Chicago and Illinois Western Railroad

The Chicago and Illinois Western Railroad (C&IW) was incorporated February 26, 1903, by Dolese and Shepard, a limestone mining company.

[3][4][5] There were also plans to go further southwest to Joliet and tracks were laid as far as Willow Springs, but they had been cut back to Hodgkins by 1918.

[6] In 1924 utilities investor Samuel Insull began building the large Commonwealth Edison and Peoples Gas Light and Coke Crawford coal generating plants at Pulaski Ave. along the south side of the railroad.

They operated it as a separate line until April 30, 1983, when it was merged into the (renamed) Illinois Central Gulf Railroad.

There it crossed the Des Plaines River and went southwest parallel to it through Lyons and McCook to Hodgkins.

[11][12][13] The railroad's engine servicing and main yard were in Dolese and Shepard's Hawthorne Quarry, on the east side of Cicero Ave. from 30th St. to 33rd St.

[14][15] The eastern end of the tracks was a connection with the now defunct Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad (the "Panhandle Line", part of the Pennsylvania Railroad system), from the southbound Panhandle it split west, crossing 31st Bvld.

Just east of Damen Ave. they crossed the "Collateral Channel" (now a slip) on an unusual Rall bascule lift bridge.

Just east of today's 1st Ave. (Ill. 171) the tracks turned farther south and continued into the C&IW McCook yard.

At the west end of the yard they crossed the north–south Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad and ran along the south side of the Dolese and Shepard (now Vulcan Materials Company) and other quarries to the Santa Fe yard at Hodgkins.