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150 Years on the Rail

Although Evanston, Illinois is not the typical streetcar suburb or bedroom community, the rails that ran through it played a major role in transforming it from a sleepy rural farming community into the “Athens of the Northwest.” That legacy lives on to this day; in an age when many suburban communities barely have bus service, not one but two passenger rail lines serve Evanston. Yet the public transportation system that remains today is but a shadow of what once existed.

As a child growing up in Evanston, I would often wait at the Main Street Chicago & North Western station for my father, who rode the double-decker cars to work in downtown Chicago. While I waited, I would occasionally pass the time by placing pennies onto the rails and, as I watched from the weeds, the big diesel locomotives would come along and flatten them.

In later years, I discovered an abandoned passenger platform near Mulford Street:

When had it had been abandoned? And why? Then I noticed that in old photographs of the downtown area, such as this one,