Chicago & Northwestern Railway Company in Illinois

Chicago & Northwestern Railway Company in Illinois
Minneapolis, St. Paul and Pacific (The Milwaukee Road)
The Soo Line / Wisconsin Central

I grew up during the 50's and 60's in Des Plaines, Illinois, a city criss-crossed by railroads. The Chicago & Northwestern Railway Company ran trains on its 3-track northwest line, chiefly commuter trains (or "scoots" as railfans call them), the Soo Line had a single track which bisected the city, and both the C&NW and Milwaukee Road (The Minneapolis, St. Paul & Pacific, to be precise) rolled freight on the "new line" which skirted the western edge of O'Hare Field. All three of these railroads intersected at Deval Crossing, about 1 mile west of the city center. Deval today is still one of the best places in Illinois to watch trains.

I lived near the Norma Junction where the new line crossed Thacker Street, and a single track split from the 2-track main line and ran straight north to Seeger Junction where it met up with the (mostly scoot) northwest line. When we first moved to Des Plaines in 1954, there was a water tower and some related structures at Norma, just south of Thacker and east of the tracks. I have not been able to find any pictures of these structures, which were torn down in 1956 perhaps. I have no recall of seeing steam power on the new line, but do distinctly recall steam locomotives pulling commuter coaches at the station in Des Plaines. Anyway, I became enamored of these railroads when I was a child, and when I was 13, I took to hanging out near the tracks, dogging the men who ran a switch engine around Bryn Mawr and the Norma Yard. I had my trusty Kodak Brownie camera at times, and many of the photos here were taken with that humble machine, back in 1966.


July 1966 -C&NW #1758 EMD GP9 northbound siding at Norma	Milwaukee Road GP40 #2038 southbound near Deval, 1979	Soo Line F7 northbound crossing C&NW at Deval, 1978

Brownie Hawkeye Camera

Soo Line F7 northbound at Deval, 1978

Wisconsin Central #7515 at Deval, 2002

I've tried to include as much information as I can, not only on the trains, but the locations as well. I love finding old pictures online, but I wish the photographers would have included more of the surrounding scenery. The trains are the subject, of course, but I just know there are pictures somewhere with a 13-year-old me in them, gawking at a freight somewhere! The pictures on this page are all thumbnails, and lead to pages with larger photos and more data. I've identified the power when possible; if you see a mistake or recognize something I missed, please email me.

Train wreck at Deval Crossing, August 1966

I was awakened one early summer morning in 1966 by one of my friends banging on our screen door and yelling for me to get my camera, there was a wreck on the Soo Line. Too Cool. As you can probably tell by the photos I took, it was a different world in those days. I was fairly crawling through the wreckage, me, a 13-year-old boy, and nobody said boo.

I never did get a proper explanation of what happened, but from what I remember it looked like about 7 or 8 cars of a southbound Soo Line frieght derailed at exactly the crossing of the Chicago & Northwestern northwest commuter line. The Soo Line F7 in the large picture above is traveling on the exact spot of this derailment. I know the location well, and the slant imparted to the trackside equipment by the derailed rolling stock tells me the train was southbound. There was a shattered wooden refrigerated boxcar with cases of Land O' Lakes butter scattered all over the place; I saw police officers looting and placing case after case of butter into the trunks of their squad cars. Like I said, it was a different world back then. If you look closely underneath the Norfolk and Western boxcar, you can see police officers and squad cars in the parking lot in front of the businesses at the corner of First and North Avenues. I hung around for most of the morning, but I must have gotten bored or maybe finally chased away by the cops. I'm hoping someone has more pictures or perhaps a news story about this wreck. I have found other pictures of the same black Bucyrus Erie #6359 crane at a wreck in Palatine, IL in 1949.

On my way home, I took this final picture of a C&NW lash-up. The conductor is out on the catwalk looking at the wreckage. Here You can read an official NTSB accident report of a different accident (train collision) at Norma interlocking in 2002.

C&NW Power
Looking northwestward along C&NW Northwest Line commuter tracks toward New line crossing

Pictures taken at Norma Yard 1966. We kids used this place as a playground; that could not happen today, eh?

Eastbound Union Pacific Freight and Manchester Road Bridge, Wheaton, Illinois. I'm standing on the old Chicago, Aurora & Elgin bridge, now a footpath.