New Joliet museum opens bygone railroad tower

The first visitors to the Joliet Railroad Museum on its opening day Friday included a couple of former railroad workers with experience at the old Union Depot Tower.

The tower has been converted to the museum, and it provides a glimpse into past railroad work that is rarely seen, said Bob Hardwidge of Mokena and Ken Connolly of Elwood.

“It’s great because these places were off limits to the public,” Hardwidge said.

Both Hardwidge and Connolly worked for the old Rock Island Railroad, which built the tower to oversee the trains that it first brought through downtown Joliet in 1852.

The towers, where workers operated mechanisms to switch tracks and allow trains to proceed on their way, are disappearing from the railroad landscape.

“Usually, they just level these joints, and that’s the end of it,” Connolly said. “These things are rarely preserved so you can see how they operated.”

The Union Depot Tower could have been demolished, too. But Joliet officials decided to save the structure when creating the new Joliet Gateway Center, which includes the modern station travelers now use for Metra and Amtrak trains.

The plan to open a museum has been in the works since 2016.

The city teamed up with the Joliet Area Historical Museum, which created the displays that provide a self-guided experience for visitors and manages the railroad museum.

Joliet kept the interlocking machine used by workers in the tower to control the switching of trains from one track to another as they proceeded to and from Chicago.

“This machine is really like an artifact from the age of the Titanic, when they were switching from strictly mechanical to electrical,” Hardwidge said. “It’s a hybrid machine.”

Today, that switching is done from remote locations as far away as Omaha.

But in their day, Hardwidge and Connolly stood in the tower overlooking the tracks and saw the trains as they came, switched tracks and went on their way.

“Here, you’d look out the window and you’d get a feel of how the trains operated in response to what you were doing,” Hardwidge said.

Visitors can capture some of that feeling. The tower overlooks trains that continue to pass through Joliet.

The museum contains several information panels over the interlocking machine describing how it worked.

Other panels on the first floor of the tower provide a railroad history of Joliet. The panels featuring historic photos tell the stories of the railroads that have come through Joliet, the Union Depot Tower itself, and the impact of train traffic in the development of the city.

“This was very interesting,” Pam Pryzbylo of Crest Hill said as she and friends left the museum.

The tower, the interlocking machine, and the displays provided insight into things she wondered about for a long time having lived in the Joliet area with a casual interest in the railroads.

“I’ve always been amazed that there are tracks that run east and west, but there are also tracks that go north and south,” Przybylo said. “When you’re on the street, you look and ask, ‘How do they do that?’ ”

More than 40 people came to the museum in its first few hours open to the public.

They included Michael Gardner, a self-described “railroad enthusiast” who drove more than an hour from his home in Cary.

When I heard the tower was being converted to a museum for public access, I was excited about its opening,” said Gardner, adding he was particularly drawn by the opportunity to see the interlocking machine.

The museum entrance is located on the second floor of the Joliet Gateway Center train station, which is at 90 E. Jefferson St. and across from Duly Health and Care Field.

The museum is open 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Admission is $5 but free for members of the Joliet Area Historical Museum.