SS United States is a retired American ocean liner that was built during 1950 and 1951 for United States Lines. She is the largest ocean liner to be entirely constructed in the United States and the fastest ocean liner to cross the Atlantic Ocean in either direction, earning the Blue Riband for the highest average speed since her maiden voyage in 1952, a title that remains uncontested.
Some parts of the US have a variety of roads that, while technically maintained as public road by some combination of county, state, US forest service, bureau of land management, etc., have more of the character of offroad “trails” than what most people think of as a “road”. Many offroading videos available on youtube feature “trail riding” activities on what are actually just really lackadaisically maintained roads. (this is actually not a good thing, as explained below)
Illinois is emphatically not one of those states! Most of the roads, even backroads far from any city, are as level as a tabletop, straight as an arrow, and often paved. If not with regular blacktop asphalt, then at least with chipseal. Especially in the counties that have cities in them, even the very rural areas tend to have paved roads.
(I was not familiar with chipseal until I moved here. In the south, I think, any road that Illinois would chipseal is just left as plain gravel, aka what we called a “dirt road”.)
There are exceptions. The counties known collectively as Forgottonia, which are mainly the far western counties cut off from the rest of the state by the Illinois river, have lot more unpaved roads, and more central counties have some if they don’t contain one of the region’s cities.
As in most all states, commercially available maps are generally terrible at indicating which roads are paved and unpaved. Pretty much the only source of this information are state Department of Transportation maps published on a county-by-county basis, and available as PDFs.
These maps are your key to dirt roads in the state. There are, of course, private off-road trails in Illinois, but we are talking about public roads here.
Mind you, most of these unpaved roads just look like this:
Cassen Road near Tallula would qualify as a highway in some states.
Some of the less-maintained ones look like this:
Pshirrer Road near Newmansville, is two separate strips of gravel, one for each wheel.
And a few have been allowed to deteriorate to this point:
Dierks Ave near Petersburg, is basically dirt in this photo. But there’s actually old gravel under there. Note it has been re-graveled since this photo and no longer looks anything like this.
But still, very flat, mostly straight, no sense of adventure in warm season weather. When it can get interesting is in winter, when counties like Cass seemingly don’t bother to snowplow these minor roads at all.
There is more variety in Pike Country, where the river bluffs provide changes of altitude, wooded locales, twistier roads. There is stuff like washouts, fallen trees on the roads, fording creeks, etc. Pike is one of the most active hunting areas in Illinois, and you see a lot of folks on ATVs on those roads.
I am not providing photographic evidence of these because one thing I learned from living in Georgia for many years is that once someone publicizes the exact location of an “interesting road” the first thing that happens is groups of people start riding convoys of 40 jeeps down it for youtube videos, and the next thing that happens is the state/county/etc paves or regrades it and takes all the fun out of it, or else closes it entirely.
This partially completed project is finally back “on track” after the final federal funding was approved in May.
Because the official maps of the project show separate “before” and “after” maps, I’ve taken it upon myself to draw the “before” line myself onto the “after” map, I’ve taken it upon myself to create a composite using MS Paint. The red drawn line is the current UP (ex-SP, ex-ICG, ex-GM&O, ex-Alton) line that will be abandoned. The blue drawn line is the new route.
Map taken from project website, modified by me.
To date, the overpasses for the new line have been built from the south end up to and including Carpenter Street. The only sign of the planned overpass over North Grand is the fact that the McDonalds at 9th and North Grand has already been demolished for some months. The state EPA office has also moved to White Oaks Mall to make way for this construction.
From a railfan perspective, this is both good and bad. It is bad because it will move the trains 7 blocks further from my house, and also eliminate several grade crossings which can currently be used for trainwatching. It is good because it concentrates both UP and NS onto one right of way (still separate railroads, but right next to each other) for a long stretch, allowing one to “double dip”. Currently the only place that can be done is a short stretch south of town. As these are by far the roads with the most trains in Springfield, this means the vast majority of all the rail traffic in town would now go right past the new passenger station on 9th street.
No, I don’t know what they plan to do with the current line when it is abandoned. In 2022 at a community meeting I asked then-Mayor Jim Langfelder about it, and he said something about a light rail / trolley line. I did not believe it then and don’t believe it now. Downtown Springfield is too small to need a trolley to get from one place to another within it.
Plans for a 3rd Street Greenway seem more realistic, but still pretty ambitious for Springfield where, as we’ve seen, things change slowly. Anyone who was in Atlanta when the Beltline was being planned knows that these kinds of things can take much longer than expected, even in a much larger city,
I’d been seeing this little stone arch in a field next to IL-123 for a couple years.
Not because I was looking for it, but because it’s on the way to one of closest (to me) parts of Illinois where there’s enough public dirt roads to put in the “recommended” 10 miles of 4×4 driving of a 4runner.
Road map stitched together in Paint from the PDFs of Cass and Menard counties, showing the abundance of unpaved gravel roads in the vicinity. The approximate location of the photo is marked with red.
Anyway, it somehow escaped me that this was in fact part of the abandoned railroad line that I already knew was in the area. I just didn’t put 2 and 2 together. Until I ran into it on Bridge Hunter, one of those last great pre-FB, pre-Twitter old school resources on the web. IMO for the (admittedly niche) subject it covers, its up there with any wiki.
The site identifies this location as:
“Abandoned stone arch bridge over Intermittent strean on Abandonded Chicago & Alton Ry”
You can clearly see the “ghost line” of this railroad line on the following images. It is the line running diagonally from southwest to northeast.
Satellite image centered on Tallula, ILSatellite image centered southwest of Petersburg, IL
Info about the line on Abandoned Rails, another of those great vanishing internet resources:
“This is the famous Jack Line that had one of the last “Doodlebug” runs untgil April 14, 1960. The double- car, motor car with trailing coach, train went daily from Bloomington, Il to Kansas City, MO and return. Trains from each direction met in Louisiana, Missouri. It was possible to make a round trip from Bloomington to Louisiana and return in a day. That was one of the longest doodlebug runs in the country and one of the latest.”
Doodlebug train from Bloomington to KC, final trip on 4/14/1960. Photo by Edward Wayne Bridges, posted to Facebook by John Woodrow on 12/6/2023.
This line was the western side of a triangle that had Bloomington, Roodhouse, and Godfrey at its corners, and included Springfield along its eastern side. This can be seen on the map from the Wikipedia article on the Alton Railroad.
1885 map of the Chicago and Alton Railroad.
From the points of this triangle, lines connected to Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City. So while this location seems remote at present, in the railroad’s heyday it was part of the connections between the Alton’s three principal cities.
So what happened? Well, what happened to many, many midwestern and midsouthern lines. The Alton was absorbed into the GM&O in 1947, which was in turn absorbed into ICG in 1972. In the 80s, ICG spun off most of its not-originally-Illinois Central trackage. They were spun off as shortlines which were eventually purchased by other Class I railroads.
The Chicago to St. Louis main line, through Springfield, is now Union Pacific and is a very busy intermodal route and the route of the Texas Eagle.
The St. Louis to KC branch did not fare as well. It ended up as KCS, and now CPKC. It currently connects KC, St. Louis, and Springfield (via the former Alton/GM&O “air line” from Murrayville to Springfield which was built in 1907 after the map shown above). It is much lower in traffic than the other line. This was the line that, during the CP and KC merger talks, CN tried to buy to extend their ex-IC line (that currently ends south of Springfield) to Kansas City.
The third leg of the triangle, which is what we’re discussing here, was completely abandoned between Bloomington and Jacksonville.
Many parts of the line are followed still by roads, power lines, or both.
Power line access road southwest of Petersburg that was once the railroad.
USGS TopoView – entry point for all current and historical topographic maps published the US government; can download maps or display them overlayed within the main viewer
Georgia Wildlife Resources Division – Interactive Map – shows state Wildlife Management Area locations, hunting, fishing, camping, shooting ranges, roads. I have learned not to trust these maps to be up to date about road closures!
MyTopo – Online Maps – these are older USGS topo maps overlayed with some such as forest service road numbers. In spite of some maps being outdated, the simple interface makes for a quick reference.
Georgia DOT Maps – Index to county road maps, which are basically the only maps online that actually show the paved or dirt status of all roads outside of national/state forests! Reasonably up to date. Unfortunate interface requires downloading individual county maps one by one.
Trails Off-Road Map – detailed trail guides for individual roads, including photos, videos, reviews. Requires sign-up with email address, facebook, etc. Some features (including to view all trails on the map at the same time) require paid membership.
Example historical map (1895) in TopoViewExample of Fed. Railroad Admin mapExample US Forest Service MapExample GA Dept. of Natural Resources MapExample MyTopo mapexample of GA DOT maps
RailGA.com was the most comprehensive site on the net for information about railroads in Georgia, until a couple of months ago when it just mysteriously went down.
Fortunately most of the pages were archived by the Wayback Machine.
Part of “an incomplete history of hard rock, heavy metal, and punk rock music”, continued from here.
I am going to dispense with most of the commentary and concentrate on simply listing things. Otherwise I will never actually finish any of these posts. As with part 1, videos disappearing off of youtube is a constant threat to the usefulness of these links. Ye have been warned.
Heavy Metal – the NWOBHM and its fellow travelers
Many of the bands here were part of the “New Wave of British Heavy Metal” (NWOBHM) circa 1979-1982. Confusingly but predictably, this music is now referred to as Traditional Heavy Metal.
NHOBHM wasn’t so much a single musical style as a cultural movement, and elements of later genres can already be heard.
Glam Metal (also known as “Hair Metal”) was not so much a musical fusion of Heavy Metal with Glam Rock, as the adoption of Glam Rock hair and clothing by hard rock and metal bands. The earliest Glam Metal was, musically speaking, almost indistinguishable from the Heavy Metal listed above. But these similarities faded fast.
By the late 80s, Glam Metal was so popular that it was the “default” style of hard rock in the popular mind. The genre nearly vanished from public view during the 90s.
The darker, edgier, heavier Metal of the mid to late 80s. The sonic characteristics that defined Thrash have become so widely diffused, in the 21st century to say that a band or genre is influenced by “metal” is mostly synonymous with saying they have a Thrash influence.
A comic that I drew during the 1992-1993 academic year, mostly during first period A.P. Spanish II, taught by “Señor Bryant”.
These strips were the first mention of “Fluxum Florum” (later spelled FLVXXVM FLORVM), some time before I thought to start using it as a musical alias.
This strip is probably a redrawn version of a lost original. You can tell by the late date (too late for that school year), the fact that it is inked, and the fact that it is not on 3-hole notebook paper. These very-evenly-sized panels were created on a computer, printed out, and inked-over so they looked drawn.
This is a genuine drawn-in-class one. It was the introduction of Junker’s nemesis, “Spearmint Sherry”. The “Franco-Prussian War Flying Ace” was a running gag, of which this was the first instance.
Another re-drawn one on printer paper, a tribute to Dr. Demento:
A roughly drawn two-parter that mentions Fluxum Florum and sees the introduction of “Kermit Grande”.
I’m pretty sure this Holodeck was not the only Trekkie reference in the strip. I distinctly recall one where Kermit Grande was a Ferengi.
A stand-alone drawing of “Kermit Grande”:
Three more genuine classroom productions. This one, the version I chose to scan was a photocopy made soon after drawing it. It is better preserved than the pencil version.
A really rough one. The “small people” here refers to, if I recall correctly, an internal parody of “Mr. Men and Little Miss” that may or may not have appeared in other strips.
The “Ben Gray” in this strip is not, as some have assumed, a parody of Ben “The Thing” Grimm. (He doesn’t even look like The Thing, ffs) He is rather a fairly accurate depiction of a classmate. “Junior” is an accurate rendering of the sign from a convenience store of that name close to the school.
Note the backstory of Junker’s parents was changed from that depicted in the first strip shown above. At some point I decided that they were not just generic “square middle aged people”, but very specifically they were “square middle aged people who used to listen to punk rock back in like 1977 or something”.
Here’s two more strips involving the “Franco Prussian War Flying Ace”. I did these in pencil with the intention of tracing in ink later, but never did. The fact that the letterhead and panels appear to be printed on something better than a dot matrix suggests these were much later than all the others here. (I have no memory of having any access to inkjet or laser printers at any time while in high school)
