CTA From The Archives: The North Shore Line

Brings back memories. In the late 50s till I was 12 when the line was abandoned (1963) my dad and I would ride from Roosevelt Road to Milwaukee just for fun every few months. By then it was only the Skokie Valley Route. With the nearly non-stop Electroliners it was 90 minutes, and they had a dining car too. Yes, that whole corridor was almost all rural. It used the L but it made only limited stops; Loop stations, Merch Mart, Belmont, Wilson, Howard. One striking thing about all films from that era was the amount of litter. People threw everything onto the ground. As recent European immigrants we found it shocking. It was not until Lady Bird Johnson's anti-litter campaign (one of the most effective but largely forgotten First Ladies) that there was a cultural shift in that regard.

Wow. Imagine if the CTA had ownership and operated all these lines today. You would be able to take the L to the far north suburbs!! I love Gurnee Mills and Six Flags Great America. Just imagine being able to take the Yellow line to Mundelein IL. and the Purple line to Waukegan Airport. With a extension of the Red Line separating from the Purple line (which would be heading to Waukegan) to head northwest to Gurnee, IL. once surpassing North Chicago.

The North Shore Line should still be around today. Unfortunately, it had reached a point in its life when it had met competition back in the 1950s when the expressways opened, and the love for cars and cheap gas made it more convenient for commuters. It had aging equipment that needed replacement, the station in Milwaukee needed relocating because of highway construction, and more things like shop relocation and modernization. If it had somehow managed to limp into the early 1970s, and the states of Illinois and Wisconsin worked together to save it as a commuter line, it would have survived like the South Shore, albeit in a modified form.

Thanks to GM, Goodyear, NCL, and Standard Oil, allot of light rail, aka trolleys systems are gone. Now we have smog, tollways, gas taxes, traffic.

When I was 14, a buddy and I HIKED the Shore Line Route from Wilmette to Highwood and back to Glencoe where my mother picked us up!

How much the land has changed over time is mind-blowing. Take a bike ride or a walk along the Green Bay Trail, the Robert McClory Trail, the North Shore Bike Path, or the Skokie Valley Bike Path these days, and you'll find that it looks absolutely nothing like it was in 1945.

This is one of the best films ever! I really enjoyed the trip! I always wanted to visit Chicago, maybe one day I will.

Thank you for these videos no other transit agency today outside of CTA and Metra seem to really have any videos like this showing the past. With the recent closure of the South Shore Line street running in Michigan City Indiana that was the last of the classic inter urban style railroads. Where freight could be run, there was mainline RR Sharing with interurban, then street running and sharing the track with trolley/streetcars. I’m from New Jersey but the closest real interurban was the red arrow lines. With these videos feels almost like being in a time a time machine, with the videos I hope one day to make a model railroad layout of a interurban line.

as a former resident of Evanston who spent a lot of time in Wilmette Skokie etc this was a very interesting video to see how my old haunts looked in the 1940s lol! the Skokie valley route seemed sort of semi rural at the time and the street crossings all seemed to consist of narrow 2 lane roads(now 4-5 lane suburban boulevards!). very interesting!

It looks like there was a cat at the last station towards the end of the video standing on the platform watching the train pull in as if it did so quite often. Probably waiting for its owner to come home.

Thank you CTA, very very interesting!

Growing up in Wilmette in the '70s, when the L ended at 4th and Linden, it's fascinating to see when the train went from there down Linden Avenue to the present 'commuter' train tracks.

I like the old cars, and little traffic.

There's a lot of things people are doing back in those days as in today's modern era - like not looking both ways while crossing railroad tracks and cars beating the train to the crossing. Seems like bad habits never grow old!

Awesome video. Love seeing this kind of footage.

Thank you, CTA, for a fine video. What is the musical selection from 0.00 to 2:40? Who composed it? The second piece, from 2:40 to 7:40 is Chopin's Valse Brilliante, Op.18. The third selection sounds like Bach, and the fourth "smells" like Schubert or Beethoven. Would you or GMP Music be so kind a to enlighten us? Thanks!

This is such a nice video, a reminder from yesteryear, I know there may be many against the idea but I would love to see this colorized, that would be really nice

I rode the el and subway in the 40s...cost me a nickel :)

This is mjy idea on how a video should be done! Good flowing action, lots of explanation and good music to a silent movie. The key to its success: Continuity. Too many rail videos today, lack it. Well done. A real pleasure to watch. I subscribed.

Cool! This tells me a lot of stuff i never knew.