Drop by Tom Burke's excellent site on famed Chicago transit architect Arthur Gerber.

The Milwaukee Road Historical Association is now selling a book covering the Milwaukee's operations in Chicago. ChicagoSwitching's Tom Burke is the lead author.

Version 5 of the Chicago Switching site is now live. In this version, we've integrated our photos with Google Maps. Beneath the article title is a link to view all of the photos in the article on a map, and below each photo is a [map] link that plots the individual photo onto a map. The Interactive Map page now displays all of our photos organized by location.

The Chicago Terminal Railroad tonight, February 12, 2007, opened up the stretch of the C&E South Line from the cutoff at the Goose Island lead all the way down to where the tracks end near Halsted St.

The railroad's SW-8 by itself made its way down these tracks which had not seen a train since the late 1990s. The last time I recorded any action on this section was in 1998 when a boxcar was spotted at Midwest Zinc on Kingsbury two blocks south of North Avenue. Midwest Zinc is now a vacant lot.

The locomotive pushed asphalt out of the flangeways and off the rails where the city had paved over the track, leaving pieces of broken pavement in its wake.

Finally, the crew made a second run back with a gondola which they placed on Kingsbury St.

Hopefully the new shortline will be able to attract new rail shippers to this section of the line.

As reported in our forum, Peerless will shut it's doors in April.