If Union Station is center stage, where Amtrak meets its public and sets the stage for its long-distance performances, backstage is the 14th Street Coach Yard, where locomotives and cars are repaired and trains are assembled and dispatched.
“It’s a huge show that goes on every day, but it’s invisible to the public,” said Stan Brandt, operations manager for Chicago’s 20th Century Railroad Club, an organization of rail fans located at 329 W. 18th St.
“We have so much rail activity right in the heart of the city,” he added, “and no one knows it’s there, except maybe (Metra’s) Burlington commuters, though I wonder if they even glance at it as they ride past the yard every day.”
The Burlington commute brings passengers past the yard on main tracks 1 and 2, the eastern boundary of the Metra yard (which is owned by Burlington Northern Santa Fe) and the western edge of Amtrak’s land. Both rail lines use these tracks into the south end of Union Station. And together, the two rail yards occupy an area bounded by Canal Street on the west, Taylor Street on the north, the Chicago River on the east and Lumber Street (just north of 18th Street) on the south.
Even compared to Union Station’s 14-acre interior, the 14th Street yards are massive, with 68 acres split between Amtrak’s 48 and Metra’s 20.
Overlooking the Amtrak yard is a six-story control tower where W.L. O’Dea, superintendent of customer services, coordinates activities and solves problems by phone.
“Passenger railroading is a very detailed business,” said O’Dea, a fourth-generation railroad worker. “It’s very capital- and labor-intensive.”
Because Amtrak basically is operating long hotels on wheels, railyard workers attend to details as diverse as repairing engines, replacing the wheels on a sleeping car, checking water supplies and restocking toilet paper.
A lot of the work is focused on keeping everything moving. From the glass-encased Amtrak control tower, O’Dea can see short-haul passenger coaches moving in and out of the yard and long-haul coaches exiting the inspection building, which can hold as many as 28 cars on two sets of tracks. Below the tracks are pits that allow workers to walk the length of the trains and inspect the undercarriages.
In the car shop, five sets of tracks accommodate cars that need wheels replaced, refrigeration repairs or major electrical work. In the engine house, up to 20 locomotives are fueled, traction motors are changed and wheels are resurfaced.
On the storage tracks, cars wait to go out and a few are in line for maintenance. Switch crews, coach cleaners, train directors, levermen, stationmasters, tower operators and yard masters are some of the 400 workers that keep the yard running 24 hours a day.
“It’s like a life-size jigsaw puzzle we put together everyday,” said Don Crimmins, a 25-year Amtrak veteran and a transportation manager at the 14th Street Coach Yard since 1986.
“It’s frustrating work, and it’s satisfying, too,” said Crimmins.
According to O’Dea, frustrations most often result from miscommunication and tight deadlines for preparing trains for their next load of passengers at Union Station. Satisfactions, he added, come from working with the talented people at the rail yard.
“When you have a nearly impossible situation that all comes together just because the people who work here want it to–and that happens more often than not–it’s very satisfying,” said O’Dea.
“Chicago is a major junction for personnel and equipment,” said O’Dea. “That and the size–our facility here is so large–makes Chicago different from all other Amtrak locations.”
Amtrak has a total of of 17,000 arrivals and departures a year.
Another thing that makes Chicago different is its history of railroading. Though the foundation of Chicago’s transportation industry was the Illinois and Michigan Canal, Donald L. Miller points out in his book, “City of the Century”:
“The very year the canal was opened, however, Chicago hitched its future to a rival means of transportation. In 1847, the city did not have a single mile of railroad track. Ten years later, it was the rail center of America, and (William Butler) Ogden, who built the city’s first railroad, the Galena and Chicago Union, was being hailed as the Railway King of the West.”
As Chicago changed, so did the land that is now the 14th Street rail yard. Its earliest known use was wharf space with some grain elevators, said Fred Ash, a vice president at First National Bank of Chicago and an amateur historian who is writing a history of Union Station.
“Before the yard was there, the streets were platted but not yet built,” Ash said. “The city allowed the railroads to buy or at least use what amounted to a street–Stewart Street–and run their tracks up close to the business district. Then, as the railroads expanded, they bought and sometimes illegally occupied land until the yard was filled out.”
At the same time, coal companies moved in, stacking piles of coal behind their buildings. And lumber yards were built, naturally, on Lumber Street.
All these businesses were booming in 1871, when the rail yard was freight only and the Great Fire was about to destroy much of Chicago.
“The day before the Great Fire, a fire started at Canal and Van Buren and spread to the coal piles and lumber yards around the rail yard,” said Ash. “Within 20 minutes, a huge area was in flames, and it would have been worse if the wide expanse of the yard hadn’t given the firefighters room to fight the fire.”
The coal and lumber stores made the flames intense, and this wore out the firefighters before the main event the next day.
According to Miller’s “City of the Century,” it took 17 hours to defeat the fire on the eve of the Great Fire, and it was “one of the most destructive fires in Chicago up to that time, (consuming) almost every building in a four-block area.”
Another notable event in the yard’s history came in 1893, by which time it was used solely for passenger trains. Until that May, the rail yard was handling 3,000 coaches a day, but thanks to the World’s Columbian Exposition, that more than doubled, to 6,500 cars a day. And the double volume continued through October.
The following year, federal troops and their horses occupied the yards in the Pullman strike, a violent, two-month labor boycott in 1894 that ultimately laid bare the hypocrisy behind Geroge Pullman’s model village and factory for building luxury railcars.
“(The calvary) ran up and down the yard, doing nothing really, but making a big show so the public would feel safe,” said Ash.
However pointless their exercises, perhaps the soldiers should be given credit for enduring the rail yard’s conditions in 1894.
“Rail yards back then were dangerous, with hot cinders, smoke, soot, cars impacting and oil on the ground,” said Ash. “At least one person a day was killed in the early days of railroading in Chicago.”
Good train brakes weren’t available until the early 1890s, and exploding boilers were a “pretty regular occurrence” on steam locomotives, said Mark Walbrun, a vice president at TransSystems Corp., Schaumburg, who was a 24-year veteran of Amtrak and director of capital projects until last year. He joined Amtrak in 1971, when it was established.
He was also project engineer, from 1977 to 1981, for the reconstruction of the 14th Street Coach Yard. The project began shortly after the U.S. government took the property from bankrupt Penn Central Railroad and gave it to Amtrak, which wanted to consolidate its five Chicago rail yards and gain control of its operating costs.
“At first, Amtrak was basically a contracting agency,” said Walbrun. “It contracted with the other railroads to clean and maintain and move its equipment, and it had to pay whatever they demanded.”
Once it had a consolidated rail yard and the employees to staff it, Amtrak could start taking control of its costs and the quality of the work. Except, of course, that the yard was in miserable shape.
“I would guess that there was no investment in the property, no work done on it at all from 1950 on,” said Walbrun.
“The darkest hour in the history of that area was the early 1970s,” said Ash. “The railroads were going bankrupt. There was no money to improve the yard. Everything was rotting, and steam heat was leaking up from the ground. The tracks were wobbly. Trains could almost derail while standing still.”
With railroads losing tremendous amounts of money on passenger trains, they weren’t about to invest in the rail yard that serviced them, he added. And so when Amtrak was established and started running the money-losing passenger lines in the country, the 14th Street Coach Yard was something of a consolation prize. Still it had to undergo reconstruction–to the tune of $44 million–and be kept in service while it was rebuilt.
“It was like trying to do open heart surgery on a guy while he’s in a meeting,” said Walbrun. The first job was taking out 1 1/2 to 3 feet of the yard’s surface so the area would be level for the new tracks being laid.
Walbrun guessed that half the yard–the three-foot-higher part, where there was a truck terminal–dated from the 1930s, when a new channel was dug next to the rail yard for the Chicago River.
Next, the yard’s few wooden buildings were torn down. Despite Chicago’s bitter winters, almost all the work in the yard had been done outside, and Amtrak decided that key efficiencies would be gained by moving the workers into six new buildings: the car shop and control center, the commissary/warehouse, the inspection building, the carwash shed, the wheel true shop and the engine house, which includes the only wall on the property that wasn’t torn down. The architecture, said Walbrun, is “government modern.”
All the switches and platforms also were replaced. For the car shop and the engine house, construction workers had to dig 130 feet to reach hardpan (Chicago’s version of bedrock), to ensure the stability of the buildings.
“It’s the largest single investment Amtrak has made to date, except equipment purchases,” said Walbrun. He added that the railroad initially expected a $3 million to $4 millions savings a year due to the reconstruction.
“But it turned out to be more like a $14 million a year savings because we discovered efficiencies that couldn’t be anticipated before we moved in. The facility paid for itself in less than four years,” he said.
About five years after the dust settled on the reconstruction, a similar project began at the neighboring Metra facility, where three owners coordinate the operation.
“Everyone who works here is employed by the Burlington Northern Santa Fe, which owns the land and the tracks from here to Aurora,” said Jim Zeilmann, shop superintendent for suburban service. He is a third-generation railroader and a 38-year veteran at the Burlington.
He said all coaches in the Metra yard are owned by the West Suburban Mass Transit District, whose board is composed of representatives from municipalities on the Metra/Burlington Northern line. And the locomotives are owned by Metra, which spent $43 million in the 1980s to improve the buildings and the equipment.
“About 118 people work here,” said Zeilmann, “and we have (a coach and diesel shop), but most of the work is done outside. That means we need snow removal crews and automated snow brooms. We have snow blowers to blow the snow out of switches, and we provide rain gear for the employees.”
He said the yard always had been a passenger maintenance facility, originally for the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad.
“The Zephyr trains originated with the Q, and this yard was referred to as the Zephyr pit,” he said. “There were power plants and machine shops making specialty parts. There was a commissary, a laundry. It was like a little village lined up on Canal Street.”
In an average day, Zeilmann said, 20 locomotives and 135 coaches are serviced in the Metra yard. They are assembled into 19 trainsets that make 94 trips every weekday between Aurora and the Loop. “The key is high utilization of equipment,” he said.
“We try to utilize each piece of rolling stock and each locomotive as well as possible,” said O’Dea of the Amtrak yard.
“Turn-around times are important to increasing our revenue and driving costs down.”
From the opposite side of 18th Street, the passenger rail yards are a spectator sport for members of the 20th Century Railroad Club, whose tall windows give a nearly comprehensive view of the action.
“We call it our skybox for rail fans,” said Brandt.
“What you really see from our windows is the hub of the hub of passenger railroads. And it’s a shame, I think, most people just hear the whistles, and they never see the inner workings of the railroad.”
