"The Illinois Terminal Railroad: The Road of Personalized Services" by Dale Jenkins

Passenger train service of the past is often depicted with bustling city stations and milling crowds pouring onto platforms. But that wasn’t the only way to catch the train back in the day. If you were out in the country in central Illinois, you could just stand by the track and wave. That’s the way one electric railway operated that connected central Illinois cities Peoria, Bloomington, Springfield, Decatur, Champaign, and Danville with St. Louis. It was the Illinois Traction System. The interurban was referred to as “an American transportation phenomenon” by William Middleton in his book The Interurban Era. “Evolved from the urban streetcar, the interurban appeared shortly before the dawn of the 20th century, grew to a vast network of over 18,000 miles in two decades of excellent growth, and then vanished after barely three decades of usefulness,” declared Middleton. The interurban lasted a little longer than that in Illinois, a state that boasted one of the top systems in the country, said Dale Jenkins, president and founding member of the Illinois Traction Society, the Decatur-based clearinghouse for history about the line. The Illinois Traction System started in 1901 when Champaign’s William McKinley (a cousin to the U.S. president with the same name) purchased the Danville Street Railway & Light Co. and joined it with the Urbana and Champaign Street Railway Co. By 1910, Mr. McKinley, as Jenkins reverently refers to him, had added over 500 miles of track to his system across the state. The Illinois Traction service was not only convenient for travelers in an era when the state’s road system was still a work in progress; it provided style, said Jenkins, who wrote The Illinois Terminal Railroad: The Road of Personalized Services in 2005. Parlor cars featured mahogany and Spanish leather. Illinois Traction, with its slogan, “The Road of Good Service,” was the first electric railway to offer sleeping car service, Jenkins noted. If you’re wondering why sleeping cars would be useful on a route between Peoria and St. Louis, you need to understand that a car trip between the two cities once took over six hours, said Jenkins, who gave a presentation on the service in August at Peoria’s Wheels O’ Time Museum. The Bloomington-to-Peoria line was considered one of the most scenic in the ITS system, reported the McLean County Museum of History in Bloomington. While not as powerful as the steam-powered locomotives of the day, interurban cars had an advantage when it came to providing rural service. “It was much easier to stop and start an electric car than a steam engine,” stated the McLean County museum. “A 1948 list used by Illinois Terminal (the company dropped the Traction name in 1935) employees shows 48 stations and stops in the 37-mile route between Bloomington and Peoria. Most of these were not listed on passenger timetables,” according to the museum. They were “flag” stops where a passenger could wave a cloth or flag to signal for the train to stop. But the popularity of auto travel as the 20th century progressed spelled trouble for the ITS passenger service. The WWII era provided a profitable interlude when fuel and tires were limited but, after the war, the passenger spiral returned. “The damn autos came along and spoiled it all,” complained a former Terminal rider in a 1983 Bloomington Pantagraph story. Interurban service to Peoria ended in 1955 with the last passenger run coming between Springfield and St. Louis in 1956. ITS continued to deliver freight on the line until 1981 when the company was sold to the Norfolk and Western Railway. Jenkins, who retired after 40 years with ITS and its subsequent companies, continues to share the state’s interurban history on the society website, illinoistractionsociety.org, and the Flyer magazine, published twice a year, as well as an annual calendar.