This Map of the Month was featured in the February 2009 issue of Trains magazine.
The railroad Abraham Lincoln so ardently championed in the 1800s had changed dramatically in the ensuing century. On a mainly double-track speedway (enhanced with Automatic Train Stop in Illinois), diesel locomotives rushed goods from Gulf Coast ports and farms to a heavily industrialized North. Perhaps most surprising, the mighty Illinois Central by the mid-1970s was a cog in a larger machine — one component in a merged railroad (Illinois Central Gulf) that itself was part of a giant conglomerate with interests in real estate (La Salle Properties), financial services (Benjamin Franklin Savings), consumer products (Midas muffler shops), and manufacturing (Waukesha Nuclear Castings). The railroad accounted for 31 percent of the income of parent IC Industries in 1973, a year when the ICG posted an all-time high revenue, thanks to strong grain, coal, and chemical traffic.
Illinois Central Gulf was a transitional railroad — a type of railroad that would include the likes of Chessie System, Erie Lackawanna, Burlington Northern, and Penn Central. They were the stepping stones between the famed railroads of the classic era and the megasystems of today. Transitional railroads were primarily created in a 10-year period between 1963 and 1972 with the merging of parallel systems, rather than those that connected end to end. The driving force behind this movement was the desire to rationalize networks by eliminating excess and duplicative trackage and facilities, thereby realizing significant cost savings.
The 9,400-mile Illinois Central Gulf was formed in 1972 by combining the Illinois Central with the Gulf, Mobile & Ohio — railroads with parallel north-south lines that cried out to be streamlined. Only the core north-south former IC main line carried nationally significant volumes of traffic. Most other lines moved light densities over unsignaled, single-track secondaries and branch lines. (The data for this map came from Federal Railroad Administration zone maps released in 1975 showing traffic density, trackage, and signaling for the ICG in 1973-74.)
Fifteen years of line sales and abandonments followed, culminating in a name change back to Illinois Central in 1987. Canadian National purchased IC’s slimmed-down, 2,400-mile system in 1999, the last of the transitional railroads to disappear.
Railroads included in this map:
Burlington Northern; Chicago & North Western; Illinois Central Gulf; Louisville & Nashville; Illinois Central; Gulf, Mobile & Ohio; Southern; St. Louis-San Francisco; Waterloo
