The Rock Island Line. Bill Marvel
A. C. Flagg of New York became treasurer.
On its way to Burr Oak Yard on October 3, 1970, U25B No. 237 pauses at La Salle, Illinois, in the ancient heart of the Rock Island, to await a fresh crew. Paul Dolkos
SW1500 No. 944 is equipped with Flexicoil trucks and geared for 77 miles per hour, neither of which is useful here as the five-year-old unit shuffles cars at Armourdale in September 1971. The locomotive’s usual assignment is to transfer drags among Kansas City’s numerous rail yards. Paul Dolkos
Split Rock Tunnel, 2 miles east of La Salle, Illinois, has long been abandoned as GP7 No. 1279 hustles past with an eastbound in September 1971. Piercing a bluff overlooking the Illinois River, the bore dates to 1851. Terry Norton
With Farnam in command in the field and Sheffield watching the money, things began to move.
By October 10, rails reached Joliet, 40 miles out. A celebratory excursion was called for. On a blustery Sunday morning, a bright and beaming Rogers 4-4-0 named Rocket (not for Rock Island, but for the pioneering George Stephenson locomotive that had hit 29 miles per hour in the famous 1929 Rainhill trials in England) pulled six yellow coaches from the new 22nd Street depot to Joliet, a two-hour journey on still-raw trackage. Because there was nowhere to turn the engine, the train was backed to Chicago, arriving in time for an evening banquet at the Sherman House. Regular service to Joliet, two trains a day, began a week later.
Sixty miles beyond Joliet, La Salle was less welcoming. By March, track gangs began to spike down rail along the foot of the Illinois River bluffs. In anticipation of the railroad’s arrival, local entrepreneurs had been buying up property, but that property was on top of the bluffs. City council demanded that the railroad redirect its line and, and when the railroad refused, the council threatened to forcibly move the tracks. Male citizens were enjoined, under threat of a $10 fine, to lend their muscle to the removal effort. The dispute was settled only after the state legislature affirmed the railroad’s right to build along the river bottoms.
By March 1973, Chicago’s “Rocket House” no longer dispatched passenger power beyond the Mississippi River, but Peoria- and Rock Island-bound trains and suburban trains still fill the ready tracks this morning. Shown are E8A No. 649, E9A No. 660, and AB6 No. 750. Kevin Piper
The westbound Golden State has drawn an interesting assortment of motive power this March afternoon as FP7 No. 402, an E7B, and an E3A lead the road’s flagship past Silvis. Terry Norton
Running on former Great Northern rails, U25B No. 220 and GP40 No. 4705 work a transfer back to Rock Island’s Inver Grove Yard in St. Paul on August 24, 1974. Burlington Northern’s Westminster Tower, background, survived until 2003. Ralph Back
F7A No. 117 came down the old Burlington, Cedar Rapids & Northern on Saturday night. Now turned on the air-operated turntable and coupled to its train, the 25-year-old unit idles in the glow of a Sunday morning at Burlington, Iowa, on November 10, 1974, before setting out on the return trip to Columbus Junction. Dick Hovey
That May, Sheffield and Farnam signed a contract with a group of local investors to build a railroad from Peoria to a connection with the Rock Island. They were joined in the project, called the Peoria & Bureau Valley, by an erstwhile physician turned speculator, Thomas Clark Durant. Only 33, Durant had bought and sold a lot of Rock Island stock.
With no further problems, rails reached Bureau by September and Sheffield in mid-October 1853. By Christmas, when severe weather halted construction, the railhead was only 23 miles out of Rock Island. Business was very good, and the contractors were calling for additional locomotives and cars.
One of only two GP7s to get their noses chopped at Silvis, No. 1275 leads a pair of ex-UP F9Bs on a westbound manifest at Atalissa, Iowa, on a cold March afternoon in 1975. The F98s have just come off the Lafayette coal train. John Dziobko
Rock Makes Tracks
With Rock Island rails advancing across Illinois, in February 1853, the Iowa legislature, meeting in Iowa City, granted three of the road’s original founders—Antoine LeClaire, Ebenezer Cook, and A. C. Fulton—a charter to build another railroad. This new enterprise would reach from the banks of the Mississippi at Davenport across the state to Council Bluffs, and it would be called, logically enough, the Mississippi & Missouri Railroad. Capitalization was set at $6 million.
From the start, the M&M was created to continue the westward march of the Chicago & Rock Island. Besides LeClair, Cook, and Fulton, organizers included Rock Island’s president, John B. Jervis; Farnam, who was the road’s chief engineer and contractor; and Durant. Rock Island’s treasurer, A. C. Flagg, became M&M’s treasurer.
Eastbound at Colona, Illinois, GP7 No. 4517 gleams in Rock Island’s “new image” blue-and-white scheme created by John Ingram. On June 8, 1975, the former No. 1274 is just three weeks out of the Capital Rebuild Program at Silvis shops. Bill Marvel
William Walcott, a Farnam associate, was placed in charge of acquiring right-of-way and looking into possible branch lines. His committee soon recommended that M&M build a branch south from Davenport to Muscatine and northeastward to Cedar Rapids and the Minnesota border. In June 1853, the charter was duly amended. On September 1, Antoine LeClair turned the first spadeful of earth in Davenport, and three days later a survey party led by Grenville Dodge began working westward. The surveyors arrived in Council Bluffs on November 22. Actual construction would not begin for a year and a half.
Across the river, however, track crews were busy. On February 22, 1854, citizens of Rock Island had something besides George Washington’s birthday to celebrate. The first train from Chicago rolled up to the “passenger house” at 5 p.m., announced by church bells, cannon fire, and huzzahs. At a party that evening, N. B. Buford, a longtime Rock Island resident and member of the railroad’s board, raised his glass to toast the “espousal . . . of the Mississippi River and the Atlantic Ocean.” Less than 25 years had passed, he noted, since the first locomotive had run on American rails and less than two since rails had reached Chicago. Then citizens bundled against the cold to watch fireworks displays on both sides of the river. A larger celebration of the new railroad would wait for warmer weather.
On the morning of June 5, two special trains packed with Rock Island stockholders, investors, journalists, politicians, and distinguished guests (among them former President Millard Fillmore) rolled out of Chicago for the formal opening of the 181-mile line. In the evening there was the usual grand banquet with speeches and toasts, and the next day guests boarded five chartered steamboats for two days of excursions along the river. Among their destinations was St. Paul, Minnesota, where citizens were already talking about a railroad of their own.
In August, a full year and a