Champaign, IL: Railroad Hub

Ellipse Kirk posted

Ellipse's comment:

This is an early 1900's map of Champaign showing the interconnected RR facilities. The ICRR station is on the east with the IC tracks diagonally NE to SW. The "Big 4" (Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railway Company) station was NW of that. Wabash trains also used the Big 4 station. A block SW of the ICRR station was the Illinois Traction station, which ran both streetcars and the Interurban. Today along the old IC tracks in downtown RR fans can see the 3 stations that served those tracks still there. The Oldest station has been re-purposed as the Black Dog Saloon, and the 1920's station is offices and shops, and there is a big new inter-modal station on the south end, actively hosting the City of New Orleans, The Illini, and The Saluki north & south daily. If I don't miss my guess, this is the only set of three sequential mainline railway passenger station buildings extant. The Traction station building is still there as well, though the Traction RR went away in the '50's. If you're near Champaign, as IC railroad fans I think most members of this group would enjoy seeing this cluster of stations.
The old IC freight depot building is still also there, NW of the current Black Dog, and one of the Traction RR barns is near where the Big 4 station was, if you come to visit.

If you access the "posted" link in the caption, you should be able to link to the full resolution picture. Note that all of the action is in Champaign instead of Urbana because of the IC tracks. The Big Four was formerly the Peoria & Eastern. I know that it went to at least Indianapolis.

I did not realize that Wabash came to town. It was a branch that came up from Sidney. You can see the curve on the west side of town were it branched off. And if you zoom out, you can see tree lines southeast of Deers and Mira.

Albert J Reinschmidt comment
All 3 stations are visible in this shot.

Albert J Reinschmidt comment: Don't forget the old dynamometer building on campus