Chicago Great Western Railway HO Scale Models

The Chicago Great Western Railway traced its origins to 1885, when St. Paul businessman Alpheus Beede Stickney organized a regional line in Minnesota known as the Minnesota and Northwestern Railroad. This predecessor concern began building southward from St. Paul toward Iowa, and by 1887 the property had been reorganized as the Chicago, St. Paul and Kansas City Railroad. Under Stickney's aggressive leadership, the carrier extended its reach in multiple directions, pushing west to Omaha, Nebraska, south toward St. Joseph, Missouri, and east to Chicago via a tunnel near Dubuque, Iowa. In 1892 the railroad underwent another reorganization and adopted the name Chicago Great Western Railway, the identity it would carry for the remainder of its independent existence. That same year, the company established its headquarters and primary mechanical facilities at Oelwein, Iowa, a centrally located point on the main line where an enormous shop complex was eventually completed by 1899, earning the small city the local nickname of Shop City. Operating across a four-state territory that encompassed Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Nebraska, the Chicago Great Western linked Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Omaha, and Kansas City. Because its routes ran through the heart of the midwestern agricultural region, the railroad earned the marketing nickname the Corn Belt Route. It faced stiff competition from older and better-capitalized carriers throughout its existence, which pushed the company toward a persistent culture of operational innovation. The CGW was among the earliest American railroads to experiment seriously with internal combustion-powered self-propelled cars, beginning with McKeen motorcars in 1910, and it launched trailer-on-flatcar piggyback service as early as 1935, expanding that operation to regular intermodal service between Chicago and St. Paul within a year. The railroad completed its conversion to diesel motive power by 1950, relatively early for a carrier of its size. Financial pressures were a recurring theme throughout the railroad's history. The Panic of 1907 cost founder Stickney control of the property, which passed into the hands of financier J.P. Morgan. The Great Depression forced retrenchment, and the railroad entered bankruptcy reorganization in 1941, emerging under new ownership by a group of investors known as the Kansas City Group. A period of modernization followed under president William N. Deramus III, who assumed leadership in 1949 and pursued aggressive cost-cutting and efficiency improvements before departing in 1957. By the 1960s the railroad's management recognized that its position in an increasingly consolidated industry was precarious, and president Edward Reidy testified before the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1965 that the carrier could not long survive as an independent railroad given the surplus of competing transportation available across its territory. Merger discussions with the Chicago and North Western Railway had begun as early as 1964, and after several years of opposition from competing railroads, the consolidation was formally completed on July 1, 1968. At the time it was absorbed, the Chicago Great Western operated approximately 1,411 miles of track and had generated roughly 28.7 million dollars in freight revenue during 1967. The Chicago and North Western, which bore the reporting mark CNW and was itself later absorbed into the Union Pacific system, wasted little time in rationalizing the combined network and abandoned the majority of the former CGW trackage in the years following the merger. The Chicago Great Western thus became a fallen flag, remembered today for its distinctive Corn Belt Route identity, its early embrace of intermodal freight, and its long struggle to compete as an independent carrier in one of the most densely railroaded regions of North America.