A wasp fluttered through the open window of a wooden rail car as it rattled along steel rails in a swath of resurrected prairie dotted with purple flowers at the Fox River Trolley Museum in South Elgin.
The rise of the 20th Century automobile culture spelled the demise of electric and trolley lines, along with inter-urbans and most electric commuter rail service. In their heyday from the 1890s until the 1940s, hundreds of miles of trolley rail lines reached like an intricate web into the countryside from Chicago and connected farming communities and smaller industrial cities such as Joliet, Plainfield, Aurora, Elgin, Lockport, Chicago Heights and Frankfort.
About 8,000 people a year visit the trolley museum, where that rail past comes back to life.
Larry McClellan, a historian specializing in regional history and a consultant to the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, talked trolleys, inter-urbans and railroads.
In the U.S., he said, railroads generally were powered by steam or diesel locomotives and connected cities over longer distances.
Trolleys ran in cities. The first, he said, were horse-drawn. They then were converted to electric power from overhead lines. Trolleys evolved into inter-urbans that connected cities, generally over shorter distances than railroads.
"In Chicago we had an elaborate system of inter-urbans that connected Chicago with its satellite industrial cities," he said.
An electric line is a generic term for longer train run on overhead electricity. The South Shore Line, he said, fell into the category of a train because it had larger cars than trolleys.
"Some inter-urban lines developed into more substantial lines and were considered train systems," he said. The Metra Electric line, run on Illinois Central tracks, also fits this category.
"From the earliest days, Chicago was a point of connection," said McClellan. "It was a hub for cartage via the Illinois & Michigan Canal, for coach lines and eventually for rail lines."
There once were about 30,000 miles of inter-urban lines, mostly in California and east of the Mississippi River, said Don MacBean, who lives in Glen Ellyn and is one of the non-profit museum's founders.
Inter-urbans, he said, sold their excess power to businesses and villages along the lines. It was even possible, via these lines, to travel longer distances, such as from St. Louis to Peoria or, if you did not mind overnighting in a few places, from Milwaukee or Chicago to Rochester, N.Y. Though some lines ran at night, service was not as frequent as during the day. MacBean said that the Chicago Aurora and Elgin ran from about 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. for instance.
To reach New York City, however, you would have had to employ some shoe leather. "I think there was a gap in a place near Rochester where you had to walk a bit," said MacBean. The gap was a half mile between lines.
As they would have been on a searing summer day in the early 1900s, the windows of the original car from the Chicago, Aurora and Elgin Railroad were wide open as it traveled through a section of restored prairie in the Blackhawk Forest Preserve, part of the Forest Preserve District of Kane County.
The 1.5-mile extension opened in June and runs next to the Fox River. The tracks go through an old railroad gravel pit that is being restored by the district to its prairie origins.
The wasp that made its way through the window was not as welcome as the breeze that refreshed Cyndy Fisher of Newark, Ill., and her grandson, Austin Platt, 3. They were among about a dozen passengers looking to experience a bit of transit history as they climbed aboard the car. After the ride, Austin couldn't wait to experience another as he ran to the next car.
"I want to make this [an interest in trains and railroads] a part of my grandson's tradition," Fisher said.
Among the 25 or so cars it owns, the museum has wooden cars from the Chicago, Aurora and Elgin, steel cars from the North Shore Line, a diesel electric locomotive from the Aurora, Elgin and Fox River line, a steel coach from the South Shore Line and a flat car with a crane from the Chicago Transit Authority.
The cars from the North Shore Line and one wooden car from the Chicago, Aurora Elgin line are in use at the museum. The others are being restored.
Fisher said the ride prompted her to imagine when Chicagoans took the electric lines that stopped in Elgin, Plainfield, Lockport, Aurora and other spots for fresh air, recreation and a pastoral setting.
"With the breeze coming in, I was thinking what it must have been like in the 1920s, how people would have dressed and how excited they would have been to come out and see a band," Fisher said.
Some electric lines, such as the Aurora, Elgin and Fox River Electric Co., which built Exposition Park in Aurora, provided amusement parks, band shells, picnic groves and other attractions.
Dellwood Park in Lockport, for instance, began as a recreation destination with baseball fields and picnic areas for people who traveled on the electric line.