To the hoots and hollers of Chicago-bound riders in the passenger car, engineer “Charley” Wagner urged his train to go faster and faster, trying to beat the steam engine running next to him.
In 1903, the tracks of both the steam and electric railroads ran parallel to each other on a straight run just east of Wheaton. It was too much to resist for the engineers of each line not to race.
So the engineer for the Chicago and North Western or Great Western would put more coal in the steam engines and the motorman of the Third Rail, sometimes called the Roarin’ Elgin, would turn up the current. Flashes of light from the fires and sparks from the electric power sparkled against the dark of the night as they willed their trains to go faster and faster.
Usually the electric train, which could get better acceleration, took the lead early, leaving the lumbering steam engine to catch up.
The electrics won some of those races, but, in the long haul, it was the steam engines that won it all.
Electric railroads, launched in the 1860s, swelled to a vast transportation network that carried 30,000 riders a day across northern Illinois, but they went down with a whimper in the 1950s. There is little evidence today that the system had even existed, except for the trail of the Illinois Prairie Path, which marks much of its route.
Hopkins Stolp Peffers, a lifetime Aurora resident, details the story of the electrics in the Fox River Valley in his new four-volume set of books titled “Aurora-Elgin Area Street Cars & Interurbans,” published by the American Slide-Chart Corp. of Wheaton.
It reads like a scrapbook, filled with historic photographs, copies of ticket stubs, timetables, maps, advertising posters and comments about what life was like when electric street cars ran just about everywhere.
Now 89, Peffers spent the last five or six years writing the book, culling photographs from his own collection and that of his many railroad buddies, people whom he and his family have known for years. It was his grandfather Albert J. Hopkins who started as a vice president for a mule-car street railway operation in Aurora in 1888. From that interest, Hopkins’ law firm about 20 years later garnered the account for the Aurora, Elgin and Chicago railroad.
It was an association that would see eight more of Peffers’ relatives involved with the railroads, from timekeepers and stockroom managers to attorneys and directors.
Peffers’ life was closely entwined with that of the electrics. He knew most of the employees and motormen by name.
“It was nothing for my mother to drop me off at a streetcar in the afternoon while she went to a luncheon,” Peffers said. “I would ride the rails all afternoon and maybe end up at the car barn, where I listened to the motormen and conductors hash over stories of the day.”
He enjoyed helping out by loading the headlights for the trolley cars onto a two-wheeled cart to be brought back to the barn during the day to replace the carbon filaments that made them light.
But from the beginning, as he details in his book, the electric rail system was troubled.
Initially, Elgin and Aurora competed to provide the most modern and efficient urban transportation system. The Elgin City Railways was operating trolley cars in 1890, and the Aurora Street Railroad started in 1891. By the mid-1890s, each company had also built lines to nearby towns.
Around 1900, all of the rail lines were purchased by a syndicate of investors from the Cleveland area and renamed the Elgin, Aurora and Southern Traction Co. (EA&ST). This same company, by 1909 renamed the Aurora, Elgin and Chicago (AE&C), had laid a special three-rail high-speed track (as opposed to overhead electric wires used for power in town) for four routes from the Fox Valley to Wheaton. From there, double track continued to downtown Chicago.
Electric trains ran at 15-minute intervals, sometimes as many as 147 a day. When the AE&C underwent bankruptcy proceedings during World War I, the railroad was divided. Its Third Rail Division to Chicago was reorganized and renamed the Chicago, Aurora and Elgin Railroad (the CA&E, often called the Third Rail, or the Roarin’ Elgin), while the portion that ran between Aurora and Elgin became the Aurora Elgin & Fox River Electric Co. until about 1935, when trolleys were replaced by buses.
The sale of the CA&E to another buyer and two more bankruptcies found the railroad after World War II struggling to survive.
Experts argue about what caused the final demise of the electric rail line. Some say it was politics, but others say that the lines could not have survived without being subsidized by government dollars, as many transportation systems are today.
But most people agree the construction of the new Congress Street Expressway (now the Eisenhower) put the final nail in the coffin for the electric railroad when commuters found it more to their liking to drive their automobiles to downtown Chicago than to ride on a train. “The automobile caused the demise of the electric railroad,” Peffers said.
Passenger service on the CA&E was discontinued in 1957 in a well-known story that left commuters stranded when the line ceased passenger service abruptly in the middle of the day July 3. Freight service ended in 1959, and the track was torn up in 1962 when all hope of resurrecting the electric line was gone.
Other electric train companies that had laid track into the surrounding countryside were the Elgin and Belvidere; the Joliet, Plainfield and Aurora; Chicago, Aurora & DeKalb; Fox and Illinois Union; the DeKalb-Sycamore; and the Woodstock and Sycamore Traction Co. By the mid-1920s, most of them had all but disappeared.
Still, some people remember with fondness what it was like to ride the electrics.
Fred Lonnes, past president of the Fox River Trolley Museum in South Elgin, says he remembers getting up from the rattan seats with impressions of the basket weave left on the backs of his legs.
“The lights would flicker inside as we moved down the track; the air compressor would thump as it got ready to provide the whistle that gave out a warning as we traversed the track,” he said. “The cars would rock and sway as they made their way down the track, and the sooty, acrid smell of burning coal from the heaters would fill the cars in the wintertime.”
The sound of a running car was a combination of a hum of the electric motor and the clickety clack of the wheels as they crossed the joints of track combined with the slide of the trolley pulling along the overhead wire.
Peffers’ book chronicles the development of the street cars from two-man-operated vehicles that eventually evolved in about 1926 into cars operated by one man. Controls were located at each end of the later cars, so that a car would not have to turn around at the end of its line. The conductor would just flip all the seats, disengage one motor, flip the trolley (the bar on the top of the car that attaches to the electric line) and engage the motor on the other end of the car.
Peffers devotes an entire chapter to the summer cars, which were open-air vehicles that were particularly enjoyed by passengers in the warm months. There was no center aisle, though, and when the cars were loaded with passengers, some even dangling off the sides, the conductor would have to climb over the seats to collect fares.
Many of the electric railways built parks to attract traffic during the summer months. The EA&ST completed a park in 1901 just south of Montgomery that it named Riverview Park. Later it changed to Fox River Park to eliminate confusion with the other park of that name in Chicago.
Electric railroads were loved by their passengers because they were clean, convenient and relatively safe, although some mishaps did occur. In 1902, a car on the EA&ST plunged into the Fox River as the bridge in St. Charles gave way midway across the river. There were no serious injuries among the 30 passengers aboard the train, but it took 32 hours to remove the car from its wet surroundings.
And in 1904, during an argument over a seat, a man drew a revolver on a train leaving Aurora. Women and children screamed in panic on the speeding train during the ensuing confrontation between the armed man and two other men. No one was reported injured.
Jim Johnson, whose Wheaton company American Slide-Chart Corp. published Peffers’ book, is also the president of the Illinois Railway Museum in Union.
“Profit was not the motive in publishing this book,” he said. “Peffers is possibly the last of the old-time electric railway-type people who lived in the era when they were being built. His relatives and his family participated in the building of these lines. From a historical standpoint, it was too important to pass up.”
“The books appear to be the most complete treatment of the topic,” said John Jaros, executive director of the Aurora Historical Museum. “Hop lived a lot of this history, and he saw the end of the era.”
