‘Riding the Rails’: WTTW unveils the mystery, history and romance of the region’s trains

Trains captured Geoffrey Baer’s heart early on.

Growing up in Highland Park, “we were one house away from what was back then the Chicago & North Western, now the Union Pacific North Line,” Baer explained.

“Every time a train went by, I would literally run to the window to watch.”

That fascination never flagged, and now the WTTW writer, producer and host debuts his latest show, “Riding the Rails,” at 7 p.m. Monday.

The 60-minute program pays tribute to the sprawling influence of freight and commuter railroads in the nation’s busiest train hub. Along the way, Baer explores why people love trains, delves into the biggest rail heist in U.S. history and dishes on the Hollywood stars who traveled coast-to-coast via Chicago.

The program starts with a visit to a childhood haunt of Baer’s, The Choo-Choo restaurant in Des Plaines.

“You sit at the counter, and a little toy train comes around and delivers your hamburger to you. When I was a kid, that was just like nirvana,” he said.

From there, Baer jumps on a Metra Union Pacific Northwest Line train into the city.

“Virtually all of our Metra lines are legacies of the great Chicago North Western, the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, the Illinois Central … all these lines that extended to all the four corners of the country,” Baer said.

And where interurban train lines went, suburbs followed, he added.

Baer takes viewers back in time, riding a Pullman car. They’re named for George Pullman, who transformed uncomfortable journeys in upright seats by designing and manufacturing sleeping cars in the late 1860s.

“He made these things like luxury hotels on rails,” Baer noted. However, Black Pullman porters were accommodated in cramped quarters “the size of a phone booth. It really speaks to what American society was like in those times.”

One notable stop is Rondout near Libertyville, where the “Newton Boys” carried out an over $2 million mail train robbery on June 12, 1924.

Primed with inside information from a corrupt Post Office inspector, two gang members ambushed the crew and forced the train to stop. Four other robbers climbed aboard and seized numerous mail bags, but in the frenzy, Wylie “Doc” Newton was mistakenly shot.

Police converged on the gang in Chicago but a portion of the money remains buried.

“It’s out there somewhere,” Baer noted.

Another historical marker is the flight of southern Black residents in the early 1900s to northern cities like Chicago, where the Illinois Central Railroad once owned a gigantic train terminal in Grant Park, Baer said.

“That was like Ellis Island for hundreds of thousands of African Americans coming north for the Great Migration, dressed in their Sunday best, arriving full of hope,” he said.

One segment of the show is devoted to Chicago’s role during the golden age of train travel when luminaries such as Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Joseph Cotton, and Elizabeth Taylor had layovers here.

“The reason you had to get off in Chicago was because none of the railways went through Chicago, they all terminated in Chicago,” Baer said.

She may not be a household name, but Baer also recognizes May Theilgaard Watts, former naturalist and teacher at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, who helped establish the first rails-to-trails path in the U.S. during the 1960s.

Watts “fell in love with walking paths in England,” Baer noted. “She happened to notice the abandoned Chicago Aurora and Elgin (Railroad) right of way in the western suburbs and mounted a very long and difficult campaign to get it converted into what is now the Illinois Prairie Path.”

Baer brings viewers to the present at a new railway flyover bridge on Chicago’s South Side built to untangle train traffic, and inside a gantry crane at CSX’s intermodal rail yard near Midway International Airport.

“It’s six stories tall and six containers wide and it’s on wheels, and we drive around plucking 20-ton containers off of trains and dropping them onto truck chassis,” he said.

“I asked the woman who runs the yard, ‘What’s in all these containers?’ She said, ‘Everything in your house.’”

One takeaway for viewers is that trains and rails offer a “parallel universe” to ours, Baer said.

“You see trains all the time but you don’t really know where they’re going, particularly freights. There’s a mystery and I think it remains a mystery, ‘why do we love trains so much?”

For more information, go to WTTW.com. Got a comment or question? Drop an email to mpyke@dailyherald.com.