I had a vision once. I was standing on the apron of an Amoco station outside Chenoa, filling up during a drive from Chicago. Glancing toward the west, I saw a trainload of the damned, wailing and thrashing their arms about as they were borne off to Judgment through a fiery cloud. Shaken, I described the scene to my wife when I got home. She calculated from the time and location of the sighting that all I had seen was Amtrak’s southbound 3:15 out of Chicago, backlit by a setting sun, passing me at the precise moment that its passengers learned the Amcafe was already out of chicken salad.
Riding a train through the midwest compels one to recast Harry Truman’s favorite saying: The only thing dull in the world is the history you don’t know. Princeton was the home of abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy, who would not have been shot and killed by a mob in Alton in 1837 if he’d had the good sense to get on a train out of town. The name “Mendota” brings a smile to the lips of connoisseurs of canned lima beans. Kewanee’s south side was founded by Connecticutters bent on improving learning and piety among the primitive Illinoisans.
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Five trains a day (four on Sunday) travel from Chicago to the capital, the earliest at 8:15 AM. You can leave Union Station on that one–usually a two-car local, the Loop, which shuttles between Illinois’ official capital and its real one–and get back to Chicago, via the Ann Rutledge, at 9:40 PM. That gives you five and a half hours on the ground in Springfield, assuming everything runs on schedule, which it might.
The options expand considerably for those who are in less of a hurry to get back to Chicago. Indeed, an intrepid explorer equipped with a complete schedule and patience and a generous taste in amusements can cobble together several overnight trips worth the taking. For example, if you wish to see Champaign-Urbana–and who doesn’t?–the earliest you can get there is 6:29 PM (via the Illini). But look at it this way: the next returning Illini leaves for Chicago at 6:52 PM the next day, which gives you more than enough time to take in a concert at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts and tour the Morrow Plots (the nation’s most venerable cornfield), even allowing for the slower pace of life.
And trains are slow, a sort of suspended travel. Trains are great places to fall in love, more social than the car, more leisurely than the airplane, more romantic than both put together. (One regular traveler enthuses, “You can do anything you want on a train if you don’t get caught.”)
If the virtues of the landscape are sometimes subtle, its history is almost wholly lost on the casual traveler. The tracks to Saint Louis take one past the stone walls of Joliet’s Stateville prison and the locks and warehouses of old Lockport on the Illinois and Michigan Canal. Taking a Detroit-bound train at sunset as it snakes across the abandoned steel works on the far south side offers a vision of postindustrial apocalypse. Unfortunately, the significance of such sights is lost on most train travelers. It’s not that they are incurious about what they see. (Though the most-asked-and-least-answered question you hear aboard Amtrak trains is “What time will we get there?” the next one is “What’s that?”) But there’s precious little available to help them. The typical Rand McNally folding maps do not deign to show rail lines, or even the location of train stations. The popular Mobil regional travel guides don’t even mention trains, so perfect is their bias in favor of the car. The few guides published for the train traveler tend to focus on station stops and scant everything in between. I recommend the Federal Writers Project guidebooks to the various states. They’re old, but then so are the rail routes.
Horror stories abound. A state worker took the State House bound for Springfield in the dead of winter. An hour and a half late departing because of snow and frozen switches on the line, the train was stalled for another two hours north of Joliet. (When the train crew left the train, anxious passengers envisioned permanent entombment. The crew returned, however, carrying buckets of fried chicken for everyone–the unions made some friends that day.) Because the signal lights on the track weren’t working, the driver could do only ten miles per hour over the 100 miles between Joliet and Lincoln, arriving in Springfield at 3:30 AM, eight and a half hours late.
