A Visit To The Fox River Trolley Museum

The Fox River Trolley Museum, located off of IL 31 in South Elgin, is home to numerous interurban cars from the Chicago area's former interurban lines. We visited the museum in 2017, although are trip was postponed for a few weeks due to historic flooding along the Fox.

Thankfully, the museum didn't sustain any major damage in the floods. 
Former South Shore Line Trolley Car

The South Shore Line is one of the few interurban lines still in existence, and actually still has street running operations in some parts, especially around the Michigan City, IN area.

Former CTA Car


The museum uses the ROW of the otherwise abandoned Aurora Elgin & Fox River Railroad, which became part of the larger Chicago Aurora & Elgin, making this a very apt car to have.

The museum was near one of the first abandoned rights-of-way I discovered, along a walk along the Fox River Trail. I didn't even know the museum was there when I first visited the area. But it was at a least a part of becoming an enthusiast for the abandoned, particularly when it came to abandoned railroads!

North Shore Line Trolley

Chicago's perhaps most well-known former interurban line, the Chicago North Shore & Milwaukee Railroad, or the North Shore Line. The Illinois Railway Museum has many artifacts from the line, and the Trolley Museum uses one of their cars on a small train ride that they have along the former C A & E right of way.

The ride runs approximately one mile each way and has some nice views of some of their other rolling stock, under bridges and of the Fox.




This is a built station just west of the former right-of-way which is close to the Jon Duerr Forest Preserve

From here you can walk around and stretch your legs a bit for the return journey!



The volunteers are uniformed, very friendly, knowledgeable and professional!


The car was empty other than us, which was unfortunate, but at the same time, it was nice to enjoy the quiet.


This little spur connected the line with the Illinois Central (now CN line) near Stearns Rd




From the ROW!


What is called Woodcliff Station is named after one of the former landowners in the area. Today it is a collection of signals.



Some more signals are located on the museum grounds

Someone REALLY likes railroad crossing signals!
Overall, the Fox River Trolley Museum is relatively small, especially compared to the Illinois Railway Museum, but it is just as fun to visit and quite informative. You can probably see everything in an hour to 90 minutes, so if you're in the area I would recommend visiting and consider supporting the museum!
Location: 365 S La Fox St, South Elgin, IL 60177, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Choum Tunnel: The Monument to European Stupidity in Africa

Image
Scars of European colonization are located all across Africa, although some are more obscure and strange than others. With that in mind we come to the Choum Tunnel , built in Mauritania when it was controlled by the French. At first glance, it seems like an ordinary railway tunnel, however, one look at the local geography and you'll find yourself asking what its builders were possibly thinking with creating the project. Choum Tunnel in Mauritania. Unknown photographer. The Mauritania Railway was being built in the early 1960s, and was planned to connect Nouadhibou to Zouérat to exploit the iron ore reserves at Zouérat. That route still exists today in largely its original state, with the exception of the tunnel. Image: Ammar Hassan via Atlas Obscura The easiest route required running a short section of track through the then-Spanish controlled Western Sahara , but rather than pay Spain for the land and other concessions, the French engineers instead chose to tunnel under a hill sp
Read more

Railroad Vocabulary: A List of Words and Phrases Used in the Industry - Updated February 2024

Image
As somebody who enjoyed watching trains, but was not an employee of the railroad industry ( at least growing up ), when I would interact with railfans and historians, there was often a lot of technical jargon that applied only to the railroad industry thrown back and forth that made it difficult for a newcomer to understand what they were talking about. For example, what is a dinky? It's actually a passenger train. This non-inclusive language seems to keep the loop closed to members of the community, and to uncouple (no pun intended) that technical jargon and help make it easier for people to communicate with people in the industry, I am creating a list of railroad vocabulary that I'm hoping will make the industry more transparent.  BNSF 2361 . Image: Matt Flores While I ultimately believe that such technical jargon has no place outside of perhaps technical communications between employees, I know quite well that I alone am not going to stop people from communicating in a non-i
Read more

We asked ChatGPT to write an article on Abandoned Railroads - Here's the Result

Image
We live in an incredibly interesting age of information - made even more interesting by one of the most advanced chatbots that exist. Chatbots have been around for awhile now, but there are very few that have captured the amount of information and artificial intelligence that have been shown by ChatGPT . To demonstrate this, I asked it to write me an article on abandoned railroads with 1200 words in it. After this paragraph, you'll see what ChatGPT wrote. I will provide relevant links in its paragraphs and make any errors that I can see in brackets "[]". What I've noticed is that ChatGPT is great when it comes to general ideas about a particular historical topic, but largely gets facts, dates, and context wrong. Thus, we're still a little ways away from being taken over by computer overlords . Otherwise, thanks as always for reading my material, the rest is by guest blogger ChatGPT! Abandoned railroads are railways that are no longer in use or service. This can ha
Read more