CNW Chicago Division Progress - 2025

[eric]

The fun continues... completed the Clinton Curve, which was used for many publicity photos over the CNW years...

The guesswork started with a couple pieces of dynamic track to get an approximate radius, which worked out to be 250m with some tweaks here and there. It's all individual pieces, which took a lot of trial and error to get lines up correctly, starting with 20d's and moving to 01d and 05d pieces.

The curve support had been a huge monolithic scenery object before, but I've completely replaced that with track piece specific pieces to form the viaduct, ballasted deck, and girder bridges by using WorldFileHacker. More on that in a later post.

Looking south from halfway in Clinton Curve and down the station throat

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Looking northwest from the same spot at Northwest Junction, where the Geneva Sub splits to Omaha on the left, and the Harvard and Kenosha Subs split to Madison and Milwaukee on the right:

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Making sure the 250m radius curve has no collisions between tracks...

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Six tracks become four as the center two tracks split directions...

The left side continues to Clybourn where they split into the Kenosha Sub and Harvard Sub, while the right side will become the Geneva Sub.
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There's still a little more work to be done, but this was by far the biggest rock to climb for the week.

Just beyond Northwest Junction, I need to rebuild a single curve for the Kenosha/Harvard into the Erie Street interlocking plant, and then a set of reverse curves on the Geneva Sub at Noble Street tower, which is where the MILW out of Union Station and the CNW briefly converge to form a 7 track main out to Western Avenue aka Tower A2...

Once those stretches are done, the entire route will have be fully transitioned to 4m track spacing.

[eric]

And here I thought the Union Station in Portland, Maine was compact with tracks for passenger cars, baggage/RPO's, switcher stubs and fuel/sand tracks. Thats looking good Eric!

Thanks... yep, this was all built in 1910, and purported to be designed to support up to 1500 trains a day on 16 tracks.

It would be madness, but mathematically possible with 5 trains per hour per track over 18 hours...

[eric]

One last step before I put this back on the shelf for a few days....

You can't have Olgilvie without at least the north end of Union Station...

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In the lower right, I have my placeholder tracks. At the left.... I was able to merge a few tiles from what Josh had been working on for the Midwest Mega Route and the CB&Q Racetrack, which includes a full Union and LaSalle Street Station:

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I'm not sure if it will stay like that or not but he did a fantastic job, and the alignments are perfect.


With the trackwork largely done, now the not so fun part starts. By moving Olgilvie, 122 of the 230 paths created for the route are now broken/invalid.

That'll take a bit of work to clean up and/or recreate, although not every one of those will be re-done -- some ostemmed from an attempt to create a timetable for the entire day's schedule including the Milwaukee Road trains out of Union Station which would cross at A2 on the way to Milwaukee, Fox Lake and Elgin.

[eric]

I needed a break from downtown Chicago... so here we are in Oak Park. New third rail shapes matched up to fit Scalerail track sections...

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They're not perfect, in that there aren't any ramped approaches, but that will probably be an add-on piece at a later date.

[eric]

These are the KLW CTA 2400's, which still look OK despite their age and are probably the most accurate of all the CTA models in the library.

Spacing on the third rail fits almost perfectly with the shoes on Kurt's model.

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The station platforms and support structures are older shapes of mine that I'm re-using since the CTA line is really just background scenery more than anything else.


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[qballbandit]

Nice Eric! Stirring up some memories right there

[Whatever2006]

Solid work there Eric.

[jbtower]

Do you remember the B&O using Madison Street Eric? I was just looking at some of your shots and a flood of memories popped into my head recalling the B&O.

[Orbita]

Do you remember the B&O using Madison Street Eric? I was just looking at some of your shots and a flood of memories popped into my head recalling the B&O.

The B&O and C&O used that station briefly after Grand Central Station was closed in 1969. Amtrak ended that short tenure a few years later. Would have been used by whatever passenger trains that were still around at the time.

[eric]

That's a few years before my trainwatching days, but my dad vaguely recollects seeing some non-green and yellow cars.

The B&O and C&O came north up the Panhandle which became the CNW's Rockwall Sub, then it turned east and crossed the MILW at A2/Western Avenue and then into Northwestern Station. The Rockwall is where they'd wye the remaining LD trains before going to the coach yard for servicing.

[eric]

This is something that was always in the plan for the route.... the ability to backdate on the fly.

The CNW Chicago Passenger Terminal (CPT) was built in 1911 at Madison and Canal, and was their second downtown terminal, replacing a station built in the 1881 at Kinzie and Wells, where the present day Merchandise Mart sits. The original station dated back to 1856 and was also on Kinzie Street.

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That station was demolished in 1984, and replaced by a Helmut Jahn designed building which opened in 1987. First called the Northwestern Atrium Center, it was later rebranded as the Citibank Center, and today as the Accenture Tower.

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The new building stood over the old train shed until 1991:

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In 1991, the old shed was demolished and replaced by the new "blue" trainshed that's been in most of my recent screenshots...

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So that's three different arrangements over a ten year period from 1982 to 1992.

How to model that?....

About ten years ago, I'd built the two sets of train shed canopies, as well as two versions of the headhouse (e.g. the main building with the waiting lobby and ticket windows), which shared common axis points with the track pieces used to build the layout.

Rather than change the W file, I've now included both in the W file...

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Yeah, I know, that's just a bit ugly, but by running a batch file it will be possible to switch between the three eras.


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