Experiments with real dirt as a base ground cover. I scooped this up from Lincoln Park, baked it at 400F for 20mins, and sifted it a few times. It's... messy but I think I like the look.
Order placed, thanks for the heads up! When it arrives I think I'll visit my mom in Glenview and then head over to Grandpa's Place on Prarie Ave. next to the tracks to page through the issue...
Progress (like it or not)... looking down at the C&E grade crossing at Waveland Ave. and ROW to the southwest, April 2015. I have to wonder what interesting stuff they found under the old parking lot asphalt. I'm feeling an itch to build a diorama of this scene as it looked in the 40s, probably from the perspective of the McDonald's sign.
I would love to see this operation as well. I grew up in Glenview; hanging around that area in the late 70s/early 80s, I was (unsurprisingly) very fascinated by the remnants of the freight spur embedded in the pavement in front of Rugen's meat market. Wish I had taken some pics (how many times have all of us said that...)
Not sure this has been posted before .. press the Zoom button to access an amazing level of detail. No idea how accurate it is, but there's a ton of railroad stuff to look at: http://www.greatchicagofire.org/item/ichi-14892
Came across this plan for the park via the Southport Corridor feed on Facebook. Nice to see such clear acknowledgement of the railroad as mentioned by Brianbobcat.
This plot will become a city park. Looks like the last visible track fragment north of Diversey (that I'm aware of) may be in jeopardy so.. of course I took a couple pics.
A couple years ago when this was an active local parking lot, I wandered in for a closer look and picked up these artifacts. Was amazed, at some level, that they were just lying around after all these years - there hasn't been a train through this spot since 1973 I believe, right?
Love this topic - here's one of my favorite roundhouse images. While spending 6 (haha) years at the University of Wisconsin Madison, I never had any idea that this site had a massive MILW roundhouse on it:
Knowing what was going on, I didn't bike down Kingsbury between North Ave. and Division all last year, as I normally would. Couldn't stomach the carnage Well, I checked it out the other day and while there are a few artifacts if you look closely, in general the whole stretch has been scrubbed clean - more so than I was expecting. This is pretty much all that's left:
So I figured it's time to post several shots I took on this stretch during the summer of 2011 for posterity. In retrospect, it's pretty wild how much was left.