Hello, I surfed into this forum via some research I\'m doing into the history of the Cragin neighborhood.
As there seems to be interest in the Bloomingdale Line I\'d like to share some history of it as this line figures in Cragin history.
The line was actually the main line of the Chicago & Pacific (C&P), which opened for service to Elgin in 1873. The C&P eventually reached Savannah, Illinois. The Milwaukee & St Paul built into Chicago in 1872, just after the fire, and came in at a diagonal, coming into town along the CN&W at Western Ave. The M& StP became the CM&StP after making the Chicago connection.
The C&P and CM&StP lines were separate, and crossed at Pacific Junction. The CM&StP took over the C&P in the early 1880s.
A brief corporate history of the C&P can be found at the Wichita State Universtiy Special Collections
on line finding aid for one of their collections.
The C&P generated suburban developement all along its line, and the sucessor CMStP & P (Milwaulkee Road) apparently maintained passenger operations over the Bloomingdale line fairly late, it seems.
Stations appear on this 1898 West Side Elevated system map (the Humboldt Park branch was providing competition by that time). Stations east of Pacific Junction where Elsemere, Humboldt, a station at Milwaulkee Avenue, and a station on the Kingsbury Line and on Goose Island:
Stations probably looked like the one at Bartlett, as this is the last orginal C&P era station on the line
(from the Villiage of Bartlett website)
I don\'t know when the track elevation occured, but, based on the following ariel photos it appears that the elevation may have made room for stations, as the embankment widens at the locations of at least two of the stations on the above 1898 map:
One can imagine passenger traffic was light as this area was served by the Humboldt Park branch of the L as well as streetcar lines. At some point commuter service was re-routed at Pacific Junction following the route Metra follows today, and Bloomingdale became freight-only.
My familiarity with this line is mostly with the Galewood Yard and related operations as I used to live three blocks from the yard.
Here is a before and after pix. The first was from last weekend. Not much is left, just a few yard tracks, with abandonded grain silos from the former Glidden -->Central Soya-->ADM plant (now gone).
Here is the same area in the 1940s, a Farm Service Admin pix...
. The Galewood Yard was fairly active into the 1960s, until operations where moved to Bensenville, I guess.
Here is a pix of a train moving pat the Cragin station onto Cragin Junction (to the BRC, I guess?) ...CP & Soo Line engines.
There isn\'t much of a Cragin station anymore, but in the early to mid \'60s there a real station was on-site, with a waiting room, office, and station agent. The building probably dated to the grade elevation as it was on the the north side of the tracks, while the original station (according to old maps) was on the south side.
Anyway, I hope this was of interest. Thank you all for this great site!
Jeff
