Naperville, IL: Kroehler Furniture Co.

(Kroehler 3D Satellite; Depot 3D Satellite)

This factory was used to help care for the injured when a passenger train travelling at 85 mph ran into another passenger train. (source)
Colin Mulligan American high speed rail attempts never recovered.

Marty Bernard posted

NOTE: Several commenters have said the series was taken before 1955.

INTRODUCTION: A. C. Kalmbach spent hours one mid-day at Naperville shooting trains on the CB&Q 3-track mainline (aka., racetrack). Sets of 35mm slides were produced from them and sold by Blackhawk Films and called "Noon at Naperville". No date is given. My guess is circa 1960. As you will see the captions, which I'll put in quotes, are not railfan type captions. I'll add roster and other information where I can.

The quality of the Blackhawk duplicates and the years gone by have left the slides quite blue. Eliminating the blue has not left much color, but I did my best. The slides would not sharpen up much.

Published with permission.

"Big furnature company at Naperville cointributes its quota to Burlington freight revenue."

 

safe_image for Naperville was home to the largest furniture-manufacturing company in the US
This building was built in 1918. The company was founded in 1893.
Andrew Cole: My grandfather started at Kroehler in the early 1930's and became a stockroom foreman and later did customer service until he retired in the 1970s. According to him, that during the Depression, the men would play baseball in the area north of the plant and when a job came up, they would get called in by turns so everyone got some work. Because he worked around the loading docks, he was also a material witness to the "Tragedy at Loomis Street" in 1946.

Lost Illinois Manufacturing posted six pictures with the comment:

Kroehler Manufacturing Co.In 1902, Peter E. Kroehler bought the Naper ille Lounge Co., a maker of wooden lounge chairs and upholstered furniture. Kroehler built a new factory in Naperville in 1913 after the original facility was destroyed by a tornado. Soon thereafter, he renamed the company Kroehler Manufacturing Co. This enterprise soon operated across the country and employed several hundred men and women in the Chicago area. By the middle of the 1940s, with over $20 million in annual sales, Kroehler was the second-largest furniture maker in the United States. During the 1960s, when the company employed close to 8,000 people around the country, annual revenues passed $100 million. The company struggled during the 1970s, closing its historic Naperville factory in 1978 and ending its operations in the area. In 1981 Kroehler was acquired by the ATR Group of Northbrook, which put the company up for sale. By the early 2000s, furniture was still manufactured under the Kroehler name by two unrelated companies, one in North Carolina and the other in Ontario, Canada.

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I assume this was the factory destroyed by the tornado.

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Ted Fisk asked about photos with boxcars there.
JW Shoener Here's a link that has a few photos with boxcars. http://www.napersettlement.org/index.aspx?NID=395
Eric Reinert Marty Bernard has lots of them on various sites: http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=4419872

Jayson Hallberg posted
Here’s CB&Q 5632 Pulling an excursion train as it goes through Naperville Illinois. Photo by: Melvern Finzer Circa 1960s. 🚂

I didn't realize that the part that still exists is such a small part of the original factory. When my wife and I first visited the repurposed builiding, it was more of a shopping mall and food court. When I had to run an errand in Naperville, I made a point to check out the old Kroehler factory on my way back. Other than parking being a hassle, it seems that they have been successful developing it as office space. It does not surprise me that there are a lot of lawyer offices in Naperville. Since my first pass looking for a parking spot was not successful, I ended up at the Loomis Street crossing. So I took photos of the locomotives of the eastbound freight. It looks like the first one suffered some sort of fire in its middle.

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Since I wasn't going anywhere, I got out of the car to take this shot facing West. Note the commuter train stopped at the station platform on M1. The freight is on M3.

The freight was going incredibly slow, so I turned around, found a parking spot and trotted to the west end of the factory building to find the train was still rolling through town. Note the underground pedestrian passage between the two parking lots. A pedestrian passage is desperately needed at the Main Street station in Downers Grove.

I moved closer to the train, but I was still in a bad position for photos, so I resisted wasting electrons until I saw this BN hopper.

Why would I take a photo of a commuter parking lot? To record that there was more of the freight train as far as I could see. But I moved on to take photos of the building.

This is the west end of the factory.

Since I was so close, I did walk to the northern platform of the depot for photos to the West and then East.

One advantage of taking photos is that I see stuff in the photos that I didn't notice in "real time." Below I zoomed in on the above photo because I noticed the parked freight. That would explain why the freight was rolling so slowly across Loomis Street --- it was coming to a stop just east of Loomis. If you look at a satellite map, you will see that there are no grade crossings in Lisle, IL. The tracks are elevated across that town because the town is down in the flood plane of the East Branch DuPage River.

Camera Resolution

A view of the southwest corner of the factory building.

The northwest corner making sure to include the iconic Naperville Water Tower.

I'm going to "photo dump" the interior shots. They have quite a few plaques and framed photos illustrating the history of the building. I walked through the building from the west side to near the east side. 

They took advantage of the wood beam construction to leave a wide open space in the middle.

They also preserved the skylights.