On July 3, 1957, Peter Weller, then a seventeen-year-old high school graduate, was on a return flight from Texas to the Glenview Naval Air Station, just northwest of Chicago. He and twenty-six other boys his age had been awarded Chicago-newspaper-carrier scholarships earlier that spring, and they had just been treated to a four-day Navy Buddy cruise and had visited naval air facilities at Corpus Christi, Kingsville, and Dallas. The plane passed over the Wheaton Shops of the Chicago Aurora and Elgin (CA&E) Railway on its descent toward Glenview in the late afternoon. Weller noticed that passenger cars filled the storage tracks in the yards, which seemed unusual since most equipment should have been out on the line for the evening rush hour. When he arrived home that evening and saw the front page of the Chicago Daily News, the reason became apparent: CA&E passenger service had shut down at noon that day. Stories had circulated for several weeks that the end of service was near; and with school out for the summer, Weller had planned to ride those last runs and take more photographs before the line stopped. To his dismay, those plans had been overtaken by events. On that same afternoon, Richard Stark, a young west-suburban teenager, had wanted to go into Chicago to buy fireworks near Roosevelt Road and Central Avenue. He had intended to ride the CA&E to Des Plaines Avenue and take the Garfield Park "L" to Central Avenue to make his purchases. When he got to the Spring Road station, not far from his home in Elmhurst, he was told by an employee there that the trains had stopped running. The authors of this book are related. Fred and Richard Stark are brothers who grew up in Elmhurst, Illinois. Their parents moved from Chicago in 1944 and chose to live in that Elmhurst neighborhood because CA&E service was available nearby. Peter Weller, a cousin to the Stark brothers, grew up in Chicago. Neither family owned an automobile in those years, and the CA&E trains provided the link between them. The men's adult lives and careers led them away from the Chicago area; but recently they walked along the Illinois Prairie Path in Elmhurst and studied photographs they had taken at the same locations more than forty years earlier. As they watched hundreds of bicyclists and hikers pass by them on the former CA&E right-of-way, they found the experience of seeing the commuter-rail corridor transformed into a recreational trail somewhat disorienting. This book has been written partially with a sense of nostalgia, but the authors also wanted to document the right-of-way's transformation from a rail-transportation corridor to an express highway and nature path. If one accepts that change is the only constant, then one must also accept that what exists today may not exist tomorrow. With the passage of time, the memory of the Prairie Path as a corridor for high-speed electric trains will continue to fade. Many of the CA&E bridges have been replaced with newer structures; few of the stations have survived. The number of suburbanites who remember, or even rode, the CA&E trains will continue to decline. Accordingly, public perceptions of the meaning and significance of this corridor will continue to change. To readers under the age of thirty-five, this has always been the Illinois Prairie Path. Those who are somewhat older may have only vague recollections of the red-and-gray electric cars that ran their last miles and disappeared along with other childhood memories. For many west suburbanites of the immediate postwar era, the CA&E provided a vital and necessary service in getting them from their homes to Chicago for work, shopping, cultural events, and even worship. Nearly 150 trains a day raced along the CA&E rails during the Railway's peak year of 1948. Even in 1957, the last year of passenger service, the CA&E still scheduled nearly one hundred trains a day between Forest Park and Wheaton. In the Chicago-metropolitan area of the 1990s, the need for large numbers of suburban residents to go into Chicago for any of these reasons is far less compelling, and many people living along or near the Illinois Prairie Path today probably view it as a recreational resource. The authors hope to enable readers to follow the transition of the CA&E right-of-way from a busy commuter-rail line to a biking, hiking, and nature path, and to understand why such a transition took place. This book is not a definitive history of the CA&E Railway. Instead, its purpose is to convey a sense of what the CA&E Railway was in its last years of operation, to describe the formidable obstacles that it faced and failed to overcome, and to express the feelings the authors had as young railfans whose formative years coincided with the CA&E's decline and ultimate demise. The book also provides a pictorial record of the railway drawn from photographs the authors took and other memorabilia they collected when the CA&E was still in operation. Photographs by others are also presented, as are records of the CA&E cars and other artifacts that have survived through the preservation efforts of museums and historical societies. Finally, the book describes how the right-of-way evolved through the preservation efforts of the Illinois Prairie Path corporation and its many members and volunteers, and by the state and county agencies responsible for its acquisition and maintenance. The scope of this book, therefore, goes beyond the history of the CA&E and melds together two very different kinds of institutions, activities, and functions - transportation and recreation - that have shared the same right-of-way for nearly a century. Table of Contents | Home | Photo Gallery | Ordering Information