Mid-America's Main Line

At 11 o'clock one bitter cold morning in Chicago last week, a deafening din arose from the Illinois Central Railroad's yards. Whistles shrieked, bells clanged, diesel engines blatted their air horns like dying cows. From a smoke-grimed overpass, Illinois' Governor Adlai E. Stevenson, who had set off the bedlam by tugging the rope of an old dismantled locomotive bell, cried gleefully: "There are a hundred trains here, and I bet every one of them is late!" Just as gleefully, Illinois Central's President Wayne Johnston cried back: "I'll bet they are, too!"

For once, Railroader Johnston didn't care. The Illinois Central was celebrating its 100th anniversary. All along its 6,543 miles of track between Chicago and New Orleans, the same tumult of bells and whistles broke loose on the "Main Line of Mid-America." The Illinois Central had plenty to toot about. It dominated the length & breadth of the Mississippi Valley--which Alexis de Tocqueville had called "the most magnificent dwelling place prepared by God for man's abode." The Central had opened up the dwelling place to man.

Prairie Wonder. The idea for the railroad was first advanced in 1835 by Colonel Sidney Breese, an Illinois prairie lawyer who later became U.S. Senator. Not till 16 years later did Senator Stephen A. Douglas win a grant of 2,595,600 acres from the Government--the first to any railroad--and persuade Eastern and British financiers (including Gladstone, Stephen Cunard and Economist Richard Cobden) to put up $9,000,000 to construct a 705-mile "Y"-shaped road. It stretched north from Cairo, and forked to East Dubuque and Chicago.

To do the job, 100,000 laborers were brought into Illinois from the East and from Europe. The crews brawled incessantly because of the "numerous groggeries along the line." They were plagued by cholera. But finally, on Jan. 8, 1855, the first through passenger train from Cairo reached Chicago, its coaches lit by dim whale-oil lamps. Along its right of way, flourishing villages sprang up. Soon the Central linked up with Mississippi steamboats, opened trade to the Gulf.

Across the Wide Ohio. The Central also was smart enough to spot an able lawyer in Sangamon County's Abe Lincoln. In 1855, for $10 each, he defended 15 claims against the railroad. The following year he won its most important case--a tax suit--and collected a $5,000 fee, the biggest he ever got. But he had to sue to get it.

After the Civil War, the road absorbed ex-Confederate railways in the Mississippi Valley and for the first time stretched its tracks all the way from the Great Lakes to the Gulf.

The Central helped both to change national habits and create folklore. It was one of the first to sponsor excursion tours to the South via its "True Winter Route"*. And the folk hero of all U.S. railroading rose from the wreck near Grenada, Miss. in 1900, where Illinois Central Engineer John Luther ("Casey") Jones died with one hand on the brake, the other on the throttle.

Red Light & Highball. In 1883, Empire Builder Edward H. Harriman, who believed that "the Illinois Central was the best railroad in the country," bought enough stock to get on its board. By 1906 he took complete control.* The Illinois Central more than fulfilled Harriman's estimate. By 1931 it had paid out a total of $310,300,000 in a golden flow of dividends uninterrupted since 1860.

But the combination of depression and increased truck and barge competition almost wrecked Central. It suspended dividends, and its stock, which had once hit $184, fell to $4.75. Control of the entire $700,000,000 system could have been bought for only $3,300,000. By trimming costs to the bone, President Lawrence Downs and his successor, John L. Beven, managed to pull the road through, though it was touch & go. One time, the papers were even drawn up to put it into bankruptcy. World War II sent the road highballing again, and Beven began using earnings to trim the $368 million debt and buy new equipment. When Beven died in 1945, Wayne Johnston, who had started with the railroad at 22 as an accountant, stepped in, the first Illinois Central president born in Illinois (at Urbana).

Johnston trimmed the debt to $238 million, spent $134 million on equipment and improvements in five years. By 1949 Johnston had the Illinois Central in such healthy shape that he resumed payments on the preferred stock. Last year, when the road earned a net of $29,123,632, the fattest in its history, he plunked out the first common dividend ($3) since 1931. As a result, the common stock has soared from its 1941 low of $4.25 to $72.75 last week. This week, 53-year-old President Johnston was just as confident about the Main Line as Investor Cobden had been in the Panic of 1857. "That the stock will go up again ... I have no doubt," wrote Cobden to a friend. "Nothing but an earthquake or some other convulsion of nature can impair the value ... of the richest soil of the world."

*Winter trippers enjoyed the cockfights and mule races in New Orleans, sunned in Galveston. Florida's coastal resorts were just opening up, thanks to Henry M. Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway. Daytona Beach was the tourist center. Miami Beach and Palm Beach did not yet exist. Only adventuresome women dared to bathe, clad in knee-length, pantalooned dresses, corsets, and beach shoes.

*The Illinois Central has been a Harriman road ever since. Union Pacific Railroad Co., of which E. Roland Harriman is chairman, has working control of the stock.

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