Wallace W. Abbey: A Life in Railroad Photography

by Kevin P. Keefe

  The operator inside the Chicago & Western Indiana’s State Line Tower in Hammond, Indiana, on September 9, 1956. He controlled a maze of tracks at this southeastern entrance to Chicagoland on the Illinois-Indiana border. The Chesapeake & Ohio, Erie, and Monon all came in from the southeast and used the C&WI into the city. Running parallel was the Nickel Plate Road’s main line, and everything crossed both the Baltimore & Ohio Chicago Terminal main line and a branch of the Indiana Harbor Belt.

  Travelers walk past Union Pacific’s City of Portland passenger train, shrouded by steam from its heat line, while preparing to depart from Union Station in April 1957. In 1955, the Milwaukee Road took over operating Union Pacific’s streamliners between Chicago and Omaha; previously the Chicago & North Western had handled this traffic, with the trains calling at North Western Terminal a few blocks north of Union Station.

  Pedestrians walk briskly along the Loop in downtown Chicago, heedless of a North Shore Line train rumbling overhead on the “L” tracks above Wabash Avenue on a summer day in 1957. With more than 100 miles of routes, service dating back to 1892, and twenty-first-century ridership of three-quarters of a million per weekday, you could say the “L” is as Chicago as icy winter winds, hotdogs with relish, and ivy-covered outfield walls. Yet Abbey rarely photographed it—he made these views specifically for a story in Railway Age, where he worked for three years before beginning his tenure with the Soo Line.

  Chicago, Burlington & Quincy’s westbound CD freight train to Denver departs Cicero Yard behind five locomotives on November 9, 1958. At the time Cicero was the Burlington’s primary classification facility for its traffic coming into and out of Chicago. In the 1980s, successor Burlington Northern shifted nearly all its mixed freight classification 200 miles southwest to Galesburg, Illinois, and converted Cicero into a dedicated intermodal facility.

  Inbound Milwaukee Road commuter train passing Tower A-20 at dusk on March 24, 1959. The name comes from the railroad calling its route between Chicago and Milwaukee its “A” line, and this location being 20 miles from Chicago Union Station. Located at Techny Junction, the tower controlled a connection with a Chicago & North Western line that passed above the Milwaukee. The connecting track is visible at left.

  Passengers from a Baltimore & Ohio train walk through Grand Central Station in April of 1959. Despite its name, Grand Central was the smallest of Chicago’s six major passenger terminals. Besides the B&O, it also served trains of the Chesapeake & Ohio and the Soo Line, as well as the Chicago Great Western until 1956, when that road ended its Windy City passenger service. Facing declining patronage and political pressure, Grand Central’s remaining trains were transferred to other facilities by 1969, and the station closed. It was demolished two years later.

  Workers at Grand Central Station load mail onto the Soo Line’s Laker passenger train for Duluth on the evening of April 17, 1962. This was the last full year that the train would use Grand Central. In 1963, the Soo transferred its remaining passenger business to Central Station, a few blocks to the southeast. The move would be short-lived. Changes by the US Post Office Department in 1964 removed most of the mail from the Laker, and the train made its last run on January 15, 1965.

  With Chicago’s skyscrapers glowing like palaces, Santa Fe’s combined Super Chief–El Capitan prepares to depart Dearborn Station on the evening of October 22, 1965. Rail passenger patronage was in steep decline across the nation by the mid-1960s, but the Santa Fe still operated an impressive service. While it had combined these two trains in 1958, the railroad still offered four other departures from Chicago every day for the West Coast. That would last for two more years, until the Post Office Department canceled nearly all its mail contracts in October of 1967, leading to deep cuts in the railroad passenger business.

  An Illinois Central freight train from Iowa comes down the ramp from the St. Charles Air Line, heading south for Markham Yard in south-suburban Homewood, Illinois, on October 22, 1965. Three GP9s lead the train, which includes three refrigerator cars, likely carrying Iowa beef, directly behind the locomotives. The Air Line passes above the congested streets and railroads immediately south of downtown. The IC owned one-quarter of the route (along with the Michigan Central, Burlington, and North Western) and used it to get trains between its line to Iowa from the west and its line running south along Lake Michigan.

  Santa Fe diesels from three builders rest between assignments at the railroad’s 18th Street roundhouse. Fairbanks Morse switchers at far left and right bracket an Alco switcher and two sets of F-units. 18th Street primarily serviced power for the Santa Fe’s passenger trains, and in 1965, the year of this photograph, that still included four streamliners and the Fast Mail every day between Chicago and the West Coast. As a high-school student, Abbey spent the summer of 1944 working here.

  Passengers watch from Englewood Union Station as an eastbound Pennsylvania Railroad passenger train arrives on October 22, 1965. The tower at left controlled the crossing of four Pennsylvania tracks and three of the Rock Island. Out of view to the right, New York Central’s main line curved from paralleling the Rock to the Pennsy. The station served all three railroads, as well as the Nickel Plate Road, which used NYC’s tracks.

  A lone pedestrian walks east along 63rd Street, passing Englewood Union Station and about to go under a New York Central passenger train. The view looks east from the platform serving the Rock Island; the Pennsylvania tracks were on the other side of the station to the right. Trains of the fourth railroad, the Nickel Plate, used the NYC tracks. The station was a convenient place for making connections just outside of downtown, but it was closed and demolished in the 1970s. Metra commuter and Amtrak intercity passenger trains still pass through Englewood, but they no longer stop here.

  Located forty miles southwest of Chicago, the busy junction of Joliet, Illinois, was one of Abbey’s favorite places for photography in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Santa Fe’s main line to California crossed the Rock Island at grade in front of Joliet Union Station, and the mix of infrastructure, people, and heavy train traffic offered myriad photographic opportunities. In this view from a tank car in a freight train, Santa Fe’s eastbound passenger train no. 20, the FT-powered Chief from Los Angeles, accepts a clear, “high-arm” semaphore signal at the Rock Island crossing and moves toward the station while a switcher waits on an adjacent track.

  FIVE

  CLASS BY ITSELF

  WALLY ABBEY KNEW HIS WAY AROUND THE STEAM LOCOMOTIVE, and his photography proved it. Whether it was a 4-8-4 roaring across the prairie or an 0-8-0 shuffling cars in a freight yard, he depicted the iron horse with perception and insight. He reveled in the sensations of being around steam—the hiss of air compressors, the smell of rod grease, the heat from a boiler—and he loved to portray the men who made it all happen.

  But Abbey was never an antiquarian, not as a professional railroader, and certainly not as a photographer. In that influential salon of trailblazing photographers in the November 1955 issue of Trains magazine, Abbey even made a point of it in a statement attributed to him: “The dieselization of the railroads is merely a means and not an end—a means of keeping the railroads abreast … of continuing change in the world of trade and transportation. Having dieselized, if a railroad then ceases to modernize and to change, it might as well pull up its rails.”

  That was Abbey: rational, clear-eyed, optimistic. It informed his photography, and it informed his career. Unlike many of his camera-carrying contemporaries in the late 1940s and early ’50s, he embraced the diesel.

  That’s also why his favorite locomotive undoubtedly was the Electro-Motive FT, the pioneering diesel-electric that in a few short years changed the course of railroading. Introduced in 1939 as the 5,400-horsepower, four-unit demonstrator No. 103, the FT successfully made the case for standardized, mass-produced motive power on its historic barnstorming tour of several railroads. But for World War II putting locomotive development largely on hold, the FT might have led to steam’s extincti
on even sooner than the mid-1950s. Abbey’s friend David P. Morgan, editor of Trains, put the first FT in perspective in the November 1965 issue of his magazine: “No. 103 was the biggest change in railroading since the air brake.”

  Abbey came by his own appreciation of the FT honestly, with oil under his fingernails to prove it. There was his summer job in 1944, at age sixteen, working as a diesel repairman’s helper for the Santa Fe at 21st Street. The young high school kid earned a princely eighty-two cents an hour, eighty-four cents if he did the job of oiler. He usually worked the second trick, 3 to 11 p.m., officially on a schedule of seven days per week, but usually only five or six.

  The shop was there to perform running repairs on Santa Fe’s passenger locomotives, mostly Electro-Motive E1 and E3 models in the railroad’s new “Warbonnet” paint scheme. The gleaming red-and-silver racehorses ran out of Dearborn Station, only a couple of miles or so north of the shop. For a budding diesel fan, it was the perfect apprenticeship.

  The work could be difficult, as Abbey recalled. “Mostly, I carried the diesel repairman’s toolbox, or turned over the big diesel engines for piston-ring tests by standing on a long steel bar inserted in the flywheel, my back against the locomotive’s ceiling, or applied various kinds of lubricants where they were needed. It was hard, hot, dirty work. But I enjoyed it.”

  He also wasn’t satisfied to learn only what his narrow job required. He submersed himself in textbooks by John Draney, published by the American Technical Society, a Chicago-based organization that at the time was devoted to helping industrial workers in the war effort. Draney’s two volumes from 1943, Diesel Locomotives: Electrical Equipment and Diesel Locomotives: Mechanical Equipment, became bedtime reading for the young railroader and fed his relentless curiosity. “I’m sure I annoyed others in the shop with my questions.”

  Then came a formative experience. One day in 1945, he got word that the 167, one of Santa Fe’s first FTs, had made a rare visit to Chicago. And he’d missed it! In their early years, the FTs stayed way west, mostly working the desert territory between Winslow, Arizona, and Barstow, California, where they could make the best case for supplanting steam. But that September some of them began showing up around Chicago.

  Abbey recalled his first sighting on the southwest side. “The diesel, we’d been given to understand, was out in Arizona, winning the war against Japan, that we’d actually seen only in the literature of the time—unexpectedly, that magic, mystical machine had materialized out of the mists of McCook!”

  Over the next few years, Abbey would photograph the FTs as often as he could. But the diesels were an elusive quarry, and Abbey’s nascent journalism career would begin taking him in different directions. By the early 1950s, the FTs were giving way to newer locomotives such as the F3 and the GP7 hood unit, and the last FT was retired by Santa Fe in 1966. In his early 1950s travels for Trains, though, he did get a chance to shoot FTs on the North Western, Burlington, and Erie.

  Decades after he photographed the FTs, Abbey turned to them once again, this time to write what he likely considered his most important book, Class By Itself, an exhaustive history of the first FTs on the Santa Fe. Alas, the book never saw publication; the huge manuscript awaits the ministrations of a capable editor willing to finish what Wally Abbey started. But even in its unpublished form, Abbey got down on paper what he thought was one of railroading’s essential stories.

  “If it weren’t for progress in dieseldom,” he wrote, “there would be no railroads to enjoy at all. But here and now, and sounding quite like a railfan, I want to declare that if there is an all-time classic diesel-electric locomotive—classic much more for how it played its designated role than for how interesting it might have been to the locomotive-watcher—it is the Santa Fe’s 100-class FT.”

  A worker at Santa Fe’s 18th Street Roundhouse in Chicago inspects FTA no. 163 in the summer of 1946. No. 3460, the railroad’s only streamlined steam locomotive, stands in the distance beyond the sanding towers. The early success of Electro-Motive’s diesels on the railroad’s premier passenger trains contributed to the lack of streamlined Santa Fe steam power. As a high school student, Abbey had spent the summer working at 18th Street two years earlier.

  An A-B-B-A set of Erie Railroad FTs roll past the engine servicing facility at Maybrook, New York, in June of 1951. Maybrook was a major gateway for freight traffic moving between New England and the Mid-Atlantic. The New Haven came in from the east via the Poughkeepsie Bridge over the Hudson River and connected with the Erie; Lehigh & Hudson River; Lehigh & New England; New York, Ontario & Western; and New York Central. A fire closed the Poughkeepsie Bridge in 1974, and two years later all of the railroads were merged into Conrail. Today the only trace of the once-massive Maybrook Yard is a single running track at the edge of the property.

  To climb out of the Illinois River valley going north from Peoria, the Chicago & North Western used helper locomotives throughout the steam era and into the early diesel era. Abbey’s photograph of this operation at Kickapoo Junction, Illinois, in 1949, allows a comparison of F-units. On the left, an A-B pair of FTs and an F3A arrive with a northbound freight; on the right, an A-B-A set of F3s waits to assist the train up the grade to Radnor.

  An A-B pair of Chicago, Burlington & Quincy FTs leads an F3A on a freight charging down the middle of the Burlington’s “Racetrack” through West Hinsdale, Illinois, in 1949. The three-track main line was—and is—a place for fast and frequent freight and passenger trains coming in and out of Chicago. This westbound has a large block of ice-cooled reefers behind the power—quite possibly filled with meat from the Windy City’s sprawling Union Stock Yards.

  Veteran Santa Fe engineer in the cab of FTA diesel locomotive no. 176 on a freight train in Arizona in 1953. While his name is lost, he surely spent most of his career running steam locomotives and, like many railroaders, took great pride in his appearance. While many “old heads” mourned the loss of steam engines and the craftsmanship of operating them, the cleaner diesels made spotless overalls and jackets much easier. Abbey was riding in the cab while on assignment for his “Super Railroad” story about the Santa Fe in Trains magazine.

  Chicago & North Western FTA-B nos. 4051 and 4051B approach Rochelle, Illinois, with an eastbound freight train on June 20, 1948. The C&NW crossed the Burlington at Rochelle, which is even busier today as a crossing of the Union Pacific and BNSF Railway, respectively. This train is passing through what is today Union Pacific’s Global 3 intermodal facility. Note the wig-wag crossing signal protecting the two-lane road.

  The first section of Santa Fe train no. 7, the westbound Fast Mail Express, passes Turner, Kansas, on its way out of the Kansas City area on June 4, 1948. FTA no. 168 leads an A-B-B-A consist of locomotives. Train no. 7 and its eastbound counterpart, no. 8, handled express freight and mail between Chicago and Los Angeles. When business was heavy, they operated in multiple sections, as was the case on this day.

  Chicago & North Western westbound freight train no. 381 for St. Louis crossing Main Street in Elburn, Illinois, on April 12, 1949. FT locomotives nos. 4051 and 4051B lead F3A no. 4055 with a train Abbey recorded as having 39 loaded cars and 48 empties, weighing 3,000 tons.

  Santa Fe “time freight” no. 86, an eastbound train led by an A-B-A set of FTs, prepares to depart Chanute, Kansas, for Argentine Yard in Kansas City on a calm night in 1950. The first two units are among the relatively few FTs that were modified for passenger service. Note the second headlight, additional hoses flanking the coupler, the removable plate on the pilot covering the steam line, and the steam generator stack on the B unit. Located just north of Cherryvale, home of Abbey’s maternal grandparents, Chanute was not on the Santa Fe’s main line to California, but could still see heavy freight traffic at times.

  Eastbound Santa Fe freight train crossing the Chicago Sanitary & Ship Canal at Berwyn, Illinois, on June 1, 1952. The 28-mile canal system opened in 1900, reversing the flow of the main stem of the Chicago River and sending it down
the Des Plaines and Illinois rivers to the Mississippi. The main reason for the canal was to divert sewage out of Lake Michigan, source of Chicago’s drinking water. The canal also replaced the earlier Illinois & Michigan Canal for navigation—the reason that Santa Fe’s bridge is a swing design, pivoting on its center pier to allow vessels to pass.

  Santa Fe no. 175 joins several other FTs and a set of F7s—the latter in the railroad’s “Warbonnet” color scheme for passenger trains—by the coaling and sanding towers at Argentine Yard in Kansas City in the spring of 1953. A single steam locomotive, 4-6-2 no. 3427, is in the distance at far left. Santa Fe received its first FTs in the winter of 1940–41; a dozen years later, they had helped to almost completely replace steam on the railroad. The last steam operations for regular service on the Santa Fe occurred just four years later.

  Steam from the train’s heating line envelopes the Skytop parlor-observation car of the Afternoon Hiawatha, standing beneath the Minneapolis train shed ready to depart for Chicago on October 24, 1969. The train would make its final run just three months later. The depot closed in 1971 after Amtrak took over the Milwaukee Road’s remaining passenger operations. While many of the nation’s great train stations were demolished, this one is now a hotel. Even the train shed still stands to provide covered parking and, in the winter, shelter for a skating rink.