Fascinating Railroads In Your Own Backyard

by Charles A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Albuquerque NM | March 30, 2025. This isn't a post about garden railroads, although garden railroads are a fascinating subject. Garden railroads pale, however, in comparison to the real railroads many of us are fortunate enough to have within a short walk or drive from our homes.

A garden railway in a backyard - AI graphic

Since my last post, I've posted many comments on Facebook pages with pictures of trains from the past. Those posts made me realize that I've been lucky enough to have the equivalent of a railroad museum and my own private railroad exposition right in my own backyard for most of my life. Blessed with a better than average eidetic memory, I've been able to correct or amplify many of the comments posted with those old photos. I've also been blessed with having lived from the final phases of steam locomotion and electric streetcar use to today, where electric propulsion is having a renaissance and many once-abandoned lines a revival, of sorts, if only for recreation. We are in a golden age of railroading. Old technology is at its pinnacle, and restoration is on the upswing. Brand new tech is everyday showing us how much more can be done.

As I write this, I'm starting to realize that I won't be able to tell my readers about all of my fascinating railroad experiences in just one post, so consider this part of a series. I'm also realizing that I won't be able to provide original pictures for many of them, so graphics are going to be touch and go. Let's get rolling!

The Berwyn Bungalow where I grew up. - Google maps

My parents' house was located on a quiet residential intersection in Berwyn, Illinois, known in 1950 as The City of Homes. What made it that was the total lack of zoning for any business of an industrial nature. Commercial businesses were okay, and so was the Chicago Burlington & Quincy railroad, which, completed in 1864, actually predated the city by about 40 years. To be fair, there were two railroads through Berwyn in 1950, with the Illinois Central branch coming through what would later become Berwyn in 1851, making the CB&Q a Johnny-come-lately. The IC, in 1950, crossed the CB&Q above grade, and with fewer tracks, a short walk from the house. Both were the heaviest industry to be found in The City of Homes. Just east of the IC viaduct, the eastbound CB&Q widened out into a massive yard, then known as Clyde, adding an extra twist to the train traffic passing thorough Berwyn.

I'll get to the IC a little later, but for now, let's focus on what has often been called The Q, In the early 1950s, it was known to most of us in the neighborhood as The Burlington. The mostly east-west mainline of the Burlington ran two blocks (about a half mile) south and the other side of a wide prairie from home.

This old aerial photo from about 1940 shows the rectangle that was the wide prairie. North is to the top. The Burlington crosses from the west end of the yard at right to the lower left. The IC runs on the diagonal from middle left to bottom right on an embankment creating a shadow. The upper right corner of the prairie is 29th St. and Lombard Ave., on the east boundary of Berwyn. My street is the next north-south street to the west. You can see the walking baths created by foot traffic. The white oval is a small wetland that became a skating rink in winter.

The empty lots in those days were called prairies, a holdover from the first decade of the twentieth century when the whole area, then known as Laverne, really was Illinois prairie. You really couldn't see the Burlington from home, too many elm trees. But before I was old enough to walk the half mile to the prairie, I could hear it.

Our house was a Chicago bungalow. (See image above.) Those readers who have ever lived in the Chicago Area will know immediately what this was and still is, and, for the rest of you, think brick, one-story rectangle with a pitched roof and Dutch basement. My small bedroom was in the front of the house. On a summer night, with nothing like air conditioning and the windows open, you could hear the Burlington trains starting to pull their strings of freight cars on their way west. (Everywhere West was a Burlington motto.)

Burlington Route O5a northern type locomotive pictured at West Burlington about 1941. Photographer unknown. From commercial collection.

The sounds of steam locomotives--heavy Northern types, some Mikados, a few Hudsons starting heavy trains--were distinctive. Low explosive chuffs as the engineers pulled out the throttles, rapid and sudden pounding if the giant drive wheels slipped, quick recoveries to the accelerated beats of chuffing and chugging then punctuated by the steam whistles being blown for the first grade crossing west of the yard. Under it all, the bells of the crossing a steady ding ding until the audial package moved farther away, the gates lifted, the bells ceased, and all got lost in the sounds of the crickets, frogs, and cicadas. I wish I had a recording of it now. I wish I had recorded all of it, though the recollections in my head are as accurate as any recording.

Then, more and more, with each passing summer month, the diesels came. The early diesels had sounds almost as fascinating as steam engines. Most, if not all, Burlington diesels were Electromotive products.

The diesels that supplanted steam on the Q.

They had a loud, repetitive burping sound as all of the sixteen cylinders fired in order and gave a slight pause in between each full cycle. When pulling out from Clyde on a summer night at full throttle they gave out a throbbing sound that vibrated or resonated all the way up the street to the front door. As the skilled engineer throttled through transitions in the locomotive's electrical system, the whine of the generator and the grind of the traction motors joined in the throbbing. And they didn't whistle for a crossing, they honked--like six-geese each honking a different note. These were true sounds, an orchestration of sounds rather than the shock waves of steam exploding from high to atmospheric pressure. You seldom heard the sound of only one of these diesels at a time; they always came hooked up in twos and threes and fours. A symphony, perhaps.

I didn't get to go down to the tracks to see the machines that caused all these delicious noises until later. Public school meant the chance to make friends, and some friends actually lived closer to the tracks. It was a different time, and nothing was thought of a

This is what you can see today of the wide prairie. The intermodal facility, storing hundreds of trailer frames for trucking containers, is the second generation of use by the railroad. The first was Freight House Eight, what today would be called a transfer facility, for unloading/loading boxcars to/from trucks. The viaduct carrying the IC (now CN) over the Burlington (BNSF) is just about under the bunny shaped cloud. - Google maps.

five- or six-year-old walking down to a friend's house after school. We all walked farther than that to get to school. No buses, and few parents took the time to walk us to school. At least one friend lived less than a block from the wide prairie, and I'd stand in awe as the top half of a giant 5600 series Northern struggled along the tracks behind the prairie grasses. Then I would follow my friend up his front steps where I discovered a better view over the top of the grass. On other days there would be diesels, more and more of them, painted in grey and red with black pinstriping and the big square Burlington Route emblem in black red and white. I don't know how I kept myself away from there after that.

The IC viaduct over the Burlington, present day. The BNSF has built a private road bridge just behind (east) of the old, concrete clad, through girder bridge. You are looking into the large yard, and behind you is Ridgeland Avenue and Laverne station for Metra. The wide prairie was just to the left of the tracks beyond the viaduct. - John Marvig

One day--miracle of miracles just as a big Burlington steamer approached the viaduct--a black and white diesel of another kind flew westward on the IC over the Burlington tracks. A heavy cloud of black coal smoke blasting up from under the viaduct with the steamer at full throttle enveloped the smaller IC diesel as it hauled a long string of freight cars. I was hooked! That two railroads could conspire to present such a well-choreographed show at no cost to me but to stand on my friend's front steps and watch struck me as extraordinary. What other wonders of railroading could be out there in the larger world just for the sake of being at the right place at the right time?

Typical of the power seen on the IC in 1950s Berwyn, this GP7 is in Decatur IL. - Facebook

The IC used diesels smaller than those on the Burlington. That, and a few other things conspired to make the IC my second-favorite hometown railroad. The mostly black motif--befitting a coal-hauling road--couldn't live up to the promise of bright red or the stainless steel of the Zephyr and other Burlington streamliners I will get to later. Much later in my youth, I learned that the IC didn't go everywhere west, like the Burlington, and that the branch those freight trains were on got only as far west as Council Bluffs, Iowa. The IC also didn't run as fast as the Burlington, whose triple tracks through Chicago's western suburbs were much later designated by railfans as "The Racetrack." To make matters worse, the IC ran much fewer trains and no passenger trains to speak of. That day I became enthralled by the spectacle of two trains running within sight beyond "my" wide prairie? That was the day the Burlington became number one.

In my next post, I'll cover what my father did when he found out his grade schooler walked to Tommy's house just to watch trains. So watch for the next installment of Fascinating Railroads in Your Own Backyard.

And I am Mr. Trains. -- mistertrains@gmail.com

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All other artwork created with by the author.

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