[gentle music]
- Richard Colby: Good afternoon, everyone.
Welcome to today's History Sandwiched In program.
The opinions expressed today during the presentation
are those of the speaker
and are not those of the Wisconsin Historical Society
or the society's employees.
Before we hand it over,
I'm excited to introduce today's lecturer.
We have Scott Lothes, who is presenting
"Railroads of Madison and South Central Wisconsin."
Scott joined the staff
of the Center for Railroad Photography and Art in 2008,
and serves as its president and executive director.
His deep interest in both railroads and landscapes
came from his childhood in West Virginia,
and he took up photography
while attending college at Case Western Reserve University
in Cleveland, Ohio.
His work appears frequently in railroad magazines
and other publications.
He has contributed to eight books
of railroad photography and art.
He and his wife, Maureen Muldoon,
have lived in Madison since 2011.
They reside on the city's west side with their dog, Alma.
And with that, please join me in welcoming Scott Lothes
for today's presentation.
[audience applauds]
- Scott Lothes: Thank you.
Well, thank you, Richard, for that kind introduction.
Thank you, everyone, for being here
on this beautiful late September afternoon.
It's an honor for me to take part in
the Wisconsin Historical Society's
History Sandwiched In series.
Now, my presentation today is about railroads.
And for most people,
experiences with trains these days are somewhat rare.
You might enjoy hearing a whistle across town
on a warm summer evening,
but many people only really think about trains
if they get stuck behind one at a railroad crossing.
But that wasn't always the case.
Railroads helped build Madison and south central Wisconsin
into the city and the region that we know today,
and they have left deep imprints.
Even the few trains that still run,
the ones that might stop you on John Nolen Drive,
play an important role in the regional economy.
Now, at their zenith,
nine different railroad lines fanned out from Madison,
and in the early 20th century,
more than 100 trains steamed through the city every day.
Now, seven of these lines remain in service,
although only four still reach their original destinations,
and none of them see anywhere close to as much traffic
as they once did.
We'll touch on all of these lines,
and I'll come back to this map a lot.
Before we go any further, though,
I want to offer a disclaimer.
Railroad history, like the history of any subject,
is multidimensional.
For more than a century,
railroads touched nearly every facet of American life.
Even today, when they roam
mainly in the shadows of the landscape,
trains are integral to the global supply chain.
You can approach railroads from nearly any perspective:
business, labor, race, gender, land use,
geography, popular culture, and on and on.
That's one of the many reasons
why railroads have fascinated me for my entire life.
This is a photograph by John Gruber,
and I'll share more about him shortly.
It shows the deployment of Wisconsin's
32nd Infantry Division by train from Madison in 1961,
due to the Berlin Crisis.
The platform today is the glassed-in showroom
for Motorless Motions Bicycles.
Now, many historians approach railroads
by focusing on their construction,
particularly their financing and the personalities behind them.
Both of those, financing and personalities,
were often complicated and almost always interesting.
This photograph shows construction
of a new railroad line at Lebanon, Wisconsin, in 1910.
I have to imagine this might have been a Sunday outing
for this family who posed next to the steam shovel
in their church clothes.
I think that's a great example of the public's fascination
with railroads a century ago.
Now, this isn't the same spot, but it is the same railroad line
and a photograph of my own taken a century later.
This is Clyman Junction, Wisconsin,
where the coaling tower still stands,
a relic from the age of the steam locomotives.
My main interest in railroads are how they've been used
after they were built, how they relate to their surroundings,
how they've changed over time, and why.
And as a photographer,
I try to interpret these stories visually.
So, that's the perspective I bring,
and it's just one of many different perspectives
you can apply to railroad history.
None of the railroads in Madison
or south central Wisconsin arrived by accident.
Each one was the result of a strategic
and usually expensive project.
Some of them exceeded their builders' expectations,
others struggled, and all of them have changed.
To understand why, we have to look beyond the city,
to the regional, continental, and even international trends
that have affected the railroads here.
Now, I'll be illustrating my talk with a lot of photographs,
including some of my own.
Those appear without a credit line,
like this one of a Wisconsin & Southern train
crossing the Rock River at Edgerton in the fall of 2023.
I also have some selections
from the Wisconsin Historical Society,
as well as the Library of Congress,
and then quite a few from our archive
at the Center for Railroad Photography & Art.
And those are all noted by their abbreviations.
Now, let me say a few words
about the Center for Railroad Photography & Art.
Our mission is to preserve
and present significant images of railroading.
Railroads and photography
came of age together in the 19th century--
this is a glass plate from our Jim Shaughnessy collection--
and they forged a visual relationship
that is vibrant today.
This is a 2019 photograph by Justin Franz,
one of our board members,
and it shows young and old photographers
posing with Union Pacific's
restored Big Boy steam locomotive at Ogden, Utah.
Now, there are hundreds of railroad museums
and historical societies,
but the Center is the only one with such a strong focus
on the visual culture of railroading.
We also have a pretty unique business model.
We don't have a museum or a gallery space of our own.
We have a business office
and an archival storage facility in Madison.
And from them, we maintain a growing collection
of more than half a million images
that provide much of the material for everything we do.
That includes preparing exhibitions
that go to museums and galleries all over the country.
This was our biggest, called "Railroaders,"
which was at the Chicago History Museum from 2014 to 2016.
We started with photographs by Jack Delano
at the Library of Congress,
and then we researched many of his portrait subjects
to present a cross-section of railroad life in Chicago
during World War II.
And one of our principles for this project
was Jack Holzhueter,
who worked at the Wisconsin Historical Society
from 1964 until 2000.
More recently, this is our exhibition
about Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg,
photographers, authors, and publishers
at the Illinois Railway Museum in 2025.
This was the eighth venue for this show
since we produced it in 2018.
And this is the opening reception
for our latest exhibition,
The Kalmbach Art Collection, with more than 50 paintings
at Milwaukee's Grohmann Museum in May of 2025.
We had nearly 250 people come out that night to see the show.
In 2023, we partnered
with the Madison Trust for Historic Preservation
on a walking tour of what we call the West Rail Corridor
in Madison, between Monona Bay and West Washington Avenue.
We really enjoyed working with the Trust,
and this presentation grew out of a talk
that I prepared for their virtual architecture series.
The West Rail Corridor Tour will be available again in 2026,
and maybe I'll see some of you there.
Now, getting back to our work
at the Center for Railroad Photography & Art,
we also host conferences, events, and presentations.
This is our annual conference at Lake Forest College
just north of Chicago in 2025,
our third consecutive year with a sold-out crowd.
We also make annual awards for creative imagery,
and we publish books,
as well as a quarterly journal called Railroad Heritage.
We're a non-profit organization supported
by our community of members.
You can learn more about us on our website, railphoto-art.org.
We're also on most of the major social media platforms
@railphotoart, including on YouTube,
where you can watch dozens of our online presentations.
Now, if you're wondering why we're in Madison,
it's because our founder, John Gruber, lived here.
John graduated from
the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism,
and he spent most of his career making publications
for the university.
He was a talented photographer, author, and researcher,
and I'll be sharing many of his photographs.
John perceived the need for a railroad organization
focused on imagery.
He did the work,
and he had the connections to get it off the ground.
Along the way, we have attracted a tremendous,
all-volunteer board of directors from all over the country
with a wide range of experience and expertise.
And Madison has turned out to be a great location for us.
It's a wonderful city
close to the nation's rail hub of Chicago,
and we found several outstanding interns and staff members
from the university's iSchool and elsewhere,
as we've grown our team from one person to ten
in the time I've been here.
So, let's look at Madison.
When Wisconsin became the 30th state in 1848,
it had no railroads.
In 40 years, less time than I've been alive,
Madison's railroad map was complete.
The first line here was an extension
of the first railroad in the state,
which joined Milwaukee and Waukesha in 1851,
and it reached Madison three years later,
coming up through Milton, Edgerton,
Stoughton, and McFarland,
and then across Monona Bay to reach the isthmus.
When the first train steamed into Madison in 1854,
a crowd of 2,000 people greeted it.
The city's population then was about 6,000.
So proportionally, that crowd was as big
as a sold-out Camp Randall is today.
The first depot was at West Washington Avenue,
a railroad location we all still recognize.
And here it is in 1873,
looking east up Washington toward the capitol,
and you can see a corner of the depot at left.
When it arrived in 1854,
this was the Milwaukee & Mississippi Railroad,
chartered to build from Lake Michigan
to the Mississippi River.
Many railroads were chartered in the 19th century
with grandiose plans and expectations,
but they often failed to reach those aspirations.
But this one did, going west out of Madison
and arriving in Prairie du Chien in 1857.
So, within a decade of statehood,
Wisconsin had a railroad running all the way across it.
Like many early railroads, it connected waterways.
Both of its endpoints were major ports with dense populations
and heavy industry.
This is an 1854 drawing of Milwaukee
with ships quite prominent in Lake Michigan.
And this is Prairie du Chien in 1870,
with both steamboats
and the railroad featured at bottom middle.
Now, visible at upper right is the Wisconsin River,
whose broad and gentle valley was a natural path
for the Milwaukee & Mississippi Railroad
as it went west of Madison.
It also provided proximity to the lead mines
that were a big part of the regional economy
and had been long before the first European settlers arrived.
Now, since this was the first railroad to cross the state,
I'm gonna share a few more photographs of it
before moving on.
So, a mile west of the Madison depot,
the railroad crosses University Avenue,
and this is it in 1958 as a freight train heads west.
At the center is the stack of the UW Power Plant,
which was coal-fired and rail-served
into the mid-2010s.
Now, the two-story brick structure at far right
is the Material Science & Engineering Building.
Continuing west,
this train is passing the Middleton Depot
at Parmenter Street in 1982,
with Osborne Company still stood next to the tracks.
The 1895 depot remains,
but everything else in this scene has been redeveloped.
Now, this train is leaving Cross Plains
on Halloween in 1975.
There's been a lot of new development here too,
but on the left,
Saeman Lumber is still in business 50 years later.
A mile beyond Cross Plains,
there's a wonderful overlook at Festge County Park,
where I photographed a Wisconsin & Southern train
just after sunrise on a winter day in 2021.
The incredible hoarfrost that morning
was thanks to the cold air
and the open water of Black Earth Creek,
which the railroad follows.
Coming into Mazomanie,
the tracks run alongside Lake Marion,
which is really a pond fed by Black Earth Creek.
It was built in the 1850s, in part to power a mill,
but also to provide water for steam locomotives
on the Milwaukee & Mississippi Railroad.
In town along Brodhead Street, this is a Madison-bound train
passing the Mazomanie depot in 1956.
The structure was 99 years old in this picture,
built in 1857 and the oldest wood-frame depot in Wisconsin.
It still stands in 2025
and is home to the Mazomanie Free Library.
Now, just before arriving in Spring Green,
the railroad crosses the Wisconsin River
for the first of three times.
This elevated view from 2021 shows off the sandbars
that are so characteristic of the lower Wisconsin
and so detrimental to commercial navigation attempts there.
The rightmost of the three truss spans was built as a drawbridge
that spun on a central pier,
but between the sandbars and then the trains,
it rarely had to open.
I'd love to keep going west,
but we have a lot more railroads to see back in Madison.
So, getting back to Madison in the 19th century,
a third line had arrived by 1857,
and that was the Watertown and Madison Railroad from Watertown,
which ultimately provided a second route to Milwaukee.
The panic of 1857
and then the Civil War slowed railroad construction
all over the country,
but the next line arrived in 1864,
before the war had ended.
That was the Chicago & North Western,
reaching all the way up from Chicago by way of Janesville.
This line also crossed Monona Bay,
and so it had to cross the tracks
that the Milwaukee & Mississippi
had built a decade earlier.
Now, when two railroads cross one another at grade,
that's called a diamond,
because the intersecting rails make that shape.
And this spot in Monona Bay
became known as "the diamond in the lake,"
and it's a pretty unique railroad location.
Diamond crossings themselves are common.
Madison would eventually have half a dozen of them,
some with multiple diamonds.
But this might be the only one in the world
in the middle of a lake.
This is my drone photograph from January of 2022,
and this is a wider and higher view,
with plenty of ice fishermen out trying their luck.
The train is on the former Milwaukee & Mississippi
bound for Janesville and ultimately Chicago,
and the former Chicago & North Western line
is on the causeway at left.
To the right, along John Nolen Drive,
that track reaches the isthmus, and once there,
the North Western had to build diamonds
with the Madison and Watertown Railroad,
which wound up right in the middle of Blair Street.
Those diamonds are at the upper left
of this 1936 Angus McVicar photograph,
and the view here looks northeast.
Williamson Street and Machinery Row would be
just out of frame to the right.
Now, railroads are legally obligated
to allow other railroads to cross them
when they're with diamonds,
but the railroad that got there first gets to be in control.
And that explains this 1955 scene
looking the other way from Blair Street.
Here we have a Chicago & North Western passenger train
that is stopped and having to wait
for the lowly Milwaukee Road switcher
pulling a few freight cars.
The Milwaukee Road got first-- got there first.
They get to be in control.
Now, back in the 19th century,
Madison's next line arrived in 1870,
when the Madison and Portage Railroad
connected those two cities.
It joined the Madison and Watertown
at East Wilson and Baldwin Streets, and at this point,
one of the two major rail systems in Madison was complete.
Now, the corporate history of U.S. railroading
is an endless series of mergers and acquisitions,
and four of these lines
came under the control of one big company
called the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul,
better known as The Milwaukee Road.
With major shops in its namesake city,
it became Wisconsin's hometown railroad.
The Milwaukee Road built and assembled
a dense network throughout the Upper Midwest,
and then in 1909,
they completed their Pacific extension
all the way to Puget Sound, later renaming themselves
as the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Pacific.
It even reached the Ohio River at Louisville, Kentucky.
Now, the Milwaukee Road's growth into an 11,000-mile system
was a two-edged sword for Madison.
On one hand, passengers and freight in Wisconsin's capital
had far more options within the network of a single carrier.
But on the other hand,
the Milwaukee Road lines in Madison
were ultimately relegated to secondary status.
Now, to understand why that happened,
let's take a look at the state rail map from 1900.
The Milwaukee Road lines are the reddish orange ones here,
and they went almost everywhere in Wisconsin.
We'll zoom in on the southern part of the state.
Now, I've already mentioned the Madison and Portage
and the Madison and Watertown railroads,
and many other railroads
came under the control of the Milwaukee Road,
including one that ran straight between Watertown and Portage
through Columbus.
It ultimately forms the hypotenuse of a right triangle
with Madison at the corner.
Remember from geometry class
that the hypotenuse is shorter than the sum of the two legs.
And now consider that one of those legs,
the Madison and Portage,
had to climb out of the Yahara River,
go over Arlington Hill,
and then descend into the Wisconsin River valley.
That required a grade of about 1.5%,
which means 1.5 feet of vertical rise
for every 100 feet of horizontal travel.
Now, that might not sound very steep,
but it's about twice as steep
as most other railroad grades in the region.
Why is that important?
Well, the entire enterprise of railroading
is based on the very low rolling resistance
of a steel wheel on a steel rail,
and that resistance increases drastically
when you add grades and curves.
A locomotive that can pull a 2,000-ton train up a 1% grade
might only be able to manage 1,000 tons on a 2% grade,
and that's on straight track.
Curves reduce that even more.
If you're unlucky enough to have a curving 4% grade,
you might need 5 engines to pull 17 cars.
This picture and the last aren't from Wisconsin,
but they do help make the point.
Railroads want to be as straight and as flat as possible,
and that's important here.
Taking the hypotenuse between Watertown and Portage
is not only shorter,
but also straighter and flatter than going through Madison.
Now, all three of these lines still exist today,
but the ones through Madison now only host local freight traffic,
typically just one or two trains a day.
Now, this one is hauling crushed rock from the quarry at Waterloo
over the Crawfish River at Hubbleton.
But up on the hypotenuse between Portage and Watertown,
the trains can be two miles long
and some of them run across the continent.
This is CPKC Train 148,
coming into Watertown on a stormy evening in 2023.
It's bound for Chicago,
and it came all the way from the docks of Vancouver,
British Columbia.
Many of its colorful shipping containers
carry imports from Asia.
Returning to the triangle here in the Milwaukee Road,
to the east, the Milwaukee Road tracks
run to Milwaukee and Chicago,
which became the railroad hub of the entire continent.
And to the west, the Milwaukee Road goes to La Crosse
and then up the Mississippi River
to St. Paul and Minneapolis,
which became a gateway to the Pacific Northwest.
By the 1890s,
most of the North American rail network was complete.
The trains had come to dominate transportation,
and the Twin Cities had two different railroads
running to the West Coast.
The continental U.S. had been complete since the 1850s,
and trade was moving across much greater distances
thanks in large part to the railroads.
The rail corridor between Chicago and the Twin Cities
emerged as one of the most important in the nation.
Half a dozen different railroad companies competed fiercely
for business in this corridor.
The Milwaukee Road had one of the best routes,
but it didn't go through Madison.
It went through Watertown, Columbus, and Portage.
So, that's where the long-haul freight trains
and the streamlined passenger trains ran
and why they still run there today.
This is the Milwaukee Road's flagship train,
the Olympian Hiawatha, bound for Tacoma,
and John Gruber took this wonderful photograph
from atop the railroad's tunnel at Tunnel City,
looking west into the hazy bluffs
rising toward the Wiscon-- to the Mississippi River Valley.
Now, what came through Madison on the Milwaukee Road
were primarily regional and local trains,
but that's not to say the city suffered from poor service.
In the middle of the 20th century,
the Milwaukee Road ran 11 daily passenger trains each way
between Madison and Milwaukee, as well as two pairs to Portage,
where they connected with those long-distance trains.
There were also three pairs of trains
that ran directly between Chicago and Madison,
and the fastest of them, called the Varsity,
made the run in three hours flat.
Now, this Gruber photograph shows it in 1963
crossing Monona Bay.
Going west from Madison,
there were also three pairs of passenger trains,
and at Prairie du Chien,
they crossed an incredible pontoon bridge
over the Mississippi River to Marquette, Iowa.
You can see the open bridge in the background here.
That section actually floated on pontoons
and trains ran across it.
One of the Milwaukee Road trains
that crossed this bridge was called the Soo,
and it went all the way to Rapid City, South Dakota.
Now, back in Madison,
the Milwaukee Road's main facilities were always
in the 600 block of West Washington.
This is the second depot built there,
a two-story wood building that replaced a smaller structure.
And that's an eastward train in front of it.
The station included a hotel, which you can see on the sign
above the locomotive's headlight.
It was typical for city stations to include hotels
and other amenities.
But as business grew,
the railroad needed a larger station here,
and so they replaced this one in 1903
with the one we still have today,
a neoclassical brick building designed
by the Chicago firm of Frost & Granger.
A striking feature about the depot for me
is that it only had one platform,
meaning that only one train at a time could receive
or discharge passengers.
With all those trains,
that must have been a bottleneck.
And for decades,
the Milwaukee Road had a second depot in the city.
It was called East Madison,
and it sat at East Wilson and South Franklin Streets.
The first structure was built in 1869
and was a pretty simple one-story affair.
This view looks west on Williamson Street,
and you can just barely make out the capitol above the depot.
As the city grew, the railroad built larger structures here,
including this one, photograph circa 1918,
and it was later replaced by a hip-roofed depot
similar in style to the larger one at West Washington,
as seen here in the middle of this Angus McVicar photograph.
Now, by this time,
the Milwaukee Road was calling this station Franklin Street,
which came in from the right.
That's Blair Street in the foreground,
and you can see straight up Wilson on the right.
This station lasted until 1952,
when the railroad consolidated everything to West Washington.
So, here it is in a 1956 Gruber color slide
with a couple of freight trains out front.
The Milwaukee Road's freight traffic through Madison
was also pretty substantial, and mostly agricultural products
and manufactured goods made in Wisconsin
heading to Chicago
and connections there with eastern railroads.
One of the biggest shippers in Madison
was the Oscar Mayer plant on the east side of town.
It was a hive of activity in this 1942 aerial photograph.
The view here looks north from Commercial Avenue,
and Packers Avenue now runs just to the right of this image.
And at upper left, the railroad cutting that diagonal
was the line to Portage.
We'll head back downtown with another aerial photograph,
this one from about 1950.
It shows all of the Milwaukee Road's key structures in Madison
for both passenger and freight trains.
We're looking west here, and that is West Washington
cutting across the lower corner on the left.
And then on the lower right corner is the Hotel Washington,
which burned in 1996.
The new development includes this commemorative plaque.
The hip-roofed passenger depot is right in the middle,
and then to the right of that is the baggage claim building
that is now The Harvey House restaurant.
Now, much of the architectural history of railroading
focuses on depots and stations,
especially the larger and grander ones.
Rightly so,
but I am equally fascinated with the more utilitarian
and vernacular architecture of railroading.
And so, let's look at some of that.
That's Regent Street at the top middle,
and just below it is the roundhouse.
And I think the location of the roundhouse is the reason
that Regent makes that jog right there.
The roundhouse nearly inscribed a half circle,
and at the time it had 18 stalls.
That's where steam locomotives went to be serviced
and repaired between their runs.
The turntable in the middle provided easy access
to every stall,
while also turning each locomotive
in the proper direction for its next run.
In the upper right corner is the coaling tower,
which fueled the steam locomotives,
and I think most of you know
very little of any of this remains today.
The turntable and the roundhouse are completely gone,
and the City Station shopping center now occupies the site.
Demolition came in stages.
In 1983, just six stalls of the roundhouse were still standing.
A year later, the freight station was being torn down.
This view looks east
with the passenger depot in the distance at right.
John Gruber even came to see the removal of the turntable,
which started in 1986, was still in progress in 1987,
and wasn't actually lifted out
until two days after Christmas in 1988.
The turntable has been preserved at the North--
at the Mid-Continent Railway Museum
in North Freedom, Wisconsin,
where it's stored in hopes of future use.
Going back to the aerial photograph,
I also want to point out
that West Washington crossed no fewer than 12 tracks.
There's just one there today.
The only visible protection is a pair of Griswold signals
with rotating stop signs and flashing lights
there in the middle of the street.
There are no gates,
despite exponentially more trains than there are now.
There was, however, manual crossing protection
and another piece of wonderful vernacular architecture
just out of view to the left of this frame.
But we see it here on the right, this elevated watchman's tower.
And this is a 1963 Gruber photograph
from a locomotive cab.
On the left is the former Kroger warehouse
with three boxcars on its spur track for unloading.
For the photographer lucky enough to be allowed upstairs
in that tower, it offered a commanding view.
This is a Milwaukee-bound passenger train
getting ready to pull out in the winter of 1956.
So, that covers the Milwaukee Road.
Now, let's take a look at their main competitor in Madison,
the Chicago & North Western.
We already touched on the North Western's
first line into Madison, the one coming up from Chicago,
which arrived in 1864
and made that diamond crossing in Monona Bay.
By 1873,
the railroad had extended that line north and west to Baraboo,
Reedsburg, and beyond.
It crossed the Wisconsin River at Merrimac,
where we see a streamlined passenger train
rolling across the bridge in 1960.
And it also ran along the eastern shore of Devil's Lake,
seen here with a steam-powered passenger train in 1952.
The railroad played a key role in developing tourism here.
Now, to tap into the agricultural bounty
of southwestern Wisconsin, in 1881,
the North Western built a line west from Madison to Dodgeville,
Platteville, and eventually Galena, Illinois.
It split off from the Chicago line at Olin Avenue
near the bottom of the map here.
And then finally, to compete all the better
with the Milwaukee Road, in 1882,
the North Western built its own line
between Madison and Milwaukee
through Cottage Grove and Lake Mills.
So, at this point, in less than 30 years,
the two biggest railroads in Madison
had fully staked their claims to the city.
Now, unlike the Milwaukee Road,
Madison was very much a main line stop
for the Chicago & North Western.
Its roots appear here in dark blue.
Northwest from Madison, the line extended to Elroy,
where it connected with a subsidiary that ran
through Black River Falls and Eau Claire to St. Paul.
And as trade between the Twin Cities and Chicago grew,
traffic swelled on the line through Madison.
The railroad built a freight yard and locomotive shop
on the east side of town to help handle this business.
Their roundhouse was just north of East Johnson Street
at Fordem Avenue, and part of it still stands
and is home today to Apex Property Management.
Now, the North Western had wanted to work
with the Milwaukee Road on a Union passenger station,
but the Milwaukee wasn't interested.
They wanted to have their own.
So, the North Western built its own passenger station
at Blair and Williamson Streets.
I haven't found a photograph of the first one,
but this postcard shows the second,
built in 1885 with a hotel and restaurant inside.
The current structure dates from 1910,
and was the North Western's response
to the Milwaukee Road's 1903 depot at West Washington.
The North Western used the same architecture firm,
Frost & Granger,
who was also working on a new terminal
for the North Western in Chicago,
and those two North Western stations,
the one in Madison and Chicago,
had some intentional similarities,
and that is worth noting.
Railroads were pioneers of using standard designs
to help establish their brands across their far-flung networks.
We might now call that franchise architecture,
and railroads really pioneered this.
By the time of this 1982 photograph,
the passenger platforms had already been removed,
but you can see them here by that wonderful neon sign
in this color slide from 1957.
This view looks geographically northeast from Blair Street.
Although the train is a westward train pulling in,
and it's westward because of the way
the railroad winds itself across the isthmus.
The filthy equipment is a reflection
of both the winter weather
and the deteriorating state of rail passenger travel
in the 1950s, and we'll say more about that shortly.
The North Western facilities here
extended east from the depot at Blair Street
and filled most of the space between Main and Williamson,
all the way out to Baldwin.
This 1955 photograph looks west from Livingston,
with the capitol in the background.
And I have to point out that in contrast
to that dirty passenger train in the last slide,
these freight diesels are new and shiny.
Now, perhaps the least remarked of the city's depots
was south Madison,
which was on the main line to Chicago at Lakeside Street,
right across the tracks from where the coffee house is today.
I still need to learn more about this depot,
but if you've seen the building with the big fish mural,
this station sat right in front of that.
So, all of the--
The point to make about the North Western beyond here,
though, is that all of their trains going through Madison
had challenges to the northwest due to topography.
To get to the bridge at Merrimac,
seen here with the 1965 circus train from Baraboo,
the North Western climbs away from the Yahara River
and then descends into the Wisconsin River valley
by going over Dane Hill, and this line has steeper grades
and sharper curves than most others on the North Western.
And that's the second time I'm making this point.
The local geography and regional traffic patterns
put Madison's rail lines at a disadvantage.
As business boomed and the trains became heavier,
they really had to slog to get over this line.
This is the circus train again,
climbing Dane Hill just south of Lodi.
In the early 20th century,
the Chicago & North Western was a successful
and wealthy railroad company,
and you can bet its board of directors
envied the Milwaukee Road with its straighter,
flatter, shorter line through Columbus.
So, they decided to build their own
brand-new, 140-mile railroad between Milwaukee and Wyeville.
It was nicknamed the Adams Line since it passed through Adams,
and it became an important stop on this route.
Compared to the line through Madison,
the Adams Line is much straighter and flatter,
cutting a hard diagonal across the landscape.
This map shows all of the Chicago & North Western lines
in Wisconsin in 1910.
This was the original main line from Chicago
to the Twin Cities through Madison.
The proposed Adams Line is shown here,
and once it opened in 1911,
the long-distance trains could now take this route
through Milwaukee instead of Madison.
And for the next half century or so,
the North Western used these two lines pretty evenly,
so service in Madison remained high.
In the 1950s, the city had five trains to and from Chicago,
and four of them continued to the north and west,
some going as far as Duluth, Minnesota,
and Rapid City, South Dakota,
and there were also local trains to and from Milwaukee.
And like the Milwaukee Road,
the North Western ran long freight trains through Madison,
mostly on the main line between Chicago and the northwest--
this one is down near Oregon--
and the branch lines to Milwaukee
and the southwest also had daily freight service.
That covers the North Western.
There's one more principal railroad in Madison,
and that was the Illinois Central,
and whether in terms of trackage, business, or service,
it was a distant third compared to the Milwaukee Road
and the Chicago & North Western.
This was a stub branch line
that came north out of Freeport, Illinois,
where it connected to the Illinois Central's main line
between Chicago and Iowa.
The Madison Branch was built between 1886 and 1888
as the Chicago, Madison, & Northern,
although it never went north of Madison
and it only ever had local service.
It did have nice facilities in Madison.
The IC built their own passenger and freight stations
just on the other side of West Washington
to the northeast of the Milwaukee Road depot.
And this is the passenger station in a view looking west
from Main Street.
Just beyond the covered passenger platform
is where the tracks cross West Washington.
And then the freight station is just beyond that.
It closed in 1974, and today it's part of U-Haul.
Before that, it served briefly
as the Carter presidential campaign headquarters,
as well as the home of Felton's Sports.
The passenger station was torn down in 1944 though.
A mixed-use building now occupies this site,
with a CVS at ground level and condos above.
But if you look closely, in a nod to the past,
that building is called The Depot.
Now, passenger trains made a relatively early exit
from the Illinois Central in Madison,
but freight service continued into the 1990s.
Traffic volumes were pretty low, though,
as this three-car train attests.
But the line is noteworthy for its earthworks,
including the Stewart Tunnel near Belleville, Wisconsin.
Back in Madison, the Illinois Central
had to cross the Milwaukee Road
with a diamond located just west of Park Street.
The view here looks west,
with a short IC train on the left
waiting for the Milwaukee train--
Milwaukee Road train on the right to get out of the way.
So, that completes the Madison rail map.
Railroads had profound economic and cultural impacts
on the city and the region,
from the everyday movement of people and freight
to the special events that brought crowds to the tracks,
like the circus trains that ran between Baraboo and Milwaukee.
This one is topping Dane Hill in 1967,
going slowly with everyone standing on the tracks,
which they should not be doing.
[audience laughs]
And even whistle-stop campaign trains,
like the one Gaylord Nelson and Bronson La Follette used
for their 1968 election.
In the days when railroads went seemingly everywhere
and touched almost everything,
a steel boulevard of four tracks ran along Lake Monona,
two on-- two for the Milwaukee Road on the right
and two for the Chicago & North Western on the left,
where we see a train heading to Chicago.
When Monona Terrace was finally built here in the 1990s,
it was based on a design by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Wright had made a series of designs for Monona Terrace
dating back to 1938.
All of his designs up through the last one in 1955
called for a Union station here, but that didn't come to pass.
For more than a century,
railroads were icons of industrial might.
This powerful image
of the Milwaukee Road coaling tower in Madison
ran in the 1950 Wisconsin historical calendar.
But as we already know, this era did not last.
The decline of Madison's railroads
follows a national story.
Railroads were far and away
our most important form of transportation
through World War II in the 1940s,
but that had changed by the 1950s
in a sharp decline that continued through two decades.
This was most visible to the public in two ways.
First was the wholesale shift from steam to diesel power.
Diesels required far less maintenance
than steam locomotives, meaning fewer railroad workers
and less railroad infrastructure.
The North Western demolished their coaling tower
near Commercial Avenue in 1957.
And second was the loss of passenger trains.
The Milwaukee Road stopped running the Soo to South Dakota
in 1960,
and closed its pontoon bridge over the Mississippi River
the following year,
turning that line into a freight-only stub
that ends in Prairie du Chien.
The view here looks south from the Highway 18 bridge,
as one of the last trains rolls across in 1961.
Wyalusing State Park is on the bluffs in the background.
The Chicago & North Western
also ended its passenger service to South Dakota in 1960,
cutting back their train to Minnesota,
and that lasted for just three years
and the North Western then abolished the train
altogether in 1963.
This is John Gruber's photograph of its last run
at the Madison depot.
Milwaukee Road service held on for a little bit longer,
and even included football specials
that brought fans from Milwaukee into Madison for Badger games.
This one is arriving on East Wilson Street
on November 9, 1968.
And, yes, the tracks ran right down the middle of the street.
That was common for trolleys,
but it was rare for full-scale railroads,
although a few examples do remain in use in the U.S. today.
Both the railroads and the cities
were eager to eliminate these,
and Madison's Street trackage is long gone.
The houses and trees are still there,
but you'd never know a railroad used to be.
This was the same spot, the 1300 block of East Wilson,
in the spring of 2022.
Back in 1968, the Badgers were terrible.
[audience laughs]
Two consecutive seasons without a victory.
On this day, they lost to undefeated Ohio State
by a score of 43-8.
Madison's football fortunes started to improve in the '70s,
but not its rail passenger service.
The last passenger train left town on April 30, 1971,
when the Milwaukee Road's Varsity pulled out
of West Washington on its final run to Chicago.
A lot of freight traffic also left Madison during this time.
The North Western would send all
of its long-distance freight trains up to the Adams Line.
This is one of them at North Lowell in 1978.
Union Pacific still runs freight trains
between Chicago and the Twin Cities over this route.
While most of the North Western tracks in Madison
are still in service today,
all of these lines were cut back to stubs.
Part of the main line to Chicago is now out of service
south of Oregon,
and northwest of Reedsburg, the tracks are gone.
The line to Milwaukee remains only as far as Cottage Grove,
and nearly all of the tracks
that once reached into southwestern Wisconsin are gone.
Only a short piece of that line remains south of Olin Drive
for just a couple of customers.
The most obvious cause for rail's decline in Madison
and across the country was technological.
Cars, trucks, buses, and airplanes
all emerged in the early 20th century and matured rapidly,
especially after World War II.
While each of them is better suited
to certain transportation needs than trains are,
trains still have many advantages.
This is North Shore Drive in Madison in 1961.
Now, trains were disadvantaged
by a number of public policy decisions,
perhaps none more prominent, the Interstate Highway System.
Significant federal, state, and local funding helped build
and continues to maintain our highways and airports,
while railroads have to pay for the maintenance of their tracks
and also pay taxes on them.
Now, we cannot overlook the fact
that railroads benefited mightily from federal
and state land grants in the 19th century,
but by the middle of the 20th century,
public policy had shifted,
putting the railroads at some significant disadvantages.
U.S. railroads also occupy an odd place
as private corporations
that provide essential public services.
Most are classified as common carriers,
and part of that means they have an obligation
to provide transportation,
even when it means running a money-losing, one-car train
like this one crossing the Wisconsin River at Sauk City.
Now, due in part to their own greed
as well as a lack of competition,
the railroads had been regulated heavily during their heyday
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
This is a stereo card from that era
showing the Milwaukee Road bridge at Wisconsin Dells.
It was taken by renowned Wisconsin photographer
Henry Hamilton Bennett.
But even as the railroads faced new competition
from cars, trucks, and airplanes,
those old regulations remained in place.
This is the circus train crossing Blair Street
in Madison,
where the competition waits on the left.
Another challenge for the railroads
is that they had dominated transportation for so long
that their leaders, both in labor and management,
failed to recognize the extent of these new threats
until it was almost too late.
Once considered too big to fail,
railroad companies fell like dominoes.
The many bankruptcies included the Milwaukee Road in 1977,
whose once proud facilities at West Washington
had become a sad sight.
But then, relief came in three forms.
The first was Amtrak, created in 1971
to take over most long-distance passenger trains,
relieving the private railroads of their obligation
to provide what were, by then, money-losing services.
This is the Empire Builder at Wisconsin Dells in 2023,
with some of the best fall color I've ever seen there.
The second was Conrail, a government-owned railroad
that salvaged several bankrupt railroads in the northeast.
And third was deregulation, with the Staggers Rail Act of 1980.
Now, we often think of deregulation
as a conservative initiative,
but the Staggers Act passed a Democrat-controlled Senate
by a vote of 91-4,
and President Jimmy Carter signed it into law.
The act allowed railroads to set their own prices,
which encouraged innovations like truck trailers on flatcars,
as well as single-commodity unit trains,
both seen here at Horseshoe Curve in Pennsylvania.
Now, these three actions,
Amtrak, Conrail, and deregulation,
helped start a railroad renaissance
that spanned four decades.
Deregulation also made it easier for railroads to abandon
or spin off unprofitable lines,
and that's what happened to most of the lines
in and around Madison.
Under the guidance of its bankruptcy trustee,
the Milwaukee Road pared back its system.
The most significant cut was its entire Pacific extension,
but more important here were many secondary and branch lines.
Those included the first railroad through Madison,
the Milwaukee & Mississippi.
And at the same time, the Illinois Central,
which by then had become the Illinois Central Gulf,
wanted to abandon its line to Madison.
The state stepped in to purchase these lines
and maintain local freight service on them,
although this got off to a rocky start.
The sad condition of these lines did not help matters.
The state initially used a few different operating companies.
One of them even brought back the name
Chicago, Madison, & Northern with a pretty nice logo.
But like all of them, it was short lived.
All of these operators were bankrupt by the end of 1984.
A new company called the Wisconsin & Calumet
then took over and did a little better,
although it would close the former Illinois Central
due to its poor condition and lack of business.
But still, the Wisconsin & Calumet,
or the WICT as it became known for its initials of WICT,
found success.
And then, like a lot of other upstart companies,
it was acquired by a bigger one,
Bill Gardner's Wisconsin & Southern,
which is the primary railroad in Madison today.
This is my drone photo from October of 2023,
with a train crossing the Yahara River
on the former Chicago & North Western track.
The Tenney locks are in the background at upper left,
and that's the Milwaukee Road, now a trail, at lower right.
And as the Wisconsin & Southern succeeded,
it looked to expand, and that included leasing
all of the former Chicago & North Western lines,
including the one along Devil's Lake
seen here from the West Bluff Trail,
as well as the former Milwaukee Road from Madison to Watertown.
As the Wisconsin & Southern grew and thrived,
it also attracted attention,
and in 2011, Gardner sold it to Watco,
a Kansas-based firm with dozens of railroads.
Their corporate colors are black and yellow,
so I am glad they have continued to use
Wisconsin & Southern red here.
This train is crossing the Wisconsin River at Lone Rock
in September of 2025, taking 130 empty grain cars
to the United Co-op elevator in Boscobel.
The only railroad in Madison
that isn't part of the Wisconsin & Southern
is the former Madison and Portage,
which the Milwaukee Road never abandoned.
Over 40 years of corporate mergers,
it became part of the Soo Line, then Canadian Pacific,
and now CPKC,
which sends a local freight down from Madison--
down from Portage a few times each week.
And this is one of those,
passing Goose Pond near Arlington.
So, that rounds out the current railroad scene in Madison.
The Wisconsin & Southern space
is the former North Western yard at Johnson Street.
Local freight trains run several days a week
on each of the remaining lines here,
and their cars then get combined into a big train
that departs most mornings around sunrise
bound for Janesville and then ultimately Chicago.
Here it is on a summer morning in 2020,
as a pair of mallards take flight at lower left.
The railroaders call this location MX,
which is short for Madison Crossing,
and it has one of the newest pieces of track in the city,
that curved connection that follows John Nolen Drive,
taking the train from the Chicago & North Western line
onto the Milwaukee Road.
Now, Madison still doesn't have passenger trains,
but 30 miles northeast in Columbus, the main line does.
Amtrak's Empire Builder stops every day
on its cross-country trek between Chicago,
Portland, and Seattle.
In 2024, Amtrak actually added a second train on this route.
The Borealis runs between Chicago and St. Paul,
and despite some equipment challenges,
it carried more than 200,000 passengers
in its first year of service.
That beat most projections by more than 30%.
Looking back at the historic rail map,
most of these lines remain, at least within Madison proper,
but consolidation led to some redundancy,
and that created some new opportunities.
Wisconsin & Southern didn't need two lines across the isthmus.
So today, part of the Milwaukee Road
is now the Capital City Trail.
And across town on the west side,
after the Illinois Central branch had been abandoned,
it became the Southwest Commuter Path.
And here it is from Spooner Street.
On the left, a train leaves town in the 1970s,
and on the right, cyclists pass in 2022.
The Rails to Trails movement has roots in Wisconsin.
Three rail trails converge in Elroy,
all on former Chicago & North Western lines.
They include the nation's first rail trail,
the 32-mile Elroy-Sparta Trail,
which begins two blocks north of the depot and has three tunnels.
Back in Madison,
the Southwest Commuter Path is busy every day,
and can get downright crowded on a Badger game day.
One of railroading's many and most visible legacies
in south central Wisconsin
is the region's outstanding trail network,
much of it built on abandoned railroads.
We even have two rail trails
that cross one another in Fitchburg.
In this 1975 scene,
we have an Illinois Central train leaving Madison
and going over top of the Chicago & North Western.
And here it is in 2022.
The North Western is now the Cannonball Path
leading toward the horizon,
and then the Military Ridge Path coming out of the frame.
And up top, the Illinois Central
is now the Southwest Commuter Path to the left
and the Badger State Trail to the right.
I miss the trains,
but I'm glad these corridors still exist,
and I've had some nice rides on all of them.
This photo of the Capital City Trail is a little drab,
but I wanted to line it up
just as closely as I could with the John Gruber photograph.
Keep your eye on the spire of St. Patrick's Catholic Church.
Here's John's photograph with the Milwaukee Road freight train
on what's now the trail,
and a North Western passenger train at the station behind it.
The view looks southwest at the Blount Street crossing.
And here's a side-by-side comparison.
It's a kind of a shame the MG&E office
now blocks the capitol,
but that is a frequent challenge of then-and-now photography.
So, as our archivists at the Center
have finished digitizing John's black-and-white negatives,
I've done several comparison shots.
This one is back at the depot at West Washington in the 1970s,
when the crossing guard tower still stood.
And here it is in 2022, with only one remaining track
and the Kohl Center looming large in the background.
Turning around, here's John's view looking the other way
from the depot across West Washington
and with the Kroger warehouse at left.
And my comparison shot from 2022 with new condos in the distance
and the GHC parking lot on the right.
I stood in that parking lot
for this view looking back at the depot,
and I did this shot so I could compare it with this one,
a Tom McIlwraith photograph from 1968.
He caught three Milwaukee Road trains in one shot here.
There's a freight train at far left,
a local switcher in the middle, and then at right,
that's a football special pulling in from Milwaukee.
You can even see the Hotel Washington
just above that locomotive.
I've lived in Madison since 2011,
and I've never seen three trains in the city at the same time.
But there are still trains in Madison,
even when they haul only freight.
Every carload moves as much as two and a half semi-trucks.
In Madison and south central Wisconsin,
the railroad's imprint is deep.
Its legacy is long and ongoing.
Thanks so much for the chance to share some of it with you today.
[audience applauds]