In 1938 there was an aerial survey done of the state of Illinois. Now why is this awesome of railfans? Because I’ve got aerial photos of Chicago from 1938!!! Actually, it’s Cook County (where Chicago is in), and I can get most other IL counties too, I just haven’t put them up. Anyways, I put all the photos up on a website, http://ilaerialphotos.com/ and I figured that I’d share them on here. It’s fascinating to see Chicago back in the golden age of railroading! If you want the direct link to the photos, it’s here: http://ilaerialphotos.com/photos.php?county=Cook
…Awesome…! i will spend more time checking this out. Believe I do find “Meigs Field”. For 1938, this is impressive.
Meigs was built after WWII-- did you mean Midway? (Dunno if it was called that then-- see the RR crossing the field E to W, with airport expansion under construction on the north side?)
If you look closely at Midway Airport you may see an E-W RR track (BRC) going thru the middle of the airport
11
Thanks for the info. I believe I do see the “artificial” strip of land that would eventually become {Meigs Field}. Did not really know when that strip of land was made into the landing strip.
Believe that strip of land was created for the Exposition or perhaps it might have been called a “World’s Fair” back roughly 1934…
I have been into both fields {Midway too}, and neither one seems very big to land or take off from…
Wow… a RR right through the middle of Midway… I’m actually wondering if the tracks were paved like a grade crossing so planes could land right over them (actually in Karachi, Pakistan, I think, although I could have my city mistake, a railway line, the Khyber Pass Railway, actually does cross the airport’s runway at grade, although I believe the line is out of service now due to a washout…). The tracks were actually Chicago & Western Indiana, not BRC, per Midway’s wikipedia article and were removed in 1941.
Actually upon some further research, based on this article: http://www.chitownads.com/k/idx/14/140/Chicago_History/article/Midway_Airport__History__Some_Fun_Facts.html it seems that in 1936 Chicago Authorized a doubling of the size of midway - if you look at the northern half, there are no hangers there or anything except pavement, so it is probably under construction when the photo was taken and then in 1941 the RR was removed to unify the two halves of the airport.
Fun stuff!
BUT… WHAT IS THIS?:
http://ilaerialphotos.com/images/counties/Cook/images/0bwq03025.jpg
Zoom in after it loads and then scroll to the bottom left, then click in the horizontal scroll bar once or twice (maybe 3 times if you have a narrow window). You should see a figure 8 track. It appears to be a figure 8 (over/under) RR track! It seems to have only one connection at the bottom of the 8 on the right.
Any ideas?
I wish I knew more about the area to be able recognize exactly where it is so I can look on Google Earth to see what is there now. There is a large RR yard with a 3/4 roundhouse to the NE of the figure 8.
HA! I FOUND IT on Google Earth! But, drat! It ain’t there no mo’.
The location now appears to be some sort of scrap yard (?) with many N/S tracks and a complete loop where the figure 8 WAS.
It is south of the river that is south of Blue Island. Directly south of the intersection of W 135th St and Mozart St, and due east of Sacramento Ave. The southeast edge of the triangular area is the Robbins Metra line.
Google Earth’s TimeLine goes back to 1999 and it shows the area is about the same then as it is now. Center coordinates are about: 41* 38’ 45.5"N, 87* 41’ 29.5" W
Still, anyone know what it WAS?
Ha, that sure is quite the curiosity! Anyone know the number to that scrap yard by any chance? I’ll call 'em, maybe there’s an old-time there who would know…
I finally got around to posting some more counties besides just Cook on the site - http://ilaerialphotos.com
I got the following counties up (mostly around Chicago):
- Boone
- Champaign
- Cook
- DeKalb
- Dupage
- Grundy
- Hancock
- Kane
- Kankakee
- Kendall
- Lake
- McHenry
- Will
- Winnebago
LOTS of great railroading history goodness in there! 
Enjoy!
The earliest aerial photos I had the chance to work with were series 1928 (out of USGS, have a bullseye level in the image, south Texas), so these are fairly early and the mapping industry (analog and all done by eye with a stereoscope and pen, the Kelsh plotter was yet to come) was still working out the bugs. The folks I work with in Peoria, Bloomington and Champaign will be interested in this stuff as in search for evidence of prior occupation.
Hadn’t got to the standard 9" x 9" or larger square format yet. Did these come from negatives or contact prints?
The area where the figure-eight was, in either Blue Island (most likely) or Robbins was west of the plant used by the United States Railway Manufacturing Company (later Evans Railcar Manufacturing Company) for the assembly of freight cars throughout the 1970s. It was later used by the Iowa Interstate as their yard in the Chicago area, and as a lumber transloading terminal.
Interesting shadows on the figure-eight. Was that a fill or a trestle at the north end?
Who knows? This could have been the inspiration for scores of toy-train layouts from the Depression era forward!
On the north end, that looks like either trolley poles or catenary frames on the inner/ sunward side of that curve. It also looks like it was all fill - trestles were expensive, and they would have shown more ‘daylight’ in the shadow areas someplace along the way, what with all those curves generating shadows in many different orientations with repsect to the track. Also looks like several cars on the southern loop, at the lower left and upper right.
Might this have been an early version of the AAR’s (now TTCI’s) “FAST” = “Facility for Accelerated Service Testing” test track in Pueblo, Colorado ?
In any event, I expect that it would have gotten a write-up or some publicity someplace in the trade press back then, which may be a way to find out more about it.
Carl - This ought to be posted over on one of the Model Railroading Forums, too. A lot of anxiety can be alleviated now because - “Yes, there was indeed an actual prototype for the up-and-over ‘figure-8’ track plan !” [:-,] [swg]
Thanks, sawtooth500, for compiling, posting, and sharing !
- Paul North.
All of these photos were originally posted on the web by the University of Illinois at http://www.isgs.uiuc.edu/nsdihome/webdocs/ilhap/ - however the U of I site is not user friendly at all and the photos there are posted in a specialty format that most people won’t be able to open. All I did was re-convert the photos to jpegs and present them on a website in a user-friendly way. Now how U of I got the originals I’m not sure if they scanned negatives, contact prints, or what but you could search their site and possibly email them if you want more information on that.
We have a similar website here in Pennsylvania called “Penn Pilot - Historic Aerial Photographs of Pennsylvania”, run by Penn(sylvania) State (University) and the Pennsylvania Geological Survey. See: http://www.pennpilot.psu.edu/ , as well as the attractive ‘nose art’* on the engine nacelle in the far upper left corner there . . . [swg] (*See: http://www.nose-art.net/ )
Below is some ‘meta-data’ information on the Penna. aerial photos from the “About” webpage. Since they appear to have been created by the USDA, I would presume that the Illinois photos have a similar provenance, until better or more authoritative information as to their origin is provided.
- Paul North.
About Penn Pilot
What is Penn Pilot
Penn Pilot, a project sponsored by the Pennsylvania Geological Survey, is an online library of digital historical aerial photography for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Using the interactive map provided on this website, you can browse, view, and download thousands of photos covering the Commonwealth from 1937 to 1942 and 1967 to 1972.
What is the source of the photos?
The photos were produced by the United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Adjustment Administration (now known as the Farm Service Agency).
What are the characteristics of the original photographs?
The original photos are black-and-white 9” x 9” and 9” x 7” prints with a scale of 1:20,000. Some northeastern counties were flown between 1967-1972 from a higher altitude;
Here is the history of the IL photos, taken from the U of I website:
On May 12, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which was originally administered by the United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Adjustment Administration (USDA-AAA). Since the mid-1930s, the USDA-AAA, now the USDA Farm Services Agency, periodically acquired nationwide aerial photographs by county. These aerial photographs were originally used by the USDA-AAA to assess the nation’s agricultural lands and served as the basis for the national soil surveys.
USDA-AAA aerial photographs are widely recognized as a unique and detailed record of the cultural and physical landscapes of Illinois. Aerial photography is intensively used for diverse purposes by government agencies, surveyors, planners, consulting scientists, engineers and other individuals. These purposes include determination of past land uses, restoration of natural areas, assessing historical changes in stream dynamics, and a variety of other applications.
Statewide coverage of USDA-AAA aerial photographs was first achieved for Illinois from 1936 through 1941. Approximately 35,350 individual frames were acquired for complete coverage of the state.
Because of deterioration and stability issues, the original 7-inch by 9-inch and 9-inch by 9-inch nitrocellulose (silver nitrate) negatives were destroyed at the National Archives in the 1980s. The United States Navy and the National Archives made small-format copies of the negatives prior to the destruction of the original negatives. These copies, and the photographic prints made from them, are of extremely poor quality. Therefore, photographic paper prints made from the original large-format negatives are the best remaining representation of this photograph collection.
Nearly complete photographic paper print collections for Illinois exist at the Illinois Department of Natural Resources Off
Quentin, if you check over at the Indiana D.O.T. website, they have historic aerial photos of Indiana as well. Some counties as far back as 1938. I believe they go back to 1941 for Delaware county. You can browse the thumbnails for free, and once you find what you are looking for, then order quality jpegs with about 10 times the quality, for $10 each
Picture BWQ-08-96 in the NE quadrant either has some distortion to the roundhouse at the PRR 58th Street facilities or it is out of round. I suspect the latter which is interesting. Comiskey Park is just visible in the top right corner of this photo.
I am occupying a lot of my time looking at Google Earth to find and list all the evidence of Roundhouses I can find.
In the referenced photo, in addition to the “oval-house” you mention I noticed that there is a second roundhouse to the east of it, so I decided to check them against my list to see if I have either of them listed.
I have matched up the photo with an image from Google Earth and used Comiskey Park as a major landmark to aid in the matching things up.
The first thing I noticed is… Whoops… When did Comiskey Park get rotated 90-degrees clockwise?
The 2nd thing is that there is no evidence using Google Earth that either roundhouse ever existed. I see no buildings or even outlines on the ground nor track layout that would lead one to believe a roundhouse was ever in either place. Even using their “Historical Imagery” feature to see older photos neither of them are in evidence.
Google Earth needs to get hold of those photos and add them to the Historical Imagery feature!