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Date: 2009-11
A FOX RIVER LINE CAR COMES HOME
The newest thing in the Fox River Valley is coming your way!
Eighty-six years young and still ready to go, Aurora, Elgin & Fox River Electric Co. Trolley Car #304 is coming "home" Tuesday to South Elgin's Fox River Trolley Museum from Cleveland after an absence of more than 74 years.
Car 304, built by the St. Louis Car Co. in 1923, is returning to the last surviving remnant of the railroad for which it was built.
"The greatest dream of the Fox River Trolley Museum is a reality," said Museum President Edward Konecki after learning that the Museum's bid in an Oct. 2 sealed-bid auction was successful.
Fox River car 304's return represents the fulfillment of an oft-expressed wish of both residents of the Fox River Valley and Members of the South Elgin Museum. Car 304, one of 7 trolleys built for the Fox River Line in 1923, began a second life in Cleveland transit service in 1935, after the Aurora to Elgin AE&FRE Trolley system ceased passenger operations and pulled up most of its track, keeping three miles for use by freight trains.
Museum Members knew for decades that the ex-Fox River cars still existed at the Trolleyville USA collection in suburban Cleveland . Cleveland real estate entrepreneur Gerald E. Brookins, a lifelong trolley fan, bought the four surviving ex-Fox River cars when he founded his museum in 1954. Mr. Brookins bought these particular trolleys, because they worked from 1935 to 1954 in the Cleveland area on the line best known as the Shaker Heights Rapid Transit. In the succeeding years, one car was scrapped for parts and a second was sold to another museum.
Word earlier this year of the collapse of the museum that Brookins and two succeeding generations of his family had founded and nurtured – known in its final years as the Lake Shore Electric Railway Museum – jolted Fox River's all-volunteer staff into action.
Feverish fund-raising was undertaken, with appeals to members, long-time donors, and the riders of the Fox River Trolley Museum 's historic trolley cars. This fund-raising continues.
Although Car 304 arrives in South Elgin wearing the cream, silver and red colors of its Shaker Heights days, it is expected to be repainted in 2010 back to orange and yellow with sunburst end scheme that the car wore when it ran its final year in the Fox River Valley .
AE&FRE 304 and its sisters provided faithful service to the Fox Valley for 12 years. When delivered, the line still compromised slightly more than 40 miles, from Carpentersville on the north to Yorkville on the south. The line was truncated south of Montgomery in 1924, with Aurora-Montgomery becoming a city streetcar line. The Elgin-Carpentersville segment was the next to be abandoned, following a 1933 windstorm that damaged the north end of the line. Service between Elgin , South Elgin, Saint Charles , Geneva , Batavia , and Aurora continued until March 31, 1935, when the interurban cars were replaced by a bus service that still operates today as Pace routes 801 and 802.
During their years of service in the Fox Valley, riders young and old made daily use of Fox River Trolley 304 and her sisters – traveling to and from schools, work at businesses such as the Elgin Watch factory, business at the old county courthouse in Geneva, and play at parks such as Coleman Grove (today's Jon J. Duerr Forest Preserve and the southern end of today's museum line) and Exhibition Park in North Aurora.
The Fox River trolley cars would meet the trains of the Milwaukee Road , Illinois Central, Chicago & North Western and Chicago , Burlington & Quincy Railroads throughout their history. Until 1930, AE&FRE riders could change to the trains of the Elgin & Belvidere Electric Ry. to and from the Rockford area, and until the end of passenger service, the Fox River line exchanged passengers daily with the Chicago Aurora & Elgin R.R. (CA&E), always considered its sister line and part of the same railroad from 1906 until 1923, when the two independently-built but merged railroads were separated by federal bankruptcy court action.
During the years of union, the line that would become the CA&E was the Aurora Elgin & Chicago (AE&C) Railroad's Third Rail Division; the line that would become the AE&FRE was the AE&C Fox River Division.
The two railroads shared about 1.5 miles of track in the St. Charles and Geneva from 1909 until 1935. St. Charles branch CA&E trains continued to use the once-joint trackage until 1937, when the branch was converted to bus operation. After that date, only the three miles of the AE&FRE between Coleman Grove and the Elgin State Hospital remained. This was the trackage the museum purchased in 1972; tracks in and alongside Illinois 31 between today's Castlemuir museum terminal and the State Hospital were pulled up in 1978 to help finance continued museum operations.
The museum has four CA&E cars on its roster, including #20, the oldest operating interurban (inter-city) electric railroad car in North America . A fifth CA&E car, #458, built in 1945 and used by the CA&E until 1957, will soon join the Fox River collection, also being purchased in the Brookins auction. Its arrival date has not yet been set.
Continued fund-raising is crucial to the museum, which is a 501(c)(3) Illinois not for-profit organization, and donations are tax-deductible. Although donations of any amount are welcome, it is offering special incentives for those making larger donations:
- $100: A one-day pass to ride the AE&FRE car plus any other cars in the collection. The donor determines the day of use.
- $250: A one-month pass to ride the AE&FRE car plus any other cars in the collection. The donor determines the month of use.
- $500: A one-season pass for two to ride the AE&FRE car plus any other cars in the collection. This would be for the first season that the AE&FRE car is operated. (Barring unforeseen circumstances, this should be the 2010 operating season.)
- $1,000: An invitation to ride the first regular passenger trip of the car plus a one-season pass for two.
The museum is developing a recognition program for larger individual and corporate donations.
Donations can be sent to the museum at P.O. Box 315 , South Elgin , IL 60177-0315 .
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