Geoffrey Baer has taken deep dives into the history and stories of the Chicago region for more than 30 years, hosting scores of documentaries on WTTW Channel 11 that explore various facets of the area.
One element of the urban and suburban landscape kept showing up in his shows, although usually in the background, industriously laboring, seen but unseen, always around but not really noticed unless except as an inconvenience.
“I’ve worked railroads into a lot of my shows, but I always thought it was too niche of a subject to devote a whole show to,” Baer said.
But when he took a closer look, the region’s railroads impressed him as “kind of a parallel universe.”
“There’s this huge industry that is kind of hidden in plain sight,” Baer said. “Everything in our lives, so many parts of our lives that people intersect with are entirely a result of railroads. You see a freight train going by, and you don’t know where it’s going, where it came from. But all the things in your house are tied to railroads.”
So for Baer’s latest program on WTTW, he decided to dive deep into the city’s long links to the rails. It was a bit like going back to his youth, he said, as he was “a train nut” growing up in Highland Park, where he lived “one house away” from what is now Metra’s Union Pacific North line.
“Back then it was the Chicago and Northwestern,” Baer said. “My mom tells me that literally every time a train went by I would run to the dining room window to watch it go by.”
In “Riding the Rails with Geoffrey Baer,” premiering at 7 p.m. Monday on WTTW, online at wttw.com/rails, and on the PBS app, he got to revisit that childhood love of trains via artifacts, such as the Zephyr Streamliner, an icon from the heyday of rail travel on display at the Griffin Museum of Science & Industry. That train became a spectacle when it broke speed records traveling between Denver and Chicago on its way to the Century of Progress World’s Fair in 1933.
He looks back at the 20th century’s ornate passenger terminals, including Union Station, one of the last remaining places where the former opulence of railroad travel remains on display, and eyes dining car menus featuring dishes such as turtle soup and leg of venison.
And he visits Chicago’s first locomotive, a smallish steam engine called Pioneer that’s now on display at the Chicago History Museum. It was purchased used in 1848 as part of the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad Co., but initially traveled out of Chicago only as far as the Des Plaines River, as that’s where the tracks ran out.
He also got a chance to get behind the figurative wheel of a steam engine himself, which was operated by levers. He called it a “bucket list thing,” but sounded glad it wasn’t a regular occurrence.
“I don’t know how these train crews lived past the age of 40,” he said. The cab is really hot. Our cameraman actually got heat stroke in the cab. The fumes are intense. And the noise. …
“It seems like it was a recipe for not living very long, being on one of these train crews. Not to mention that the brakemen would run across the top of the train cars and individually put the brakes on each car before they had hydraulic braking. It was very dangerous.”
But those train crews helped bring Chicago and its surrounding suburbs into national prominence. Most of the big passenger train lines terminated or originated in Chicago, Baer said.
“You couldn’t actually go through Chicago nonstop,” he said. “If you wanted to go from the West Coast to the East Coast, you had to get off a train in Chicago, go to a different station, often, and get on another train taking you the rest of the way.”
That legacy lives on today for commuters who, for example, want to travel by Metra from the south suburbs to Ravinia in Highland Park, which was built by a rail line to encourage ridership. That trip involves a walk across Chicago between rail stations.
But the legacy also lives on in the Metra lines themselves, most of which are named for the old trackage they inhabit. The Electric Line to University Park is the old Illinois Central. There’s the Burlington Northern Santa Fe line to Aurora and the Rock Island line to Joliet and three Union Pacific lines heading north.
And one of the remaining passenger lines in Chicago holds the distinction of being the “last surviving interurban” railway in the country. The South Shore line to South Bend, Indiana, was one of three electric interurban railways in Chicago, joining the North Shore Line to Milwaukee and the Chicago, Aurora and Elgin Line.
“It was a cross between a streetcar and a train,” Baer said. “Only the South Shore Line survived. The others are rail trails now.”
The rail to trails movement, transforming former railway routes into walking and bicycle paths, got its start in Chicago as well, thanks to May Theilgaard Watts, a nature educator at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, who was instrumental in preserving the abandoned right of way of the Chicago, Aurora and Elgin interurban as trail that eventually became the Illinois Prairie Path.
“She spearheaded this massive effort,” Baer said. “There was a lot of politics involved to get that going. It truly spread across the country, this idea of rail trails.”
Baer’s programs are just an hour long these days — “We don’t do these insanely long shows,” he said — but his latest is dense with railroad lore.
He visits one the busiest railroad intersections in the country along 75th Street in Chicago, where CSX Railroad is building a train bridge to help ease “a major conflict point” in intermodal deliveries.
Baer hangs out with railfans, who bring snacks and cameras and make a day of watching trains go by at a busy suburban junction.
“One guy said ‘I thought I was the only guy in the world who loved trains, and then I met these folks.’ They found community. I loved that,” he said.
And there’s tales of the robber barons and the underhanded ways they helped build the rail infrastructure still in use today, as well as actual robbers who held up trains in the Chicago area, including the “largest train robbery in American History, in 1924 between Libertyville and Lake Bluff.
Baer’s been doing these shows and telling these stories for three decades, and while he said he’s near the end of his career, he’s not done yet.
“I made a commitment to redo all the suburban shows,” he said. “We did a series of those about 20 years ago, but they’re so outdated now.
“I always like it when I can update or correct things I got wrong in older shows.”
And there just might be another chance to check off another bucket list item, albeit perhaps a more pleasant one.
Landmarks is a column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at peisenberg@tribpub.com.
