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Illinois Terminal In Color Vol 2 photography of Eugene Van Dusen by Volkmer Morn
Illinois Terminal In Color Vol 2 photography of Eugene Van Dusen by William D Volkmer Morning Sun Books
Hard Cover with Dust Jacket
128 pages
Copyright 2001
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Named Cars on the
Illinois Terminal Railroad 6
The Interurban at Work 7
The Interurban Station 8
Bridges and Trestles 20
Steel Trestles 28
Highway Overcrossings 30
Decatur Belt Lline 31
Danville to Champaign 32
Champaign Power Plant 39
Bloomington Power Plant 39
Champaign 40
Cerro Gordo 43
Decatur to Springfield 46
The Bloomington Line 48
The Forsythe Shuttle 55
Peoria 60
Caldwell Hill 62
Mackinaw Junction 63
Carlinville 65
Morton 66
Mindale 68
Springfield Area 69
St. Louis Area 70
The Illinois Side of the Mississippi 73
Alton Line 74
Alton 78
Granite City Local Service 81
Studying the Streamliners 84
Freight Service - The Main Line . . 94
Gillespie Interlude 95
Freight to Danville 103
Danville Power House 104
Roster Shots 105
The "Pull" Cars 111
Class B Motors 112
Class C Motors 113
Class D Motors 114
Hybrid Electric Locomotives 115
Work Equipment 116
Freight Cars 117
The Diesel Era 118
IT Cars in Museums 120
Ohio Railway Museum 121
Fantrips 122
Last Run to Danville 124
The Illinois Terminal Re-incarnated 125
Final Frame 128
ABOUT THE BOOK:
OPERATING A RAILROAD OR A TRACTION SYSTEM requires the fine meshing of three basic
departments. While there are indeed many departments that comprise a transportation entity, the three most important from a policy standpoint, are the Operating Department, the Mechanical Department and the Marketing Department. Departments such as track and signal maintenance, bridges and buildings, communications, power system, etc. are all very important functions, but they in themselves do not define the railroad, they merely support it.
Taking a closer look at the `big three", the Marketing Department determines what kind of service and equipment is needed to satisfy the customers. The Mechanical Department either builds or purchases the required rolling stock to meet the demands set up by the Marketing Department. And finally, the Operating Department is required to operate the equipment in a safe and courteous manner to meet the demands of the customers that were attracted by the Marketing Department. The Operating Department is obviously constrained by the types and design of the rolling stock provided by the Mechanical Department.
In today's "throw away" world, railroads and transit authorities still function according to these time-honored rules, but with practices quite different from those of the interurban companies of the early part of the century, which is the subject of this book.
In recent years, it has been the practice that when a particular vehicle, be it a locomotive, a coach, a bus, an airplane etc., becomes obsolete, it is merely eliminated from the roster, scrapped, or sold to Mexico. A brand new state-of-the-art vehicle takes its place.
Not so with the Illinois Terminal Railroad. The Mechanical Department of that railroad was undeniably one of the most resourceful of any railroad, before or since, its existence. The IT never threw away anything! Virtually every last interurban car and locomotive to grace the IT roster was reused, rebuilt, modeled, upgraded, reupholstered, and repainted, not once, but several times throughout its existence. If a car was retired into work car service or wrecked and retired, the motors and other usable parts were placed under unmotored trailers in order to continue their life.
When the IT needed more powerful locomotives, they used older locomotives, ballasted them and added more powerful motors.
The IT Marketing Department, ever competitive with paralleling steam railroads, was always searching for ways to draw more customers. They tried buffet meals literally from opening day, June 4, 1906 between Springfield and Granite City, which was the southern end of the line at that time. In 1909 they tried Party Cars, and in 1911 they began Parlor Car service. Reserved seat coaches came in 1914. Several seating change schemes resulted in the 1924 chair car program, dubbed the "Tangerine Flyers." Also, in 1911, IT gravitated to sleeping car service, a phenomenon that lasted three decades and included Bedroom Cars. Air-conditioning was introduced in the late 1920s and upgraded to mechanical type air-conditioning in the 1930s. Interior modernization was an ongoing process that involved the elimination of the classic leaded arch window glass that graced the IT interurban passenger cars and made them distinctive.
When the IT passenger Marketing Department made the decision in 1945 to once again modernize the fleet, for the first time since 1916, they chose to purchase NEW rolling stock. Even though eight new Streamlined cars were turned out of the St. Louis Car Company in 1948, the Decatur Shops continued to rebuild the old cars, turning out the Parlor Car Cerro Gordo to fill in, when the Streamliners were out of service for maintenance.
Thanks largely to the frugality of the Illinois Terminal and the ingenuity of its Mechanical forces over the years, the students of traction history were treated to a time-warp, of sorts, during the ten year period following the end of World War II.
Even after the various individual cars and locomotives were retired, the IT seldom scrapped them. Several of the class A and B locomotives went on to serve at power plants along the line. Trailers and sleepers were converted to Maintenance of Way Department bunk cars, locomotives were rebuilt to serve as snow plows, second hand C&LE freight motors were converted to demotored express trailers, some carbodies became yard offices and trainmen's rooms, and yes a couple of them became Instruction Cars. About the only time an IT car was scrapped was after it was demolished in a wreck or destroyed in a fire.
Alas, in 1949, the end of this time warp hovered into view and railfan photographers such as Eugene "Van" Van Dusen of South Bend, Indiana and Gordon E. Lloyd, of Chicago among others, made frequent visits to the "Land O' Corn" to record photographically, the end of an era.
Mr. Lloyd's coverage of the IT was chronicled in Volume I of this series.
Mr. Van Dusen's color photography work is illustrated here. Unfortunately, whereas Van had been shooting the IT in black and white for over 10 years prior to 1948, he began taking color slides just a very brief few years before the line was abandoned.
Whereas Volume I was geographically oriented, Volume II, presented here, will cover the same territory, but in a somewhat different manner. What we would like to do for at least a part of the book, is attempt to recreate scenes that we'd like to imagine could have existed in the early 1920s, when the interurban industry was in its heyday, but also a time in which color film had not yet been invented. At the same time we will attempt to identify the various interurban components, such as the stations, the bridges, the substations, and the cars, that all went into the make up of an interurban system in the early part of the 20th century. Hopefully, this presentation will in some way illustrate the slow, but steady changes that preceded the final abandonment of the Illinois Terminal Railroad electrified operation. As was shown in Volume I, the IT continued to carry freight with diesel power for another quarter century following the cessation of passenger service in 1958, largely through trackage rights agreements.
The name Illinois Terminal Railroad System came into general use in 1937 when an amalgamation of several complex components, referred to over the years by a host of names, leased roads, merged roads and so forth, the history of which is far beyond the scope of this book to unravel. Much of the material covered in this book was the product of a 1945 reorganization that resulted in the purchase of the eight lightweight streamlined cars plus the PCC cars.
All pictures are of the actual item. If this is a railroad item, this material is obsolete and no longer in use by the railroad. Please email with questions. Publishers of Train Shed Cyclopedias and Stephans Railroad Directories. Large inventory of railroad books and magazines. Thank you for buying from us.
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