The Forgotten History of Chicago’s Yellow Line
Clip: Special | 2m 9sVideo has Closed Captions
Chicago’s Yellow Line is all that remains of an old high-speed rail line.
Chicago’s Yellow Line train is a curious little train with a hidden history. It is the last surviving fragment of the Skokie Valley branch of the old North Shore Line – a rail line to Milwaukee with speeds up to 90 miles per hour.
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Chicago Tours with Geoffrey Baer is a local public television program presented by WTTW
The Forgotten History of Chicago’s Yellow Line
Clip: Special | 2m 9sVideo has Closed Captions
Chicago’s Yellow Line train is a curious little train with a hidden history. It is the last surviving fragment of the Skokie Valley branch of the old North Shore Line – a rail line to Milwaukee with speeds up to 90 miles per hour.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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(intriguing music) - [Geoffrey] Here's a fact about the "L" that might surprise you.
The "L" once was part of a much larger rail system that extended way beyond Chicago, and you can still find remnants of it.
(intriguing music continues) - Far from the loop, (train humming) here at the northern end of the Red Line, you can transfer to a curious little train with a hidden history, the Yellow Line, aka, the Skokie Swift.
- [Announcer] It's a good bet most Yellow Line riders have no idea this is all that remains of a mostly forgotten high-speed rail line to Milwaukee that went into service way back in 1926.
(train horn blaring) This was the Skokie Valley branch of the North Shore Line.
(upbeat jazz music) An earlier branch that ran through the suburbs along the lakefront was just too slow of a way to get to Milwaukee.
It even ran as a street car in some places.
(train wheels screeching) The railroad built Ravinia Park in Highland Park to encourage ridership, but the real solution (train horn blaring) was to build a whole new branch that ran up the sparsely populated Skokie Valley, where today's Edens Expressway follows the same route.
(cheerful jazz music) Electric railroads like the North Shore Line were called interurbans.
They connected nearby cities in the days before good roads.
Riders on the Skokie Valley branch traveled at speeds up to 90 miles an hour on sleek, futuristic trains called Electroliners.
The North Shore Line was one of three interurbans in the Chicago area.
The Chicago Aurora and Elgin ran to communities in the Fox Valley, and the South Shore Line ran to northwest Indiana.
They all came to be controlled by Commonwealth Edison president Samuel Insull, who saw interurbans as a way to expand his electricity empire beyond Chicago, supplying power to new communities built along the route.
(cheerful jazz music ending) (upbeat jazz music)
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Chicago Tours with Geoffrey Baer is a local public television program presented by WTTW