Newsgroups: soc.roots
Date:         Thu, 16 Apr 1992 23:36:35 -0700
From:         Bob Wier <rrw@ELDEN.CSE.NAU.EDU>
Subject:      Chicago Flood
Comments: To: ROOTS-L@VM1.NoDak.EDU

 For those of us out in the hinterlands who havn't been up to date on
 the Chicago flood which may endanger many records of interest to
 ROOTERS - here is a cross post from the USENET rec.railroad group...


 - Bob Wier

  ---------- insert favorite standard disclaimers here ----------
               home of the mc68hc11 mailing list
         Northern Arizona University / Flagstaff, Arizona
  Internet: rrw@naucse.cse.nau.edu | BITNET: WIER@NAUVAX | WB5KXH

From: jones@pyrite.cs.uiowa.edu (Douglas W. Jones,201H MLH,3193350740,319338287
9)
Subject: The Chicago flood

I'm surprised that nobody's posted on the great Chicago flood.  It's got
railroad connections all over:

1) The Chicago Freight Subway, once run by the Illinois Tunnel Company,
    was the tunnel system that conducted the floodwaters into the
    basements of so many downtown buildings, was built as a freight
    railroad and telephone tunnel system.  The Illinois Tunnel had
    something like 50 miles of 2 foot gauge track, running on 150 volt
    overhead power.  Most of the electric locomotives were standard
    mine equipment, but they built a few of their own.  The railroad
    was an ICC regulated common carrier until it stopped operations
    in 1959.

    The tunnel connected all the LCL freight terminals in central Chicago,
    and for a while, it was heavily used for transfer of small loads
    between terminals.  The tunnel was also heavily used to transfer
    freight from the terminals to the basements of retail operations
    such as Marshall Fields.

    For many years, the Chicago Tribune ran a double-tracked 1 foot gauge
    railroad through one section of the tunnel, used to carry rolls of
    newsprint from their warehouse to their printing plant.  Two of the
    rails were also part of the 2 foot gauge system of the Illinois Tunnel
    company.

    The booklet "40 Feet Under" published by the Interurban Press,
    describes the Chicago Tunnel.  The author has suddenly become a
    celebrity because his book is just about the only authoratative
    source available to the press about the flooded tunnel system.

2) The evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people from Chicago's
    Loop involved emergency action on the railroads serving the area.
    The Chicago and Northwestern railroad is supposed to have abandoned
    all timetables and pressed every piece of stock they could find into
    emergency unscheduled service to get people out of the Loop.

3) The Chicago Tunnel was used to excavate the CTA passenger subway
    system.  This subway was closed by the flooding, so there must still
    be connections between the CTA tunnels and the old freight tunnels.
    Where are these connections?  You can make guesses from the diagrams
    in "40 feet under", but there certainly aren't any details.

    Also, how do you dry out a subway tunnel after that kind of flooding.
    The signal system on the State Street Subway looks like it has a
    block length of less than 100 yards, with fairly standard
    old-fashioned automatic block signalling technology -- how many relays
    need to be checked?
                                        Doug Jones
                                        jones@cs.uiowa.edu
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