Chicago & North Western HO Scale Models

The Chicago and North Western Railway traces its origins to the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, which began operations in December 1848 and was formally chartered in January 1836, making it one of the earliest railroads in the Midwest. The Chicago and North Western Railway itself was chartered on June 7, 1859, just days after acquiring the assets of the bankrupt Chicago, St. Paul and Fond du Lac Railroad. A pivotal early development came on February 15, 1865, when the North Western merged with the Galena and Chicago Union, absorbing the line that is generally regarded as the true ancestor of the entire North Western system. Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, the railroad expanded aggressively through acquisitions, taking in the Winona and St. Peter Railroad in 1867, the Sioux City and Pacific Railroad in 1880, the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad in 1884, and the Milwaukee, Lake Shore and Western Railway in 1893, among others. By the close of the nineteenth century the company operated more than 5,000 miles of track and had rostered nearly 1,400 locomotives along with tens of thousands of freight cars. The railroad built a substantial operational infrastructure to support its expansive network. Major shop and yard facilities were developed at multiple points across the system, including extensive locomotive and car repair facilities on the west side of Chicago that eventually became known as the 40th Street Shops, as well as back shops in Clinton, Iowa, and Winona, Minnesota. The Proviso Freight Yard, constructed between 1926 and 1929 approximately twelve miles west of downtown Chicago in suburban Cook County, grew into one of the largest classification yards in the world, with track mileage measured in the hundreds and a capacity for more than 20,000 cars. The railroad carried enormous volumes of agricultural commodities including corn, wheat, sugar beets, and potatoes, with its Chicago potato handling facilities ranked as the largest in the nation. It also served as a critical eastern connector for Union Pacific's passenger traffic arriving from Omaha and points west, while its own 400-series streamliners provided competitive intercity passenger service throughout the region. Despite this scale, mid-century pressures from highway competition and shifting traffic patterns forced the company into bankruptcy, from which it emerged reorganized in 1944. The postwar decades brought a series of major consolidations that significantly reshaped the North Western. The company had controlled a majority interest in the Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis and Omaha Railway since 1882, leasing it formally in 1957 and fully merging it in 1972. On November 1, 1960, the railroad acquired the Minneapolis and St. Louis Railway, a roughly 1,500-mile system running between Minneapolis and Peoria, Illinois. On July 1, 1968, the Chicago Great Western Railway, itself approximately 1,500 miles in length with lines reaching Chicago, the Twin Cities, Omaha, and Kansas City, was merged into the North Western, providing access to Kansas City and consolidating parallel competing routes. That same year the railroad absorbed two former interurban lines in Iowa. In 1972, the employees of the railroad purchased the company, renaming it the Chicago and North Western Transportation Company and incorporating the phrase "Employee Owned" into its branding. Following the collapse of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad in 1980, the North Western successfully acquired approximately 400 miles of the former Rock Island's well-engineered Spine Line between the Twin Cities and Kansas City via Des Moines, after the Interstate Commerce Commission approved its bid of roughly 93 million dollars in June 1983. By the late 1970s and into the 1980s, the railroad began shedding lightly trafficked branch lines across Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and the Dakotas, reducing its system from a peak of more than 12,000 miles to approximately 5,000 miles by 1995. A significant portion of sold trackage in the Dakotas became the Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern Railroad. In 1985 a new holding company, CNW Corporation, assumed ownership of the transportation subsidiary, and in 1988 the Blackstone Capital Partners group orchestrated a leveraged buyout of the corporation. Union Pacific Railroad, which had long relied on the North Western as its primary connection into Chicago from Omaha, purchased the Chicago and North Western outright in April 1995, fully integrating it into its own operations. The North Western thus ceased to exist as an independent carrier, becoming a fallen flag after more than 135 years of operation. Its legacy endures most visibly through the dense Chicago commuter rail corridors it once operated, now served by Metra, and through the Union Pacific main lines across Nebraska and Wyoming that still carry the transcontinental freight traffic the North Western once funneled into Chicago.