The Kankakee & Seneca Railroad

The Kankakee & Seneca Railroad ran between its namesake towns beginning in 1881. Linking the CRI&P and The Big Four Railroad, it was nonetheless abandoned in 1933. (Right of Way)

According to Dennis DeBruler, "[the] K&S was organized in 1881, and it was intended to be a link between the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad and the Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis and Chicago Railway. The later was known as the Big Four, and its successor was the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis Railway, CCC&STL. Rock Island and Big Four each owned half of the K&S, but it operated under the Big Four name. 

Nonetheless, the K&S had its own train crews and station agents. The road began operations in 1882 and went between Kankakee and Seneca via Bonfield, Freilings, Union Hill, Essex, Coster, Gardner, Booth, Mazon, Wauponsee, and Langham. It had 42.15 miles of main track and 6.41 miles of sidetracks. It was abandoned Feb 24, 1933. All of the track east of North Gonnam Road south of the river has been removed. And the towns of Freilings and Wauponsee disappeared after the abandonment."

Here we have an Eastbound Kankakee and Seneca mixed passenger/freight train arriving into the town of Bonfield, IL. This was taken some time between 1900 and 1910. The train is lead by a CRI&P 4-4-0. (Josh Biggers via Facebook)


The K&S was primarily a freight line, but also transported passengers. "While the K & S railroad line primarily carried freight, there was passenger service of a sort: one train per day in each direction was listed as an “accommodation.” That term meant there was a lone passenger car attached to the otherwise all-freight train. The drawback to the accommodation train was highly-variable travel time: depending upon demand, the train might stop anywhere along the line to add or drop off freight cars." (Daily-Journal)

Image: Bonfield Station

The western end of the line remains in service, including a bridge over the Illinois River serving industrial customers east of Seneca. Despite being abandoned in 1933, it's still a fairly easy trace along the Illinois farmland.

Thanks as always for reading!

Location: Seneca, IL, 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