Illinois Railway Museum in McHenry County plans expansion with new research center, more streetcar tracks

A 1950s diner and then a row of brick facades and a relocated 1851 train depot facing an empty field. Half a mile of streetcar tracks that lead into unfinished roadwork.

It’s the beginning of a reimagined story the Illinois Railway Museum’s staff and volunteers are trying to tell on their enormous campus in Union, one about America’s past and maybe its future.

“The museum has a story to tell about how ingrained into American culture trains were 50, 100 years ago,” museum board member and civil engineer Zach Ehlers said. “These trains were integral to small town America. That was how people connected to each other before cellphones and the internet.”

Union’s Illinois Railroad Museum, which celebrates its 70th anniversary this year, seeks to take visitors back to such a time and place with a planned expansion that once complete, involves a 1950s Midwestern Main Street, complete with what will look like an old movie theater palace, an extra mile of streetcar track and the new Chicago & North Western Historical Society archive center, museum staff said.

The timeline for all of this work remains in flux, as engineering and architectural renderings for the Main Street project are underway, and once those are complete, the museum will start fundraising later this year, Ehlers said.

“We’re not under any kind of five-year plan,” said Marcus Ruef, the museum’s charter coordinator and chairman of the special events planning committee. “It’s all going to be completed as resources allow. We are hurrying it along, and we understand the value of enhancing the site.”

The museum also has track pieces for a turntable that they’d like to install eventually, Ruef said.

[ Here are the events during the Illinois Railway Museum’s 70th anniversary ]

In the meantime, anniversary events kicked off this past Saturday with a celebration of the North Shore Line, which linked Chicago to Milwaukee. Other special events Ehlers said to look out for this year include a trolley parade on July 1 with over 70 cars and a special museum showcase weekend, during which trains – some of the museum’s rarer diesel and electric equipment – will run overnight.Photos: Illinois Railway Museum

The museum’s campus – full of sheds packed with hundreds of locomotives and railcars – is a celebration of railroad history, but it also is a reminder that so many of these engines and their lines live distinctly in the past, Ruef said.

“The Midwest was the epicenter of America’s inter-urban network,” Ruef said. “And what people don’t know about Chicago is that the Metra we see today represents only part of the system, a much more robust rail system that melted away before the RTA (Regional Transportation Authority). Chicago still has an extensive network, but it’s nothing compared to what it used to be.”

The museum itself has gone through several evolutions, facilities general manager David Diamond said.

[ Photos: Illinois Railway Museum's North Shore Line event ]

Originally, in 1953, it was located along the now-defunct North Shore Line. Once the museum’s collection of trains became too large for that site, it was moved to its current site in Union, at the time farmland, and rails were laid down to bring trains to the current site in 1964, Diamond said.

Ruef said both visitors and staff are fascinated by trains, either by the locomotives themselves or the intricate rail lines and infrastructure created for them. Ruef himself worked for over 50 years in the rail industry, and in his time as an engineer, he ran some of the engines that are now in the museum’s collection.

Ehlers remembers riding the Metra as a child with his grandmother on the South Side of Chicago for her daily commute downtown. That – along with Thomas the Tank Engine – helped foster in Ehlers a lifelong appreciation for locomotives.

“The public perception of trains is very much related to how they see it in their day-to-day lives,” Ehlers said.

Not all the trains at the museum are distinctly of the past: while the museum’s inventory goes back as far as horse-drawn street cars from the 1950s, the museum also has diesel locomotives and freight cars still in use today, Diamond said.

One of the staff’s favorite engines is the North Shore Line’s electro-liner. The salmon-and-teal locomotive served “electro-burgers” in the tavern car from 1941 to 1963 and had a second lease on life with the Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, serving the Philadelphia region, before coming to the museum in the 1980s.

The decline of the railways isn’t viewed by staff as a tragedy, Ruef and Diamond said, but rather a complex nexus of business decisions – private railroads shut down if they didn’t make money – and shifting cultural mores.

“The ‘50s and ‘60s were an era of ‘It’s all about me,’ ” Diamond said. “ ‘I want to start my car. I don’t want to ride the train, it’s slow.’ It was a different era. People weren’t as environmentally conscious as they are now.”

Ruef also said that the national rail network, nearly three times larger at the turn of the 20th century than today, was overbuilt, and the transition to taxpayer-funded rail networks happened to slowly to save lines like the North Shore Line, which was effectively cannibalized by the Edens Expressway, built in 1951.

A renewed interest in trains is picking up steam around the Midwest, Ehlers said, and, like the new track they hope to build on the museum campus, the role of trains in America may be coming full circle.

But despite a heightened desire for more robust public transport, Ruef said he was skeptical trains will make a regional comeback to the level of Europe or Japan.

“People will talk about why they don’t have trains in the U.S. like in Europe,” Ruef said. “I said, ‘Well, when you were in Europe, how often did you eat at Cracker Barrel?’ They said, ‘They don’t have Cracker Barrel in Europe.’ Well, there you have it: they have nice trains, we have Cracker Barrel.”