame, at any rate. Just spend a week or two in a city like Stuttgart with modern and ubiquitous and frequent public transit and then think aobut the typical US commute. All that wwasted gas and time.

On 12/14/2008 6:23 PM whitroth spake thus:

That sounds a bit like urban legend to me; Goodyear/Standard Oil/Ford, et al, didn't have to hire muscle to get the job done. But it's pretty clear they did it (got rid of those damned trolley, streetcar and interurban lines that were cutting into their bottom line) just the same.

Yep, that Goodyear.

Hell, when I was taking the commuter train into downtown from the far north in Chicago, and I'd look out at the Kennedy freeway, and most of the time we're passing the regular lanes, and not infrequently the "express lanes", and I shake my head. I can't *imagine* how they can see the train passing, and yet drive their cars into work (and pay *huge* amounts for parking) every day.

mark

Nope, sorry, hard facts. Just like the cement company that bought up the LA interurban, ran it into the ground, and broke it up, so they'd sell more concrete for roads.

Go look it up - the companies *were* that nasty.

mark