Chapter Notes: Chicago (Destination Unknown) · 10:15pm Oct 14th, 2021
Chicago, the windy city! Somehow pegasi always seem to find themselves there, don’t they?
Thanks to AlwaysDressesInStyle for pre-reading!
The railroad she doesn’t know with the orange and black locomotives is Indiana Harbor Belt, which is co-owned by Conrail Shared Assets and Canadian Pacific Railroad. They own about 54 miles of mainline track, and 266 miles of yard track.
Even though in hindsight it’s a stupid location, due to various geographical factors railroads mostly wound up going to Chicago as either their eastern terminus or western terminus which led to railroad traffic nightmares in Chicago way back in the day. If I remember right (and I might not be), IHB was chartered by multiple railroads for the sole purpose of moving freight from one rail yard to another*, which would prevent other railroads from having to make more lines to connect with each other’s interchange yards. They also serve local industries and then set out the cars for whichever railroad will take them to their next destination.
(If you’re wondering how that prevents gridlock, in the days before trackage rights were common, let’s say you’ve got four railroads: Chicago Northwestern (CNW), New York Central (NYC), Rock Island (RI) and Union Pacific (UP).
CNW has to build three interchange yards and the associated trackage, one for NYC, one for RI, and one for UP.
NYC presumably shares the one with CNW, but they’ve got to build one for RI and one for UP.
Now multiply that by a lot of railroads, and it’s easy to see how having one belt line that calls at everyone’s yard and transfers rail cars from one to the next saves a ton of track and trains.
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*Oddly, I’m not having as much luck as I thought I’d have finding a reputable source for that online; someone in the comments correct me if I’m wrong.
While most of Metra (one of the commuter lines in/around Chicago) is not electrified, this branch is. They run 1500v DC from overhead catenary.
From what I can tell, they use bi-level cars on most or all of the route.
Sweetsong got on at the southern terminus (the South Chicago/93rd. St. Station) and rode it to the Museum Campus/11th Street stop, which is actually about as far as that line goes—it terminates at the other end of the parks and museums.
In my opinion (having currently ridden neither system), they’re not as cool as the South Shore, but that’s just me.
I couldn’t possibly do justice to the colorful history of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps. The company was started after the founder escaped a mental institution, and had, as Wikipedia puts it, “his own syncretic spiritual ideology” and the labels on the bottles reflect this, not only giving instructions for use but also a sermon.
That having been said, it’s not only effective soap, its primary ingredients are fair trade and organic, and among other things the company is known for championing sustainability and eco-friendliness. They also cap their executive’s wages at 5x what the lowest-paid workers get, and spend about a third of their profits on charitable giving and activism.
Honestly, I rarely give product endorsements, but I really like their 18-in-1 Hemp Peppermint Pure-Castile Soap. A bottle of it goes a long way.
Finally, the most astute of you who are following along with her on the map might have noticed that the penninsula just south of her is Northerly Island, although it’s not an island any more—the causeway to connect it to the mainland was built in 1938 . . . and before y’all object to un-islanding an island, the whole island itself was man-made.
Pegasi would naturally be drawn to it, since for a little over a half century it hosted an airport, Meigs Field. Mayor Richard M. Daley destroyed it in 2003, and therefore every single pegasus who lands there basically sticks it to Mayor Daley.
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So what you're saying is that Bronner was so far from being a doctor that he was actually a patient? Somehow, I'm not surprised.
5595785
You are correct. Although, according to one source, “In 1945, he was arrested after a particularly fervent speech at the University of Chicago and committed to a mental hospital for two months.”
Mother Jones
Shame it doesn’t say what the speech was about, because now I’m curious.
Yeah, fuck Daley.
But then again I'd take all the Daley's over this troll that we have now.
Ahem.
"which is do-owned by Conrail Shared"
"which is co-owned by Conrail Shared"?
"Even though in hindsight it’s a stupid location"
Oh? Interesting. Why in particular?
Oh, and I'd heard good things about Dr. Bronner's, but not that good; thanks!
"I rarely give produce endorsements"
"I rarely give product endorsements"?
"Pegasi would naturally be drawn to it, since for a little over a half century it hosted an airport, Meigs Field. Mayor Richard M. Daley destroyed it in 2003, and therefore every single pegasus who lands there basically sticks it to Mayor Daley."
Heh. :)
Thanks, as usual, for writing, chapter and blog post both!
I'll withdraw my objection, but just this once.
5595922
I’m sure you’ll get a good mayor just as soon as the Cubs win a World Series.NVM, just looked it up and they have. Maybe you’ll get a good mayor when the Lions win a Super Bowl. Or maybe that’s just the apocalypse.
5596248
Hello there!
5596376
Fixed!
Well, that is a typo too, but it’s also true that I rarely give produce endorsements.
I didn’t know about all the social stuff before I wrote the blog, but can attest to the soap working as advertised, and you don’t need much. It’s good soap.
Legit that’s why I had Silver Glow land there, specifically, and not anywhere else in Chicago.
Biggest reason is for most railroads coming from the east, you have to go under Lake Michigan and then up . . . which is why there are so many great train-watching spots in that bottleneck in the Gary area. And it doesn’t take too long before you run out of space to put rail yards, either. Not to mention it’s hardly central to the US, something like St. Louis would have been a far better choice if someone had really planned a major east/west hub city in advance. Even in the 1800s (IIRC) Chicago recognized that there were too many railroads and started requiring grade-separation projects so road traffic wasn’t continuously stuck behind parades of trains from competing railroads.
There were also flooding problems, but they solved most of that by just jacking up the downtown buildings one story. Unsure if they also jacked up the railroads at the same time.
You’re welcome!
5596763
I never liked the idea of un-islanding an island, but if it never was an island to begin with, it’s hard to completely object to the process.
5597330 Yeah, 2016 was a hell of a good year. Can we just reset the timeline to go back then?
I think your looking for the Chicago junction railway which is the predecessor of the ihb. Which is the company that seems to have been created to handle it based upon what Wikipedia says and the link to some old documents on there.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Junction_Railway
5597402
For you maybe. For me, it was part of the year trying to be both lead tech and service writer, then the rest of the year with my new manager (same one I’ve still got).
Then again, I wrote Silver Glow’s Journal for most of 2016 and that was pretty cool. Also learned to drive a rally car.
5597883
It could be . . . I seem to recall an article about it in Trains magazine some years ago, but wasn’t able to find anything super definitive online (granted, I didn’t do a whole lot of searching).
I feel like there were other cities in the US as well that had a shared switching railroad, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head. New York City, probably. And I’m also pretty sure that there were a few small railroad lines that survived on just hauling traffic from one railroad to another even if that wasn’t their original purpose.
Heh, been spending the last near decade learning pony facts and forgetting train fact.
5597334
Ah, thanks.
Hah, yes, good point. :D
Aye, that's what I've heard.
I gather you don't like him much? :D
Ah, thanks.
(Also, I went to check the geography on Google Earth, and found myself reminded that Google recently decided that, hey, a virtual globe doesn't really need things like "the name of the city or state you're looking at". And they combined all transportation layers into a single layer -- which doesn't display rail lines as clearly as the old one even if you can spot them through all the road lines. I have no idea why they thought this was better.)
I don't know about all railroads, but the tracks at Chicago Union Station are still both at ground level and far enough below street (and building) level that Superliners can access the station while being fully under the structures above.
:)
5595830
Now-a-days, Putin would realize that he is a perfect useful idiot, and have his trollfarms get all of the crazies to vote for him:
As an aside, Putin was smart to realize that someteen or umpteen (more than a dozen (12) but less than a score (20) percent) are mentally ill but allowed to vote.I remember back in the spring 2016 when I 1st can across these crazy political conspiracy-theories, when I got a message urging me not to vote for Hillary Clinton because BIll Clinton goes around raping women and then Hillary Clinton murders them so that they cannot talk. Putin had many successes such as BrExit, The 2016 US Presidential Election, et al.We should require a sanity-test to vote:
Testp-Question:
¿Do you believe that Democrats are reptilian shape-shifters from inside the hollow earth and that they drink blood, eat babies, and molest children?
Marjory Taylor Greene would pencil in "Yes, but you forgot about the Jewish SpaceLasers causing wildfires in California.".
5651318
I dunno that Dr. Bronner would be on his side. Never met the guy, so I can’t say for sure, but he seems more anchored to reality than some. Which is probably why they locked him up, TBH.
Ehh, that’s kind of a problematic subject. We used to do that in some states to keep minorities from voting. Who gets to decide who’s sane? What kind of test? How would it be possible to be sure that the people who wrote the test weren’t politically (or otherwise) motivated?