By Scott Lothes

The Milwaukee Road’s *Varsity* passenger train departs Madison for its three-hour run to Chicago late in the afternoon of October 21, 1967, reflected perfectly in Monona Bay. Photograph by Thomas F. McIlwraith, collection of the Center for Railroad Photography & Art, McIlwraith-01-014-02

Railroads—instrumental to the making of the United States as we know it—played a profound role in Madison’s growth and development. At their zenith, steel rails of three companies fanned out from the city in nine directions. Around the turn of the twentieth century, well more than one hundred trains (freight and passenger combined) rolled over those lines everyday. Through the 1950s, you could still ride passenger trains from Madison directly to Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis, Duluth, and even Rapid City, South Dakota. With connections, you could reach much of the country.

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Rail’s decline and rebirth

The decline of rail traffic in Madison follows a story arc that played out across the nation. Passenger trains’ modal share peaked way back around 1920, when cars and buses began making inroads on rail’s dominance. Train traffic flourished during and immediately after World War II in the 1940s, but by the 1950s, it began falling precipitously. Cars and buses combined with more and better roads—particularly the Interstate Highway System—to capture most short- and medium-distance trips. The swift rise of commercial aviation won over most long-distance travelers. With the great help of the interstates and cheap gasoline, trucks went from complimenting freight trains to competing with them directly on all but the largest shipments.

Railroads faced policy headwinds, too. Their dominance had fostered greed that led to regulation, which remained in place and hampered their ability to compete with trucking. Public funds built the interstates and helped build many airports, while railroads own their infrastructure—paying to maintain it and paying taxes on it. Hard-fought labor victories during the rail industry’s more dangerous past led to its inefficient adoption of new technology. As but one example, after the conversion from steam to diesel power in the middle of the twentieth century, firemen continued to ride in locomotive cabs for decades despite having little work to do. Meanwhile a single driver could operate a truck or a bus.

Railroads had been an American institution for so long that few people—neither elected officials, nor labor leaders, nor even the railroads’ own managers—perceived the extent of their peril. Long considered too big to fail, railroads began falling like dominoes. A few small ones shutdown in the 1950s and 1960s, and then came the near collapse of the industry. When Penn Central declared bankruptcy on June 23, 1970, it was the largest company to go bust in U.S. history. Other big ones followed, including the Milwaukee Road, a major player in Madison and the region.

Amtrak relieved most railroads of their by-then money-losing passenger trains in 1971, and then in 1980 came the Staggers Act to deregulate the industry. In April it overwhelmingly passed a Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate, 91 to 4. After it passed the House by a similar margin, President Jimmy Carter signed the bill into law on October 14. Deregulation allowed a much leaner—and highly profitable—freight rail industry to rise Phoenix-like from its own ashes. Flexible pricing led to new types of trains that are now common: intermodal trains carrying truck trailers and shipping containers, and unit trains hauling a single bulk commodity, typically from a single shipper to a single customer and discounted accordingly. Most railroads merged into a few very large companies. Train traffic and capital investment were siphoned to the best few routes. Other routes were either abandoned or spun off to smaller operating companies.

A Wisconsin & Southern “unit” grain train, with 100 cars from the elevators in Boscobel and Muscoda billed to a single customer, passes through Madison on the morning of July 15, 2021. The train is on the former Milwaukee Road, which was part of the first railroad built across the state in the 1850s; it is crossing the former Chicago & North Western, which arrived in 1864 and required this highly unusual at-grade intersection of two railroad lines on causeways in a lake. Photograph by Scott Lothes

The nine lines of Madison have been pruned back to seven, and many of those have been severed to stubs rather than the through-routes they once were. The regional railroad Wisconsin & Southern (owned by Kansas-based holding company Watco) operates all but one of the remaining lines in Madison, based out of the former Chicago & North Western freight yard off East Johnson Street. Several local freight trains come and go from there, generally providing three-days-a-week service on each line. They gather up cars for a big train that comes up from Janesville every night and typically returns in the morning. (If you’ve had to wait for it at John Nolan, remember that every car carries as much freight as two and a half semi-trucks.) Rounding out Madison’s remaining rail service is a branch of CPKC (formerly Canadian Pacific), one of the six big “Class I” railroads in the U.S., which sends a local freight train down from Portage, typically three days a week.

Seeking the vestiges

Beyond the tracks themselves, the most obvious evidence of Madison’s railroad past are a few remaining large structures. At the north end of the Wisconsin & Southern yard off Commercial Avenue, Apex Property Management does business out of what’s left of the Chicago & North Western roundhouse, once a stable for Madison-based steam locomotives. On the isthmus at the eastern corner of the Capitol Square where John Nolan meets Blair Street, the North Western’s two-story stone 1910 neoclassical depot still stands, in service of MG&E after the last passenger train pulled out in 1965. Its architects, the Chicago-based firm Frost & Granger, designed dozens of depots for the North Western, basing Madison’s on the railroad’s biggest terminal in Chicago (located at the site of today’s Ogilvie Transportation Center). As one of the nation’s first truly big businesses, railroads were leaders in employing standardized architecture as recognizable, branded trademarks over their multi-state networks.

New Chicago & North Western diesel locomotives congregate next to the roundhouse and turntable near Commercial Avenue on November 19, 1955. Built to maintain steam locomotives, most roundhouses became unnecessary after the arrival of lower-maintenance diesels. Part of this one still stands and is home to Apex Property Management. Photograph by John Gruber, collection of the Center for Railroad Photography & Art, Gruber-01-039-27

An unusually dirty Chicago & North Western passenger train from Chicago crosses Blair Street as it arrives in Madison on February 8, 1957. Part of the depot is visible at left. It still stands, albeit without its platforms and neon sign, and is owned today by MG&E. Photograph by John Gruber, collection of the Center for Railroad Photography & Art, Gruber-01S-50-05

Just west of the Square, the densest concentration of extant railroad buildings in Madison stands in the 600 block of West Washington Avenue. At the western corner with North Bedford, U-Haul operates out of the former Illinois Central freight depot, which for decades facilitated the transfer of less-than-carload shipments between rail cars and trucks (and wagons in its early years). It was originally paired with a similar, Italianate passenger depot on the other side of West Washington, but the Illinois Central never achieved a major presence in Madison, and the passenger depot was torn down in 1944. The current development, which houses CVS, pays homage to that past with its name, “The Depot.”

Most recognizable of all Madison railroad sites is the former Milwaukee Road passenger depot, home to Roger Charly’s Motorless Motion bicycle shop since 2014. Like the North Western depot on the other side of the Square, this 1903 building was designed in the neoclassical style by Frost & Granger, although it’s brick and hip-roofed. The stone sign facing Washington gives the initials for the railroad’s full name: Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific. Its tracks once extended from the Ohio River to Puget Sound. The principals of Frost & Granger were brothers-in-law, both having married daughters of the Chicago & North Western’s president. They received numerous commissions from that railroad, but not nearly as many from the Milwaukee Road. I like to think that the Milwaukee chose them for their signature Madison structure as a dig at their main competitor, the North Western. Regardless of the reason, their station has become an icon of the city, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1995.

Two Milwaukee Road railraoders converse at the desk in the operator’s bay window in the Madison depot; visitors today can still walk through this space in the corridor connecting Bandit with Motorless Motion. Photograph by John Gruber, collection of the Center for Railroad Photography & Art, Gruber-09-042-12

The Milwaukee Road facilities once sprawled over both sides of West Washington, extending west beyond Park Street and including a roundhouse, coaling tower, large freight yard, and numerous structures. Immediately west of the passenger depot is the baggage claim building, railroading’s version of the airport carousels we all love to hate today. It was part of the depot project and designed to match, and it’s been home to the elegant Harvey House restaurant since 2021. Its name comes from the Fred Harvey Company, an early purveyor of fine dining that once operated a chain of depot restaurants and hotels along the Santa Fe Railway’s main line between Chicago and Los Angeles.

Just west of the baggage claim building, the Milwaukee Road had its own freight depot, which was razed in the 1980s. The Kohl Center now stands just beyond it. Across the one remaining track, the City Station shopping center occupies the site of the former roundhouse and switching yard. No fewer than twelve tracks once crossed West Washington, a major source of congestion with the frequent train movements. An elevated crossing watchman’s tower provided manual protection, located on the southeastern side of the street.

This view from the cab of a Milwaukee Road locomotive looks southeast from the crossing with West Washington in 1963. At left is the Kroger warehouse with three freight cars on the spur track for unloading. The elevated watchtower for the crossing stands at right. Photograph by John Gruber, collection of the Center for Railroad Photography & Art, Gruber-05-24-001

Beyond the extant depots and long-gone facilities, subtle reminders of the railroad past still linger, waiting to be discovered by those who seek them. All over Madison—and in cities and towns across the country—industrial buildings and even the streets themselves align to the geometric order imposed by the railroad, even when the tracks are no longer there. One of my favorite examples in Madison is across Washington from the Milwaukee Road depot: Delta Properties’ former Kroger warehouse at 634 West Main Street. A spur track once ran along the building’s southwestern face. Food arrived there in box cars (both regular and refrigerated) and was unloaded into the warehouse for later local delivery by wagon or truck. Prior to Kroger’s acquisition in 1928, the warehouse was home to the Universal Grocery Company. They favored local producers, including the Sauk City Canning Company, which enjoyed single-line rail service on the Milwaukee Road. That spur is still in place—mostly paved over but with some bits of rusty rail poking through the parking lot that sits between the building and the track.

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Many other railroad vestiges haunt Madison, and you can learn more about them in two of the Madison Trust’s walking tours. The Machinery Row Tour takes in the East Rail Corridor including the former Chicago & North Western depot, while this year’s Specialty Tour focuses on the West Rail Corridor of the Illinois Central and Milwaukee Road.

You can also browse more historic imagery of Madison’s railroads in the digital collections of the Center for Railroad Photography & Art, a national nonprofit founded in Madison in 1997 by John Gruber, Ralph Pierce, and former mayor Joel Skornicka. Gruber served as our first president until 2013 and remained on our board until his death in 2018. His widow, Bonnie (a former alderperson), then donated his extensive photography collection to us. Our archivists are currently processing its more than 100,000 items.

Uncovering Madison’s Railroad Past

By Scott Lothes

Rail’s decline and rebirth

Seeking the vestiges

© 2024

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