Robert Daly posted six photos with the comment: "IC's Twelfth Street suburban station was a plain structure perched over the electric tracks just north of Central Station. It was approached from Michigan Avenue and Grant Park by an increasingly rickety wooden walkway. Metra replaced it with the much nicer Eleventh Street-Museum campus facility. See photos for details and dates."
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| 1 Looking northeast from the site of Central Station, 9/26/87. |
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| 2 View looking northwest from Grant Park, 9/26/87. |
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| 3 Ticket office, 9/26/87. |
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| 4 Looking west along the walkway from Grant Park, 9/26/87 |
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| 5 Northbound platform, April 1970. |
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| 6 New bilevels, 3/4/72. |
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| Dennis DeBruler commented on Robert's post This post helped me understand why old photos of the north side of Central Station had a clear façade, but newer photos had a walkway across the front. That walkway provided access to the 12th Street Suburban Station. The walkway is not present on a 1929 topo map, but it does appear in a 1938 aerial photo. Overview posted by David M Laz, https://www.facebook.com/groups/ILLRRHISTORYBUFFS/posts/1971479686411521/ |
A closeup of the walkway.
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| Illinois Central Railroad Scrapbook And Occasionally Other Railroads posted Alco PA's were pretty rare at Chicago's Central Station. After all, the IC never owned any. The New York Central's Big Four subsidiary did serve Central Station, and the NYC did own several PA's, but the Big Four trains were typically (but not always) pulled by IC locomotives while on IC rails between Kankakee, IL and Chicago. This is one of the few photos I've ever seen of a PA at Central Station. The photo taken on June 6, 1951 when GE's "More Power to America" train was on display at Central Station. This 10 car train was put together by GE and featured 2,000 products and innovations (all designed and built by GE, of course) that were intended to showcase new ways of "making, distributing, and using electric power". Of course, the goal was to boost power consumption, which in turn would boost sales of GE equipment. To heck with conservation - the train's goal was to boost electric consumption! Pulling the train was an Alco PA2/PB2 set that doubled as a demonstrator for Alco (remember, at the time Alco and GE were in a partnership to build diesel-electric locomotives). Admission to the train was "by invitation only", and was open only to big shots in the electrical, railroad, manufacturing, distribution, aerospace, and military fields (ie, those who influenced purchasing). On the IC the train visited several cities (somewhere I have a list). After the train's 1950-51 tour the locomotives were sold to the NYC and were scrapped by the mid-1960s. While poking around on the Internet I ran across an old GE film put together by GE to promote the film. It's not the best quality but it has some rare color shots of the locomotive. Cliff Downey coll Paul Webb shared |
You can tell by the periodic black horizontal lines over the easternmost tracks that they are the electrified suburban service. Those lines are the bridges that hold the catenary wires. Photo 5 above has a view of one of those bridges, and Photo 6 has a nice angle on some of the wires.
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| Mar 29, 1952 @ 23,600, AR1SA0000040050 |
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