EJ&E in the Seventies

What were you doing during the turbulent decade of the seventies? From 1970 to 1979 the Elgin Joliet & Eastern was still a busy little railroad.

Traffic on the railroad had been gradually declining since 1950. From 1950 to 1959 the EJ&E handled 386 million tons of freight. But in the decade of the sixties total freight tonnage dropped by a quarter, down to 287 million tons.

The 1958 recession had hit the entire railroad industry hard, not just EJ&E. During these same two decades the railroad had lost much of its loose car bridge or overhead traffic, as the larger railroads had arranged for more direct connections rather than using EJ&E. The irony is that this is exactly the kind of traffic that the Canadian National is proposing to return to the railroad.

During the seventies approximately 76% of the EJ&E’s line haul traffic was associated directly with the steel industry. Commodities here included iron and steel articles, inbound raw materials such as coal, coke, scrap and lime, as well as outbound shipments consisting of slag and coke byproducts.

One of the more interesting moves of finished steel during this period consisted of shipments moving from US Steel and Inland Steel mills to the GM Fisher Body Plant, in Willow Springs, IL, interchanged with the Santa Fe Railway at Joliet. This move started when the plant opened in 1953, and lasted until GM finally closed Willow Springs in 1989. The site is now home of the world’s largest parcel sorting facility operated by UPS, Inc.

An additional 14% of EJ&E’s traffic was composed of coal for utility companies, moving primarily in unit train service, with the remaining 10% consisting of miscellaneous products.

Thus, the railroad was heavily dependent on a two-industry market structure for its business fortunes. This simple fact helps to explain much of the postwar history of the EJ&E.

In 1973 domestic steel production reach a peak of 150 million tons for the decade, and the railroad handled an all-time high in iron and steel of tonnage of slight more than 9.5 million tons. (That’s well over half the railroad’s current annual tonnage). Two years later, the railroad experienced one of its worst years for steel traffic with shipments declining to 6.2 million tons.

In 1973 EJ&E moved about 30 million tons of revenue freight, probably its best year of the decade. By 1977 annual volume had dropped slightly to 26.5 million tons. Tonnage volume during the seventies was averaging about twice what it is today.

To compensate for the loss of overhead traffic, and reduce the railroad’s dependence on the steel industry, EJ&E embarked on a very aggressive industrial development program in the late 1960’s. Much of this effort was centered around the town of Plainfield, IL, which back then saw railroads in more positive terms than today.

By 1974 rail-served customers on the west side of Plainfield included Super Valu Stores, Fleischman Distilling Corp., Distillers Ltd., Kerr Glass Manufacturing Corp., Lehigh Portland Cement, Southern Door Company and Wickes Lumber.

Just north of Plainfield, at Walker, the Illinois River branch headed off the mainline towards the towns of Minooka and Morris. This branch was another beehive of industrial development, with large chemical processing facilities constructed by Armak, Airco Industrial Gasses, and Northern Petrochemical (now Quantum).

In February 1975 the EJ&E moved their executive offices from downtown Chicago to a facility adjacent to the East Joliet yard. These offices had been located at 208 South LaSalle Street since May 1, 1914. This was an obvious cost-cutting move that also brought the railroad’s entire local management team together in the same location.

During the seventies the EJ&E remained a busy and noisy railroad with plenty of activity.