Trains vs. Trucks

Here are my recollections of the rail service in my hometown of Mokena, Illinois, in the 1950s and 60s. The service was the Rock Island line.  

There was a mail hook on a post at the west edge of the station platform. The mailman would place the outgoing mail in a heavy canvas bag on this hook. An eastbound train would grab this mail bag from the post while moving. Mail clerks inside the mail car would sort the mail while en route to Chicago. Though I don't recall all the details, there was probably another mail hook for mail heading to Joliet on a westbound run. 

Later in the day a westbound train from Chicago would stop and unload Mokena's incoming mail sacks. This train would also drop off my newspaper bundles for my paper route (Chicago American and the Daily News). I picked up these papers at the train station with my bike.

Early in the morning farmers would drop off their full milk cans and place them on the station platform. One of the early eastbound runs in the morning was the milk train that would stop and pick up these cans and deliver them for processing in Chicago. This milk run may have been the same train that picked up the mail.

Though I never witnessed this, a train was used to collect livestock (cattle, sheep, pigs, etc.) inbound for the Chicago Stock Yards. The Chicago yards closed up for good in the early 1970s. They moved to a new facility south of Joliet accessed by TRUCKS from I-55.  

Mokena also had a grain elevator, a lumber yard, a foundry, and at one time, a bottling plant, all along the tracks. The trains hauled away the goods and brought in raw materials.  

As you can see, that was a very efficient way of handling freight. There was no need for semi-trailer trucks. I don't recall seeing any big 18 wheelers until the advent of the superhighway in the early to mid-60s. The big factories, regardless of where they were located, all had rail sidings to accommodate the incoming raw materials and outgoing finished product.

I-80 went through the area in the early to mid-1960s. And then everything changed. I recall hearing on the news that trucks were now competing with trains for rapid delivery of freight. No one cared about how much fuel the trucks needed to carry a load of freight from either the west coast or east coast. It was all about who could do it quicker. And the trucking industry won out! The unproductive rail lines were abandoned, even though train transportation is more efficient with fuel consumption. I also recall seeing an early 1900s map of Will County and it was crisscrossed with rail lines. Most are now gone.  

Figure 1 | Map of the United States’ Out-of-Service Railways

Joliet now hauls its outgoing mail by truck all the way to the south west side of Chicago for sorting, fighting traffic all the way. No more use of trains for this purpose. Newspapers are now delivered by truck to distribution points and it is unheard of today to have an 11-year-old delivering newspapers with a bike!

Today, small factories are no longer served by rail lines. It's the truck that hauls the goods. Now it's the decade of the giant warehouse built on former "vacant land." That "vacant land" was once farmland, and the soil was some of the best farm soil in the world. Farmers in many parts of the world eke out a living plowing a field of clay, sand, and rocks, using a plow pulled by a mule, and we take some of the world’s most fertile soil, remove it, recontour the land and put up a warehouse! Does that make any sense to you?

Figure 2 | Map of the United States’ Eight Million Miles of Roads, Streets, and Highways

Thumbnail/banner image by Carolyn Franks on Adobe Stock