Forgotten Lands, Places and Transit

There are very few single lane bridges in northeast Illinois remaining, and for mostly good reasons, as the ones that remain are typically substandard and have a streak of being hit by box trucks . Nonetheless, one that I was very sad to see close was in the town adjacent to my hometown, Plainfield's truss bridge over the DuPage River. Roger McCredie, Photographer, December 1991  In a historical narrative about the bridge , historian John B Nolan noted that, as of 1995, it was "the last surviving through truss in Will County, and an example of a bridge type once familiar in Illinois. This truss, built by the Wrought Iron Bridge Company." Before I realized that railroad rights of way were often easily identifiable via aerial images, one of my favorite pastimes was to look at old and unique railroad crossings on Google Maps.  However, this particular crossing wasn't one I'd discovered on Google, but rather out on one of my frequent drives to nowhere; the EJE (now C...

If you ever find yourself on a drive down Addison Road between North Avenue and Lake Street, you pass a strangely wide strip of land on the west side of the road - too broad for a sidewalk, too linear for a park, too empty to be accidental. That strip once carried a railroad. There were two Addison Railroads that operated in the United States, one in Illinois and one in Vermont, and each had no relation to the other. The Vermont Addison Railroad became part of the Rutland Railroad, and is discussed in another blog. The Addison Railroad (in Illinois) once occupied the large easement on the west side of Addison Rd between IL-64 (North Av) to just north of US-20 (Lake St) in Addison, IL, about two miles in length. Built in 1890, it was incorporated into the Chicago Madison & Northern Railroad , which itself became part of the Illinois Central by 1892. Under the IC, the short spur was simply known as the Addison Branch. Addison Railroad, 1892 . "Illinois Central Train in Addiso...

Across the American landscape, the physical remnants of infrastructure often outlast the memories of the people who built it. Rail alignments fade into forests, canals become property lines, and tunnels persist long after their original purpose is forgotten. Few sites better illustrate this imbalance between enduring infrastructure and erased labor than Hawks Nest, West Virginia , a place where industrial ambition, hydroelectric power, and human catastrophe intersected inside a mountain. I first heard about this disaster on a podcast called Lawless Planet , which goes in depth into environmental disasters and general criminal activity as it relates to the clean energy transition. I highly recommend it as far as podcasts go, and that's coming from someone who typically dislikes the true crime genre. It should be noted that non-fossil fuel based energy sources are nothing new; and the Hawks Nest Dam project, were it constructed today, would likely be labeled as a clean energy project...

Nestled along the eastern shore of Utah Lake, beneath the looming presence of the Wasatch Mountains, the Geneva Steel Plant in Vineyard, Utah stood for decades as one of the most consequential industrial sites in the American West. (Location on our Ghost Towns map) For much of the mid to late twentieth century, Geneva Steel was not just a factory. It was a place that reshaped landscapes, transportation networks, labor patterns, and the daily rhythms of Utah County. Its rise and decline reflect a broader story of wartime urgency, postwar optimism, and the slow unraveling of heavy industry in the interior West. Geneva Steel Mill in 1942. Image by  Andreas Feininger - Library of Congress Geneva Steel was a product of World War II. In 1941, the federal government recognized a strategic vulnerability in American steel production. Most major steel plants were clustered in the Midwest and along the coasts, leaving them exposed to potential attack and supply disruption. Utah offered some...

In the context of railway infrastructure, "Transcontinental" typically refers to the original Transcontinental Railroad , particularly in the United States. But very few pieces of infrastructure can truly be considered transcontinental.  One that can be considered is Egypt's El Ferdan Railway Bridge  ( Google Maps ), which is a dual swing bridge that spans the Suez Canal , connecting Africa with Asia. The bridge opened in 2001, and is (or was) the longest swing bridge in the world. Between 2001-2015, it served the Egyptian National Railway . Between 2015 and 2024, it was out of service, partly due to the Suez Canal's reconstruction and expansion, but was reactivated and expanded in late 2024 to once again reopen. This blog was originally posted in between that time frame, so context has been added to reflect the fact that it is now once again in service. Railway bridges over the Suez Canal have had a tendency to not last very long, as it was the fifth bridge over the ...

The Dodge City Montezuma & Trinidad Railway was a short-lived railroad operating between Dodge City and Montezuma, KS. ( Right of Way )  Looking at a modern rail map of southwest Kansas, one might reasonably assume that Dodge City and Montezuma have always been connected by the same railroad. After all, the two towns remain linked by rail today.  Photo: City of Montezuma, KS But this apparent continuity hides a short-lived and politically motivated predecessor: the Dodge City, Montezuma & Trinidad Railway; a railroad whose entire existence was born out of a county seat dispute and whose abandonment reshaped the geography of Gray County. Original alignment. The Montezuma we know today was not the original town to bear that name. The present-day community was platted by the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway in 1912, nearly twenty years after the first Montezuma had already faded into obscurity. That original town, now a ghost town, briefly flourished thanks ...

I try my best on this blog to stay out of current political matters and almost always stay out of social issues. That said, I cannot stay about the threats to the rails to trails movement as we know it. Across the United States, there are old rail corridors that never quite disappeared. We have visited many of them on this blog: lines where rusted steel and weed-choked ballast once marked an ending, now quietly repurposed into trails filled with movement and life. These are the rail-trails , places where locomotives once thundered and where today you are more likely to hear conversation, bicycle chains, or the crunch of gravel underfoot. They have become connective tissue for places long left on the margins, stitching together urban neighborhoods, suburban downtowns, and rural villages that lost their rail service generations ago. In doing so, they have offered something rare in modern infrastructure: a second chance at connection, memory, and renewal. Walking the Wabash Railroad Righ...