Lakeview Racine Fuel/Oil info?

[Ethan]

I've gone through pretty much everything I can find on here and elsewhere and find very little info on Racine Fuel/Oil that existed into the 1970s (at least?) at Roscoe and Racine. Once served of course by the Milwaukee Road.

I lived in the area but have 0 memories of this, likely because it was not at all interesting to me back then. Growing up, we rode our bikes all over Lakeview in the 70s and 80s.

Does anybody have any kind of info on this? Photos especially, but even aerial views would be great. ArcGIS, for $100/year, has the possibility of some aerial views from the 70s, but that's a steep price. Even marketing material or similar would be interesting. Best I've found are some Racine Fuel ad listings in the 50s in Chicago Police Association publications.

Thanks,
Ethan

[chuck]

Give Historic Aerials a try
https://www.historicaerials.com/viewer

[Ethan]

Thanks Chuck, great suggestion.

I had looked at the options and unfortunately the granularity of the photos ain't great, which is of course not too surprising. It is better than nothing, but most detail is had to discern.

Best,
Ethan

[TBurke]

Thanks Chuck, great suggestion.

I had looked at the options and unfortunately the granularity of the photos ain't great, which is of course not too surprising. It is better than nothing, but most detail is had to discern.

Best,
Ethan

Ethan-

There is a crisp, aerial photo of the line north of Belmont including of Racine Fuel in the book The Milwaukee Road in Chicago which is back in print. I scanned a photo of it but this site limits me to 500K attachments and it is 3.5 MB in size.

I will try to send it to you via FlickrMail.

You will probably want to look at the images of John Smatlak on Flickr as he lived in that neighborhood in the late 1970s and has many photos of the C&E line.

I make no money from that book where I was the lead author. I recommend it for the many aerial photos from the McCoy collection (he worked for the Milwaukee Road).

https://www.mrha.com/store/product.aspx?Product=253&Name=The+Milwaukee+Road+in+Chicago

I planned on modeling the "gap" between my two N-scale dioramas which would have gone from Belmont north to Eddy but I don't have the space to put a third diorama at this point. I purchased an N-scale set of CTA 4000 series L cars to place on a bridge over the Milwaukee Road line by Racine and Newport.

Tom

[Ethan]

Tom,

Many thanks - I just received this book and yes indeed there is a decent aerial on page 33! Thanks so much. This was long gone before my time, but the grain elevator towers (?) just north of Melrose are intriguing.

Funny enough I think I've bookmarked nearly all of John Smatlak's photos on Flickr related to the C&E. Great resource for modeling. I've even pinged Tangent about some of the unique tank cars seen delivering corn syrup in the late 70s, early 80s era.

Again, many thanks for this pointers! And I really look forward to your third module whenever it comes into being. I'm slowly working on my Athearn Genesis MP15AC and hope to post photos when complete (mostly redoing decoder/sound/lighting and perhaps some details).

Ethan