Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad
The Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad (CB&Q) was an American railroad company whose route network stretched from Chicago through the Midwest and beyond to Denver in Colorado and Billings in Montana . She went on March 2, 1970 in the Burlington Northern Railroad .
Route network
The catchment area of the railway company was essentially defined by the corner points Chicago , St. Louis , Kansas City , Denver , Omaha , Galesburg and Minneapolis-St. Paul limited. The branches from Alliance (Nebraska) to Billings (Montana) in the northwest and from Concord (Illinois) to Paducah (Kentucky) in the southeast fell out of this framework . The subsidiary of the company Colorado and Southern Railway operated a long branch line from Colorado to Texas . In 1929 9,367 miles were operated, in 1969 it was 8,430 miles.
history
The oldest forerunner of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad was the Aurora Branch Railroad , founded on February 12, 1849 . The company wanted to offer a train service between Aurora and Chicago . On September 2, 1850, the first train ran on its own tracks to Turner Junction (West Chicago) and on the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad (G&CU), the predecessor company of the Chicago and North Western Railway . After the G&CU, the Aurora Branch Railroad was the second railroad company to run trains to Chicago. In the beginning, this was done with borrowed vehicle equipment from Galena Road, as our own had not yet arrived. In June 1852, the rail company changed its name to Chicago and Aurora Railroad and built its route further west from Aurora to Mendota, Illinois , where a connection with the Illinois Central Railroad was made. This was followed by the extension of the line to Galesburg (Illinois) , later one of the most important railway junctions, where the Galesburg Yard was a large marshalling yard .
On February 14, 1855, the company changed its name again, this time in "Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad". In the same year, the route to the east bank of the Mississippi River across from Burlington, Iowa was opened by a foreign company. With the opening of the line from Galesburg to Quincy (Illinois) , also a good 100 kilometers downstream on the Mississippi, a year later, both eponymous cities were reached. In 1857 a short distance from Galesburg to Peoria (Illinois) was opened , also by a third party company. All lines were bought up by CB&Q in 1865 at the latest. Furthermore, the railway built its own line from Aurora to Chicago and was thus independent. With the suburban traffic introduced in 1863, this route is the oldest passenger train line still in operation in Chicago.
The CB&Q soon became known as one of the finest "farm railways", as it served agricultural areas, often via branch lines. With the constant purchase of locomotives, wagons, equipment and tracks, it was possible for her to go public in 1862. In the same year it was considered the only Class I company in the USA that could always pay its dividend, never got over-indebted and was always able to meet its payment obligations. In 1864 the route network was 400 miles long.
In 1868 the CB&Q completed two bridges over the Mississippi at Quincy and Burlington and thus reached the state of Missouri on the one hand and that of Iowa on the other for the first time . Across from Quincy it had a connection to the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad (H & St.J) and in Burlington to the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad (B&MR). The H & St.J was the first company in the United States to use rail mail cars to sort letters. In St. Joseph on the Missouri River , the mail was then handed over to the Pony Express . Their route connected the two eponymous cities since 1859 and was the first company to offer a rail connection from Chicago to the Missouri using a ferry across the Mississippi. In 1869 the CB&Q connected the H & St.J of Cameron (Missouri) east of St. Joseph with the help of a bridge over the Missouri with Kansas City (Missouri) . The B&MR, which slowly drove west along an old Indian trail (today's US Route 34 ), did not reach the Missouri River until November 26, 1869 across from Plattsmouth , Nebraska. Then the line was built further west through Nebraska , but with the help of another subsidiary company, the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad, founded in Nebraska in 1869, and initially without a direct rail link over the Missouri River. In the summer of 1870, the subsidiary reached Lincoln , the new capital of Nebraska, and in 1872 Kearney (Nebraska) , where there was a connection to the Union Pacific Railroad . In the same year the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad took over the subsidiary in Iowa. In the summer of 1880, the subsidiary responsible for Nebraska at Plattsmouth completed the missing bridge over the Missouri River and was taken over by the CB&Q; the next construction goal was now Denver , Colorado , which was achieved in 1882. With the completion, the first direct rail connection from Denver to Chicago came about. A year later, the CB&Q finally took over the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad, which it had initially lost to Jay Gould and his rival empire from 1871 . As a result, initially strengthened on the Chicago – Kansas City route, new competitors soon emerged with the Milwaukee Road in 1887 and the Santa Fe in 1888.
With the boom in the Pacific Northwest and the construction of the Northern Pacific Railway and the later Great Northern Railway , construction of a line on the east bank of the Mississippi River to St. Paul began in 1882 . The route led from Aurora to Savanna on the Mississippi River and from there on the Chicago, Burlington and Northern Railroad , in which the CB&Q was one third involved, upstream. It was 25 miles longer than that of the rival companies Milwaukee Road and Chicago and North Western, but less incline. The completion took place in 1886, in 1899 the CB&N was incorporated. The rapid expansion after the Civil War was based on sound financial management led by Boston- based John Murray Forbes and his supporter Charles E. Perkins . Perkins was a successful manager who eventually forged a system of several former subsidiaries, which tripled the size of the railway company from 1881 to 1901 under his leadership. Perkins believed that society needed to be integrated into a larger transcontinental rail system. Although it reached as far as Denver and from 1894 to Billings (Montana) , it missed the planned route to the Pacific. Despite approaching EH Harriman from the Union Pacific, Perkins decided not to look towards San Francisco but to the northwest when looking for a partner. Here, timber and coal supplies were more promising than those of the Union Pacific or the Southern Pacific. In 1901, after a brief but intense takeover battle with the Union Pacific, the Great Northern Railway and Northern Pacific Railway, which were then controlled by James J. Hill , acquired 98% of the Burlington route. A merger of the three companies would take 69 years. After another takeover battle for the Northern Pacific, Hill and Harriman agreed to found the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railway, in which the Union Pacific Railroad held 50% of the shares. This company leased the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad for 99 years with effect from September 30, 1901. This gave Harriman the certainty that the CBQ would not expand further into the sphere of influence of the Union Pacific. With effect from June 30, 1907, the lease was ended.
In 1908, CB&Q acquired the majority of shares in Colorado & Southern with Fort Worth & Denver , which enabled them to expand their influence south to Dallas and on to the port locations of Houston and Galveston on the Gulf of Mexico . A route south was built from Billings that hit the C&S in 1914. In 1916 a connection to the Great Northern in the middle of the prairie was established with a line from Ashland (Nebraska) to Sioux City . The southern Mississippi Valley was also better developed through the construction of a line from Concord (Illinois) to Paducah (Kentucky) in the southeast. It was about this time that society reached its greatest expansion; in the 1920s it operated over 12,000 miles in 14 states. The First World War had the same effect on the railway company as it did on the others: in the 1920s, the freight stations overflowed with wagons. With the global economic crisis , CB&Q had to scrap a good part of it.
In 1929 CB&Q founded the subcontractor Burlington Transportation Company to operate long-distance buses parallel to the rail network. In 1936 this company was involved in the founding of Trailways Transportation System and continues to operate long-distance bus services as Burlington Trailways . Although passenger traffic was slowly declining, the railway introduced the famous Zephyr operation in 1934.
After the Second World War, the vehicle fleet, which was already under the sign of dieselization, was heavily influenced by outdated steam locomotives. The company began dieselization with locomotives from EMD , whose factory was in McCook, Illinois , conveniently south of the three-track main line at La Grange, Illinois . The last steam locomotive ran on September 28, 1959.
The company archive was donated in the 1940s to the Newberry Library , whose director Stanley Pargellis also created a photo documentation of everyday life along the railway line in preparation for the company's 100th birthday.
In 1959, when the last steam locomotive was shut down, the dieselization was over. When the financial situation of the US railways worsened in the 1960s, the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad merged on March 2, 1970, together with the Great Northern Railway , the Northern Pacific Railway and the Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway to form Burlington Northern Railroad .
Locomotives
For the opening between Turner Junction and Aurora in 1850, the "Pioneer" had to be borrowed from the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, which pulled the first train in Chicago two years earlier, due to the lack of its own locomotives. It is now on display at the Chicago History Museum .
As early as 1897, the company was looking for alternatives to steam operation in the form of combustion engines . The Aurora Shops built a bulky and utterly unreliable engine that proved too impractical: they used a 6,000 pound flywheel, and the overheating problems were so severe that even the materials available today would have deformed themselves in minutes. At that time, diesel engines were still too big to be suitable for use that went beyond slow and steady driving.
The EMD E5 was built exclusively for the CB&Q and, unlike its sibling series, was made of polished stainless steel .
passenger traffic
The rail company operated a number of streamlined multiple units called the Zephyre and manufactured by the Budd Company . They represented the most famous and largest fleet of streamlined multiple units in the United States. The Pioneer Zephyr , the first diesel-electric powered, streamlined passenger train, made its first trip on May 26, 1934 from Denver to Chicago. From November 11, 1934, this multiple unit was used between Lincoln (Nebraska) , Omaha and Kansas City (Missouri) in scheduled traffic. Although these distinctive, bare steel units were well known in the United States, they did not attract new travelers. When Amtrak was formed, the last unit was phased out. The California Zephyr (Chicago – Oakland) operated together with the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad and the Western Pacific Railroad still runs on Amtrak as train 5 (westward) and train 6 (eastward). Another Amtrak train, the Illinois Zephyr between Chicago and Quincy, is a modern descendant of the Kansas City Zephyr and American Royal Zephyr trains that previously ran between Chicago and Kansas City .
Other Zephyr connections were:
- Twin Cities Zephyr (Chicago-Minneapolis-St. Paul),
- Mark Twain Zephyr (St. Louis – Burlington),
- Denver Zephyr (Chicago – Denver),
- Nebraska Zephyr (Chicago-Lincoln),
- Sam Houston Zephyr (Houston – Dallas-Ft. Worth),
- Ozark State Zephyr (Kansas City – St. Louis),
- General Pershing Zephyr (Kansas City – St. Louis),
- Silver Streak Zephyr (Kansas City – Omaha – Lincoln),
- Ak-Sar-Ben Zephyr (Kansas City – Omaha – Lincoln),
- Zephyr-Rocket (St. Louis – Minneapolis-St. Paul),
- Texas Zephyr (Denver-Dallas-Ft. Worth).
In cooperation with the Great Northern and Northern Pacific, their transcontinental trains were carried over the tracks of the Burlington between Chicago and Minneapolis. For the Great Northern it was the Empire Builder parade train and its younger brother the Western Star , for the Northern Pacific it was the North Coast Limited and Mainstreeter . The transcontinental trains North Pacific Express (Chicago – Seattle – Tacoma) and Atlantic Express (Seattle – Tacoma – Chicago) were also operated jointly with the Northern Pacific Railway . The Black Hawk night train was operated between Chicago and Minneapolis as a counterpart to the daytime operation of the Twin Zephyrs and as a competitor to the Pioneer Limited of Milwaukee Road and the North Western Limited of Chicago and Northwestern .
literature
- Stanley M. Pargellis, Lloyd Lewis (Eds.): Granger Country: A Pictorial Social History of the Burlington Railroad . Little, Brown, Boston 1949.
Web links
- Burlington Route Historical Society
- Daily Life Along the Chicago Burlington and Quincy Railroad (Newberry Library) - Digitized image inventory for Pargellis' book project 1949 (cf. literature)
Individual evidence
- ^ A b George H. Drury: The Historical Guide to North American Railroads . 2nd Edition. Kalmbach Publishing Co., Waukesha 1999, ISBN 0-89024-356-5 , pp. 93-96 .
- ^ A b Patrick C. Dorin: Everywhere West . Superior Publishing Company, Seattle (Washington) 1976, ISBN 0-87564-523-2 .
- ^ Carlos A. Schwantes: Going Places: Transportation Redefines the Twentieth-Century West . Indiana University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-253-34202-3 , pp. 187 ( Google Books ).
- ^ Glenn Yago: The Decline of Transit: Urban Transportation in German and US Cities, 1900-1970 . Cambridge University Press , 1984, ISBN 0-521-25633-X , pp. 172 ( Google Books ).
- ^ John Jaros: Aurora Historical Society: Birthplace of Burlington Railroad. (No longer available online.) Beacon News, March 22, 2012, archived from the original on May 11, 2012 ; accessed on November 3, 2012 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
