Chicago
Great Western Railway - (en)
The Chicago Great Western Railway (AAR reporting marks CGW) was a Class I
railroad that linked Chicago, Minneapolis, Omaha, and Kansas City. It was
founded by Alpheus Beede Stickney in 1885 as a regional line between St.
Paul and the Iowa state line called the Minnesota & Northwestern
Railroad. Through mergers and new construction, the railroad, named
Chicago Great Western after 1909, quickly became a multi-state carrier.
One of the last Class I railroads to be built, it competed against several
other more well-established railroads in the same territory, and developed
a corporate culture of innovation and efficiency to survive.
Nicknamed the Corn Belt Route because of its operating area in the
midwestern United States, the railroad was sometimes called the Lucky
Strike Road, due to the similarity in design between the herald of the CGW
and the logo used for Lucky Strike cigarettes.
It was merged with the Chicago and North Western Railway (CNW) in 1968,
which abandoned most of the CGW's trackage.
The History of the Chicago Great
Western
The Stickney Years
Alpheus Beede Stickney was a lawyer-turned-railroad magnate who had found
work in management of several railroads before striking out on his own.
In 1854, the Legislature of the Territory of Minnesota had chartered the
Minnesota and Northwestern Railroad (M&NW) to be built between Lake
Superior, Minneapolis and Dubuque, Iowa. However, it stayed dormant until
purchased by Stickney and another investor in 1883. Immediately, the
railroad began building, and by 1886 had constructed a line between St.
Paul, Minnesota and Dubuque.
By 1888, not only had the railroad changed its name to the Chicago, St.
Paul and Kansas City Railroad (CStP&KC), it had finished a continuous
line all the way across Illinois to Forest Park, Illinois, except for
trackage rights with the Illinois Central across the Mississippi River. At
Forest Park, the railroad made a connection with the ancestor of the
Baltimore and Ohio Chicago Terminal for the last nine miles into Chicago's
Grand Central Station. The new construction included Illinois' longest
railway bore, the Winston Tunnel, south of Galena.
Through merger and construction, the CStP&KC then added lines between
Oelwein, Iowa, on the Chicago-to-St. Paul mainline, and Kansas City,
Missouri, by 1891, and between Oelwein and Omaha, Nebraska by 1903. Thus,
Oelwein became the hub of the railroad, and its main locomotive repair
shops were soon located there. The mammoth facility was said to have
inspired Walter Chrysler, who worked as the supervisor of the shops
between 1904 and 1910.
The Great Western also expanded its assortment of feeder branch lines in
Iowa, Minnesota and Illinois, but plans to continue expanding the railroad
north to Duluth, Minnesota, west to Sioux City, Iowa or Denver, Colorado,
or south into Mexico, never came to fruition.
The Felton Years
The railroad survived the Panic of 1893 to become the Chicago Great
Western, and with Stickney at the helm soon developed a reputation for
being an innovative and progressive competitor for traffic between the
terminals it served. However, the Panic of 1907 forced it into bankruptcy,
and the road was purchased by financial interests connected to J. P.
Morgan. One of the first casualties of the buyout was Stickney, who was
forced out and replaced by Samuel Morse Felton, Jr. in 1909. Felton
realized that the railroad could not survive in the fiercely competitive
markets it served without an ambitious and sustained effort to innovate
and modernize. New rails, new locomotives including several Mallet
locomotives (which set a precedent for the railroad acquiring large steam
locomotives with substantial horsepower) pulled ever-longer freight trains
over the system, and gasoline-powered motorcars to replace steam power on
the lightly used passenger trains, were hallmarks of this rehabilitation.
The Joyce Years
Felton retired in 1929 due to failing health. At the time he stepped down,
investors friendly with Patrick H. Joyce had purchased a controlling
interest in the Great Western from J. P. Morgan and had placed him in
charge of the Great Western. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 threatened
these financial interests, so Joyce and his friends, along with the Van
Sweringen brothers, embarked on a stock-manipulation scheme to keep the
price of CGW stock high. The inevitable happened in 1935, when the
railroad declared bankruptcy once again. It was reorganized and re-emerged
in 1941.
Even as the CGW was being mismanaged, Joyce continued the modernization
and innovation of his predecessors. The Great Western trimmed passenger
service, which was never particularly profitable on the lightly-populated
lines, abandoned branch lines and refurbished main lines, and continued
acquisition of huge locomotives, this time 2-10-4 Texas-types, which
pulled enormous trains, sometimes one-hundred cars long and longer.
However, a highly important innovation was the so-called "Piggyback
Service", the forerunner of modern intermodal freight transport,
which the Great Western introduced in 1936 by moving several hundred truck
trailers on specially modified flat cars. The Great Western was also an
early proponent of dieselization. It purchased its first diesel-electric
locomotive, an 800-horsepower yard switcher from Westinghouse, in 1934.
The CGW was completely dieselized by 1950.
The Deramus Years
As it had happened in 1929, a group of businessmen friendly to William N.
Deramus, Jr., president of the Kansas City Southern, had been purchasing
up a controlling share of Great Western stock, and by 1949, this group
appointed Deramus' son, William N. Deramus III, to head the railroad. He
continued, even more aggressively than his predecessors, the modernization
and cost-trimming that had become the hallmarks of the corporate culture
of the CGW. Under Deramus, passenger service was almost entirely
eliminated, and the railroad's offices, spread out in Chicago and
throughout the system, were consolidated in Oelwein. Even longer trains
than before, pulled by sets of five or more EMD F-units, became standard
operating procedure, which slowed service but increased efficiency.
In 1946, the first proposal to merge the Great Western with other
railroads, this time with the Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroad and
the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad.
Investors balked and the CGW stayed independent, but even as the Great
Western survived and thrived during the 1950s, it was becoming
increasingly clear that the American railroad climate was changing.
Railroads were merging, changing traffic patterns and threatening the
delicate economic balance in which railroads of similar size and stability
to the CGW could exist. By the time Deramus stepped down from the CGW in
1957 to take the presidency at the Missouri-Kansas-Texas,[4] the decade of
the railroad super-mergers was just around the corner.
The Merger Decade
Upon his resignation, Deramus was replaced by Edward T. Reidy. As before,
innovations continued to keep the company profitable. Second-generation
diesel locomotives such as the EMD GP30 and EMD SD40, the largest and most
powerful the CGW ever owned, found their way into the system, and the
Oelwein shops stayed busy repairing and maintaining the now-aged F-units
long after many other railroads had replaced theirs. Passenger service,
reduced to two St. Paul to Omaha trains, was gone by 1962. Labor costs
were trimmed, branch lines abandoned, as the Great Western tried to stay
fiscally viable enough to be a suitable merger partner.
Upon the failure of a merger opportunity with the Soo Line Railroad in
1963, the board of the Great Western grew increasingly anxious about its
continued viability in a consolidating railroad market. Testifying before
the Interstate Commerce Commission in Chicago, President Reidy claimed,
"The simple fact is that there is just too much transportation
available between the principal cities we serve. The Great Western cannot
long survive as an independent carrier under these conditions."
The CGW, therefore, was open to a merger with the Chicago and North
Western Railway (CNW), first proposed in 1964. After a long period of
regulatory wrangling, on July 1, 1968, the Chicago Great Western merged
with Chicago and North Western.
The CNW maintained the "Oelwein Shop" facilities at Oelwein
until 1993. Within two decades of the 1968 merger, most of the CGW
right-of-way had been abandoned by the CNW.
