Chicago & Alton Railroad

Company History: The C&A was established in 1861 to purchase the St. Louis Alton & Chicago Railroad. By 1900 they had built and acquired a 1,000 mile system from Chicago, Illinois to St. Louis and Kansas City, Missouri. About that time, the C&A became a tool to make money in the bond market. Once those games ended, it came under control of Union Pacific and Rock Island in 1904 followed by the Clover Leaf three years later. By 1912, the railroad stopped turning a profit. In 1922 when control by the USRA came to an end, a receiver was appointed to run the C&A. In 1929, Baltimore & Ohio bought the C&A at foreclosure and in 1931 they formed the Alton Railroad to take over the operation.

Successor/Parent History: The Alton was established in 1931 as a subsidiary of Baltimore & Ohio to takeover the Chicago & Alton Railroad which B&O had picked up at a foreclosure sale in 1929. Alton was a 1,028 mile system running from Chicago to St. Louis, much of it on parallel routes, one via Bloomington and Springfield, the other via Peoria. The parallel routes met at Alton, Illinois, a Mississippi River port 20 miles north of St. Louis. Another line ran from Springfield west to Kansas City, plus branches. Alton had the second shortest route from Chicago to Kansas City (only Santa Fe was shorter.) At its founding, Alton had 292 locomotives, 232 passenger cars and more than 13,000 freight cars. For most of its history, Alton was operated in close cooperation with B&O but that changed in 1943 when Alton was untangled from B&O in the hope of selling it. In 1945, Gulf Mobile & Ohio (itself the result of a merger just five years before) bought the Alton for $1.2 million. At the time, GM&O only ran as far north as St. Louis so the addition of Alton transformed them into a Great Lakes-to-the-Gulf system. The two systems were merged in 1947. The expanded GM&O adopted Alton’s red and maroon passenger colors and “the Alton Route” was applied to many GM&O steam locomotive tenders and some diesel flanks. Today, the St. Louis – Chicago line is part of Union Pacific by way of Illinois Central Gulf , Chicago Missouri & Western and Southern Pacific. The Springfield – Kansas City line is part of Kansas City Southern by way of ICG, CM&W and Gateway Western. (Tex Courtesy of Bluford Shops)

Brief History: The U.S. is a country of 50 states covering a vast swath of North America, with Alaska in the northwest and Hawaii extending the nation’s presence into the Pacific Ocean. Major Atlantic Coast cities are New York, a global finance and culture center, and capital Washington, DC. Midwestern metropolis Chicago is known for influential architecture and on the west coast, Los Angeles' Hollywood is famed for filmmaking.