Chicago, US Rail Hub Great American Railroad Journeys

I have crossed the Atlantic

to ride the railroads of North America

with my reliable Appleton's Guide.

Published in the late 19th century,

my Appleton's General Guide To North America

will direct me to all that's novel...

beautiful...

memorable...

and striking...

in the United States.

As I journey across this vast continent,

I'll discover how pioneers and cowboys conquered the West...

..and how the railroads tied this nation together,

helping to create the global super state of today.

As I continue my rail journey across the Midwest,

I am still feeling the restless energy pumped out by Chicago.

There's much more to explore in this towering city,

reaching back to its origins.

How the waterways were adapted, and the railways attracted.

My railway journey tracks the birth of the industrial Midwest.

I began in Minneapolis - a 19th-century powerhouse.

Then headed south along the trade route of the Mississippi

to La Crosse, in rural Wisconsin.

Striking out east, I beached at Lake Michigan's Milwaukee,

then set a course for America's railroad capital, Chicago.

Next, I'll travel through fertile prairies in Illinois,

whose agriculture fuelled the cities,

en route to my final destination

in Memphis, home of the blues.

On this leg I'll start by exploring Chicago's rich railroad heritage

in Bedford Park.

It's then downtown to the lavish 19th century Palmer House Hotel,

before I take in the city's largest civil engineering project

in a century.

'This time, I gravitate towards the ultimate marshalling yard...'

So I call this the economy in motion.

'..recreate the original brownie...'

That is wicked. Well done, Chef.

'..and discover the solution to the city's pollution.'

Imagine when you have 30,000 cubic feet per second

of sewage coming out into here. It will be beautiful.

MICHAEL LAUGHS A great image.

Appleton's tells me that Chicago has, within 40 years,

grown from a small Indian trading station

to the position of metropolis

and the greatest railway centre on the continent.

In classical times, it was almost true that all roads lead to Rome.

And today it's almost true that all railroads lead to Chicago.

Chicago's first railroad arrived in 1848,

when the Galena And Chicago Union line was built

to serve Illinois' lead mines.

170 years later

Chicago is the nerve centre of the USA's vast freight network,

handling roughly one third of the nation's total cargo.

Trains from all corners of the country converge here.

In huge rail yards, they are sorted and reconfigured,

ready for their onward journeys.

I'm marvelling at the Chicago Belt Railway's

five-and-a-half mile long facility.

Joe, what a pleasure and a privilege.

'Joe Szabo is a fifth-generation railroad professional.'

Joe, I'm so impressed by Chicago

as the hub of America, the crossroads of America.

How did it become so?

The railroad boom in Chicago really didn't begin until

the building of the River Bridge over the Mississippi River

at Rock Island.

Rock Island is a good, long distance west of Chicago,

why so significant?

This was the key point in crossing the Mississippi River,

and whoever crossed the Mississippi River was going to be the key city

in the development of the railroad network,

because this is where you were finally going to be able

to connect East Coast with West Coast.

And so this put Chicago at the centre

of the transcontinental railroad,

and the economy grew from there.

The Chicago and Rock Island Railroad opened in 1854,

but not everyone was delighted.

Mississippi steamboat owners saw the growth of long-distance rail

as a threat to their river traffic.

15 days after the Rock Island bridge opened,

a steamer crashed into it and the owner sued,

claiming that it posed an impediment to navigation.

A little-known Illinois lawyer, Abraham Lincoln,

successfully defended the railroad's legal right.

A milestone in his career, and a victory for Chicago's railroads.

Once the rail network began developing,

Chicago began to explode.

By 1890, they're the second largest city in the nation.

Chicago finds itself at the centre of a transcontinental rail network.

-What is the significance of that network?

-It's absolutely critical,

because before the construction of the transcontinental railroad,

there was no national economy.

All you had was a series of small, local economies that

were no bigger than the distance a horse could walk in a day.

And it was the transcontinental railroad that tied

all those local economies together,

and for the first time, we have a national economy,

and Chicago was right at the centre of all this.

How important are the railroads for freight in the United States today?

It's critically important.

And by most measurements, rail is the most efficient,

safest way to move commodities.

Rail's a critical part of a multimodal network.

And so foreign goods are coming into the ports by ship.

They get transferred to rail,

get brought, you know, 1,000 miles inland,

and then, ultimately, distributed by truck.

How significant is this place, the Belt Railway Company of Chicago,

this enormous facility, to the USA?

So I call this the economy in motion.

On this site of 786 acres,

8,400 cars a day are sorted and assembled into new configurations

for transcontinental transit.

Using a technique that's barely changed

since the days of my Appleton's Guide.

At the heart of the operation is a 30 foot high double track hump,

or mound, controlled by a yard tower.

I'm standing above the place where individual cars are separated off,

and allowed to roll into their new formation by the force of gravity -

one of the most compelling sights I've ever seen on a railway.

-Hello, I'm Michael.

-Nick.

-Nice to meet you.

-It's a great operation you have here, Nick.

I've never seen anything like it.

These cars are descending by gravity.

How is their destination determined?

Well, each car has a code when it comes in,

and it determines where we're going to route it.

For example, all these cars in 37, we coded them as 740s,

so as this train comes out,

every car that is coded as a 740 will be humped into 37.

You call this process humping, right, because, I mean,

-literally, we're on a hump.

-That's correct.

And I'm amazed how far they travel by gravity.

Is that just cos the gradient of the track is perfectly calculated?

That's correct. The track grade make the cars roll.

They usually leave here about four, four-and-a-half miles per hour.

This Chicago yard has been marshalling rail freight since 1902,

and helping to keep the US economy rolling.

We're talking here about materials and produce from all over America.

Yeah. We move our wheat, grain,

we move frozen vegetables, lumber,

flour, corn, petroleum oils.

We have trains coming in from both the east and the west.

We bring them all the way from Canada,

and we re-route them back all over the US.

Is there any facility in the United States that compares to this one?

No, no. We're the only facility with a two-way hump.

-Meaning you can bring them up to this little summit?

-That's correct.

And then they can roll that way, or they can roll that way?

-That is correct.

-It's brilliant.

-I mean, gravity is man's oldest friend, isn't it?

-Yes, it is.

I'm swapping suburban Chicago railyards

for the urban "L".

The city has a superb skyline, an unmistakable silhouette.

And on the L, you feel like you're advancing towards Chicago.

The nucleus of Chicago's L

is a two-mile circuit of elevated track called The Loop.

Between 1895 and 1897,

this short stretch is at the heart of the L web.

For the first time, workers and shoppers could travel seamlessly

by rail to the heart of downtown Chicago.

Following in their tracks,

I'm bound for a building described in my Appleton's Guide

as one of the most imposing in the city.

The lobby of the Palmer House Hotel is fantastic.

The painted ceiling with allegories of love and fantastic animals.

Everywhere, candelabra -

some borne aloft by semi-naked angels,

others by mythical lions.

The whole thing is just so over the top.

This is the longest continuously operating hotel in North America,

and Ken Price its official historian.

We are in a glorious room in a glorious hotel.

-Welcome, Michael.

-Cheers. Thank you very much, indeed.

-What is the origin of the hotel?

-Well, it goes back 145 years.

It started with a man by the name of Potter Palmer,

who was neither educated or privileged,

who came from a very small farm town in upstate New York.

Most of the young men his age were essentially going west to Colorado

and California, where the gold was.

He saw the middleness of this area, and he was right on the money.

And it made him incredibly successful.

Potter Palmer made his fortune in retail and property development.

The Palmer Hotel was his most lavish project,

built as an extravagant wedding gift for his wife, Bertha.

The two of them were two completely opposites

in terms of where they came from, and their backgrounds.

He was not educated, she had a college degree,

during the Civil War,

when a good education for a man was simply seventh-grade.

But days after opening,

the hotel was destroyed by Chicago's Great Fire of 1871.

Palmer rebuilt it in iron, brick and sandstone,

and relaunched it as the world's first fireproof hotel,

while Bertha stamped her taste on the interior.

The hotel looks the way it does because of

Bertha's great love of beauty.

She introduced a form of painting

that had never been seen before in this country.

She loved the entire impressionistic movement so much,

she travelled back and forth the Atlantic throughout her lifetime

and acquired the 220 Monets, Manets,

Degas, Pissarros, Renoirs, Cassatts, Cezannes.

When she died,

she bequeathed the vast majority of those to the city of Chicago,

which is why the city of Chicago has

the largest collection of French Impressionism outside of France.

Extraordinary.

In 1893, millions descended on Chicago

for the world's Columbian Exposition,

celebrating 400 years since Columbus landed on American soil.

Bertha Palmer wanted to provide lady visitors to the fair

with a delicious portable snack,

and the result made culinary history.

-Stephen, how lovely to see you. I'm Michael.

-Good to see you, Michael.

-How are you?

-Great to see you, indeed.

So I think Bertha Palmer caused the creation of the brownie here.

-Have you refined it?

-This is the actual recipe that the pastry chef

back in 1893 produced for Bertha at the time.

What I have in this bowl here is I've actually melted the chocolate

and the butter, and I've placed it in here.

What we have to do now is we have to whip this up.

-If you could take care of that.

-Under your supervision, Sir.

Absolutely. It actually smells wonderful.

-It smells like a brownie already.

-It smells brilliant. It's pretty good.

-Throw in our sugar.

-That is an unbelievable amount of sugar.

-Keep going, keep going.

-Yeah, all right.

Yeah, keep mixing. Right, right, right.

-Have you got them?

-You're making me work quite hard here.

I don't think you eat many of these, do you, looking at you?

You know, I do actually eat quite a few.

-In fact, we make about 10,000 of these a week.

-Oh, my goodness!

Brownies here at the Palmer House are pretty incredible.

I really like it. You're getting a work out.

You need to get the walnuts and put them on liberally, like this.

-Oh, right.

-Pat them down lightly with your hand.

-Ready?

-Little bit, yeah.

-I'm a very happy bunny at the moment.

'30 minutes later and I can hardly contain myself.'

-Whoa, they look great.

-Check that out.

-Are they finished?

No, there's one more step we have to take, Michael.

We're going to brush them with some apricot glaze.

Was that happening in Bertha's day, too?

Yes, it was. Yes, it was part of the original recipe.

-Very inventive, weren't they?

-They were. In fact, they were.

Absolute heaven.

That is wicked!

-Well done, Chef. Well done, Chef.

-Nice job. Nice job, Michael.

I love it!

I'm sold, but what will today's guests

make of my authentic brownies?

Surprise!

Would you like a brownie?

I've been down in the dungeons of the hotel

making some brownies with the chef.

-They were invented in this hotel.

-I heard that.

-Yeah, you heard that?

-I'm not...

-You don't look like a chef, so.

-No, no. That's very true.

Those are some good brownies.

-It's pretty good.

-It is pretty good.

Delicious. I'm glad I don't have a nut allergy.

Yeah, that's right. They're heavy on walnut.

Excellent.

-Very good.

-Yeah?

-Do you make brownies yourselves?

-Yeah, from a box!

THEY ALL LAUGH

-They won't be better than your mother's, I guess?

-No.

Apparently, they're slimming.

-Amazing.

-Yes, the best of all - zero calories.

-Enjoy Chicago.

-Thank you very much.

And I hope you'll remember it not least for its brownies.

A new day, and the Windy City is rather more wet than blowy.

Many argue that Chicago's famous nickname

has nothing to do with the weather.

It teased the metropolis's boastful citizens, full of hot air.

But Chicagoans had reason to be proud.

Appleton's remarks that the site of the business portion of Chicago

is 14 foot above the lake.

It was originally much lower,

but has been built up by three to nine foot since 1856.

It's an inclined plane, rising towards the west,

to the height of 28 foot,

giving slow, but sufficient drainage.

Just imagine the challenge of draining the waste of a population

that was multiplying decade-by-decade.

Not to mention the volumes of rainwater!

In the shelter of the Loop's Clark Street Bridge,

author Libby Hill will tell me how Chicago

dragged itself out of the mud.

-Libby, hello.

-Hello, Michael. It's so nice to meet you.

Welcome to Chicago.

Libby, it strikes me that Chicago did not begin with many natural

advantages. My guidebook tells me about the drainage problem

-that the city had.

-Well, Chicago was built on a marsh,

and so when they finally hired a sewage director,

he decided that the best thing to do was to get the city up

out of the marsh, And so he raised the city.

It took 20 years. He put sewers underneath the sloping streets,

so that all these sewage would flow down to the Chicago River.

Work began on that ambitious project in 1856,

and soon the city was in turmoil

as the streets were raised to accommodate the new sewers.

It's hard to believe, if you were a citizen living here

you would have seen sidewalks that were different levels.

So the level might be like this,

and then, because they were working right here,

and then you'd be down here, and then you'd be up there.

First floors had been turned into basements

and the streets were running along what had been their second floor.

It must have been a very dramatic time,

but the city went on about its business.

Addressing this muddle and restoring Chicago's ground floors

to street level fell to engineer George Pullman,

later famous for his railroad sleeping cars.

He recruited hundreds of men manually to jack up buildings.

Even as people went about their business inside.

But despite this ingenuity,

Chicago's sewage troubles weren't finished.

Unfortunately, the Chicago River drains out into Lake Michigan,

and that's where they were getting their water supply from.

That must have given them an enormous public health problem.

Sometimes fish would come out of the faucets.

You could tell that the water wasn't really very clean.

People got sick from the drinking water.

And so everybody was complaining that the city fathers drank water

that they imported,

but that they, the ordinary people,

had to drink water from Lake Michigan.

The city fathers finally listened to all the pleas of the people, and

that's when they decided that they were going to reverse the river.

Reversing a river, I never heard of such a thing.

A huge bit of engineering. How was this done?

So what they did was to build this enormous canal,

but built on the idea of gravity,

would just pull the water westward if they just sloped the canal.

However, it's one thing to understand that principle,

it's another thing to accomplish it.

Chicago's 28 mile long sanitary and ship canal remains

one of the towering achievements of North American engineering.

38 million cubic yards of soil and rock were moved

in order to build it.

As well as diverting Chicago's sewage away from Lake Michigan,

the canal created a direct shipping channel

from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi.

-Was it a success for Chicago?

-Yes, it was a huge economic success,

and a huge benefit to Chicago's health.

What happened downstream, people didn't like it.

St Louis was going to sue the state of Illinois

and the city of Chicago for reversing the river

and sending their sewage down to them.

However, word got out that they were going to do that

and so the canal was pretty much completed.

So they opened the dams that were holding back the lake water

and the river. They opened it surreptitiously one night,

and the water flowed towards St Louis, and that was it.

Following on from the impressive successes of 19th century engineers,

Chicago has continued to adapt to survive.

There's a modern civil engineering project

that rivals those of the 19th century.

If you take a village on a swamp,

and over decades you convert it into

a megalopolis of nine million people,

you're going to come across a big problem.

And that will need a big solution.

As big as this hole.

To understand what has been built here at the McCook Reservoir,

I'm heading deep underground.

-Thank you.

-You're welcome.

This is one of the weirdest experiences I've ever had.

I've just being picked up by a crane.

And... Whoa! ..flown over an enormous hole.

And I'm going to be dropped down here like, like a sack of grain.

And it's a long way down.

'It's an exhilarating 300 foot descent into the tunnels

'that will eventually feed the new reservoir.'

Going down pretty fast.

So the shaft is closing in above me.

I can still see the sky, but it's getting smaller and smaller.

This is not like your average lift or elevator.

The Eagle has landed.

-Hello.

-Welcome to the McCook Reservoir Main Tunnel.

-You're Kevin, aren't you?

-I am.

Very good to see you indeed.

'My guide is managing civil engineer, Kevin Fitzpatrick.'

Kevin, we're entering here a huge diameter tunnel.

What is the total project about?

It's called the Deep Tunnel Project, or the Tunnel And Reservoir Plan.

We started it in 1972 to try to solve the pollution and flood

problems that have plagued Chicago for the last more than 50 years.

And what is the nature of that problem?

Well, the problem is Chicago, and several of the suburbs,

their sewers were built over 100 years ago,

and they're called combined sewers,

in which rainwater that hits the streets is combined

in the same sewer system as what's draining people's homes -

their sinks, their toilets.

So all that rainwater gets combined with the sewage,

and during a storm event, it can overwhelm the treatment plant,

and so it overflows into the waterways,

or it backs up into people's basements, in their own homes.

And so how is this the solution?

So, once this is complete, all that water will have a new place to go.

It will go out into the reservoir here,

and we'll be able to store it until after the storm has gone,

and our waste water treatment plant has a capacity to clean the water

before we put it back into the river.

So that's a charming image for me.

One day, this tunnel may be full of mildly diluted sewage.

Yes, it's been called the largest toilet in the world, sometimes!

Costing some 3.5 billion,

the system's capacity will be over 20 billion gallons

when complete in 2029.

109 miles of tunnels and two reservoirs

are already up and running,

and have reduced city flooding by half.

It's the largest project we've had in Chicago since

the reversal of the Chicago River over a century ago.

And is there a connection between this and the reversal a century ago?

They're completely connected.

When they solved the problem of the polluted water supply

in Lake Michigan by reversing the Chicago River,

they created another problem of a polluted waterway

heading downstream. Over the years

all the sewage and rainwater was diverted to that waterway,

causing pollution and decreasing the amount of biodiversity in the river.

So we're trying to clean up those waterways and capture

all that pollution here in the Deep Tunnel, and in the reservoir,

preventing it from polluting communities downstream.

So this project is really about restoring the waterways.

Are you going to live to see it finished?

-I sure hope so. They won't let me retire until it's done.

-Ha!

Ah, it's just vast.

It's just enormous.

Imagine when you have 30,000 cubic feet per second

of sewage coming out into here. It'll be beautiful.

MICHAEL LAUGHS A great image.

The McCook Reservoir will give the Chicago system the capacity

to cope with an extra ten billion gallons of storm water and sewage.

I was stunned when I heard about what was done in the 19th century.

I mean, reversing the river. That is an extraordinary thing to do.

And now I see what you're doing today.

Which of the two do you think is the more remarkable achievement?

Wow, it's difficult to say.

They're both historic engineering feats.

Er, they're both generations apart.

Very difficult to compare. But I'm a little biased,

so I'm going to say this one's much more impressive.

And I'm going to say it takes a city like Chicago to think on this scale.

Appleton's remarks that Chicago went from being an Indian trading station

to a metropolis in about 40 years.

Whatever you think of the United States,

the building of the railways, the cultivation of the prairies,

the construction of the cities,

is one of the greatest achievements in human history.

And the rise of Chicago is the prime example of the speed of change

in a capitalist society.

And what's more - it's visually spectacular.

'Next time... I get my hands on the hooter.'

People often talk about the smell of steam locomotives.

What about the sound of them?

'I'm in full swing on the fairway.'

Taking the club back...

'And I party on the platform.'

# I'll be gone 500 miles when the day is done. #

CHEERING