Sunday morning dawned with the realization this was our last day of the road trip. I had one more stop I wanted to make before getting back to Ohio.
The Illinois Railway Museum in Union, Illinois claims to be the largest railroad museum in the United States. Located 55 miles northwest of downtown Chicago, it celebrates the role railroads have played in the growth of the Chicago area as well as the United States as a whole. There are over 450 pieces of prototype equipment in its collection as well as numerous displays.
The main campus in Union includes ten equipment storage barns with a total of about 2 miles of track under cover, a dedicated steam restoration shop, an 1853 train depot, a complete CTA station, four streetcar stations of varying design, several restored and functional neon signs and concrete entablatures on display
We must have arrived so early that there was nobody to sell us tickets so we wandered around for couple of hours, throughout most of the barns, and getting hungry went back to the car and left.
A short time later we were headed down the Kennedy Expressway into Chicago, without traffic!
Onto the Ryan Expressway …
The rest of the trip across Indiana and Ohio was nonstop and uneventful. In the end we went through 11 states and 6 major cities on this trip. Without really trying we managed to see the 3rd state capitals on this road trip, Colorado, Minnesota and now Wisconsin. Along with it we saw countless great, and sometimes weird, sights.
RDZ Photography 