Old US Route 66: The Road

Lock One, Lockport, IL In Chicago, IL, Old US Route 66 once started from the shore of Lake Michigan.  The original right of way is no longer visible because development laid down in decades since has buried nearly all of it; nevertheless, yet older infrastructure may still be seen ~ however fragmentary.  Here are the remains of Lock Number One on the Illinois and Michigan Canal between Chicago and Peru, IL, at Lockport, IL.

• In ceremonies near Chicago the first ground of the I and M was broken on July 4, 1836.
• The Panic of 1837 possibly was triggered by President [1829-1836] Andrew Jackson’s July 11, 1836 "Specie Circular," which required that all federal land purchased after August 15 be paid for in gold or silver. Jackson considered bank notes to be artificial contrivances designed to enrich those who issued them. This action sank land sales and sale prices, and by the spring of 1837 the values of stocks and commodities had crashed as well. Worldwide credit had been overextended in a period of buoyant economic expectations, and the resulting depression was hard-felt across the globe.
• ... during the nearly four years of abandonment much of the completed work had fallen into disrepair. But by 1847 progress was rapid. The I and M was first opened to navigation on April 10, 1848 [nearly 160 years ago at this writing] when the canal boat General Fry, towed by the propeller A. Rossiter, arrived in Chicago from Lockport amid much fanfare.
• With the railroad a direct threat to the I and M, it came as a bitter irony in 1851 when the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad Company obtained a right-of-way along the canal line. ... This railway between Chicago on Lake Michigan and Rock Island on the Mississippi River became fully operational in the summer of 1854. Almost immediately passengers and small bulk goods shifted over to the railroad, which was fast and cost effective. And unlike the canal, which froze over during the winter, the railroad operated year round.
  
• The Chicago Sanitary District was created in 1889, and on September 3, 1892 it began construction of a mammoth twenty-eight mile Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal connecting the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers at Lockport. When this project was completed in January of 1900, the eastern portion of the I and M immediately became obsolete, and soon thereafter it was closed to navigation permanently.
• The Illinois Waterway, connecting with the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal at Lockport and extending sixty miles down to Starved Rock State Park near Utica, opened in June of 1933. ... This achievement closed the entire length of the I and M to commercial traffic permanently. Soon thereafter the Civilian Conservation Corps of President Roosevelt’s New Deal began restoring portions of the old I and M line in an attempt to make it over into a recreational and historical park. More recently this goal was bolstered when the U.S. Congress in 1984 designated the old canal route the Illinois and Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor.
  

• Today most Chicagoans take the existence of the sewer system for granted. Yet, for most of the City's first seven decades, the defining struggle for Chicago's continued existence was not the Great Fire of 1871 but its battle with sewage.

Ballard Siding, McLean County, IL The canal turned Chicago from a little pioneer settlement on yet another inland lake into a world port on a major seaway, but society's fascination with water transportation was soon eclipsed by its infatuation with steam.  Because the town was developing at this time, Chicago became the principal rail hub of the westward-hurtling nation. Throughout the Midwest, surface roads were improved to transport produce and passengers to and from the railroads.  Grain brought in by the wagon load from the farm was consolidated for shipment by the carload to flour mills. Manufactured merchandise from the East and from overseas found its way into every household via the rails. Locating the old alignments of Route 66 in Illinois is easy; just follow the railroad.  SR 4, the Pontiac Trail, which was a precursor of Route 66, was laid out along the right of way of the Chicago and Alton Railroad.  Today, where the concrete pavement veers off into the prairie to bypass some small town or other, just turn onto the side street nearest the rails.  It is sure to take you straight through the downtown business district.

Amtrak, Cayuga, IL As a railroad fan, I always bring my scanner along on Amtrak trips so I can listen in to the chatter between the crew and listen to the detectors. For those who don't know what a detector is, they are simply safety devices installed trackside at strategic points, and their job is to scan the train when it passes by. They warn of possible dangerous defects, which, if one is found, means the train has to stop and inspect the suspected area for defects, and the detector points out which wheel axle on the train it suspects [has] a defect. ... UP detectors said our train had 24 axles (five cars and the locomotive). These detectors were different from the CP detectors in that the train length wasn't mentioned at all but track speed and the ambient temperature outside was. Our Engineer was hopping right along at 80 miles per hour (highest 82, lowest 78) across the flat Illinois prairie, which has a beauty all of its own. [Thompson, Paul. "Minneapolis-St. Louis on Amtrak." On Track On Line n. seq. (Apr. 2003): 59 pars. Online. Internet. 8 Aug. 2005. Available http://www.on-track-on-line.com/trips/ trip-2003-04-18-thompson.shtml.]

	Pre-66 Ribbon Pavement, Miami, OK While legislation for public highways first appeared in 1916, with revisions in 1921, it was not until Congress enacted an even more comprehensive version of the act in 1925 that the government executed its plan for national highway construction. Officially, the numerical designation 66 was assigned to the Chicago-to-Los Angeles route in the summer of 1926. With that designation came its acknowledgment as one of the nation's principal east-west arteries. For the most part, U.S. 66 was just an assignment of a number to an already existing network of state-managed roads, most of which were in poor condition. One outstanding example of the highway in its early form is the 3.5 mile section near Miami, Oklahoma, estimated to have been constructed between 1919 and 1924. [United States. Department of the Interior. National Park Service. Special Resource Study: Route 66. Online. 1995. Available http://www.cr.nps.gov/rt66/SpecialResourceStudy.pdf.]
	Chain of Rocks Bridge Many of Missouri’s bridges were constructed in the 1920s. Undoubtedly, the most famous of these bridges is the Chain of Rocks Bridge, which opened in 1929.  The one-mile bridge, which spans the Mississippi River between Madison, Illinois and St. Louis, was constructed as a private venture by the Chain of Rocks and Kingshighway Bridge Company.  Built as a toll bridge to bring travelers into St. Louis from the north, the Chain of Rocks Bridge became a free crossing in 1966.  The bridge, which is the 12th longest continuous span bridge in the world, became notorious for delays caused by the 30-degree bend in its middle span.  After the City of Madison purchased it, the Chain of Rocks Bridge was incorporated into the third routing of U.S. 66 through St. Louis in 1931.  In 1965, U.S. 66 traffic was routed over the new I-270 bridge.  The Chain of Rocks Bridge closed for repairs in 1970 and never reopened to automobile traffic.  In recent years, it has been reopened for hiking and biking, connecting Missouri and Illinois trails. [Snider, Becky L, et al. "Route 66 in Missouri." National Park Service Cultural Resources. Online. 2003. Available http://www.cr.nps.gov/rt66/HistSig/ MissouriContext.htm.] Bridge lanes over the Mississippi River have declined from 22 lanes in the 1960s to 12 lanes in 2003. A group of state and local officials and business people are supporting a proposal to build a new eight-lane bridge over the Mississippi about one mile north of downtown St. Louis. That project is dependent on Missouri and Illinois receiving federal funding in the upcoming Senate transportation bill. ["McKinley Bridge Could Be Repaired, Open by 2006." St. Louis Business Journal n. seq. (16 June 2003): 7 pars. Online. Internet. 14 Aug. 2005. Available http://stlouis.bizjournals.com/stlouis/stories/ 2003/06/16/daily16.html.]
	Rainbow Bridge, Riverton, KS In 1992, construction of a softer curve bypassed the Rainbow Bridge at Brush Creek. After a hard fight by the Kansas Route 66 Association, County officials agreed to leave the Brush Creek Bridge standing as a historic landmark. [Weiser, Kathy R. "Legendary Route 66." Legends of America n. seq. (2004): n. pag. Online. Internet. 9 Aug. 2005. Available http://www.legendsofamerica.com/66-Mainpage.html.]
	Pony Bridge, El Reno, OK The Pony Bridge at the Canadian River is 3944.33 feet long and contains 38 pony trusses. It was completed July 1, 1933. [Randall, Guy. "Shadows of Old Route 66." The Road Wanderer n. seq. (28 Nov. 2004): n. pag. Online. Internet. 9 Aug. 2005. Available http://www.theroadwanderer.net/route66.htm.] Count the trusses the next time you pass over. See whether or not there are more. Only those who've actually driven it are entitled to dispute the official count. Heavy semi traffic is still running along this stretch, though. Watch out you don't become too preoccupied, looking for the water. Here, the Canadian River is merely a braided stream in a wide bottomland.

• Contemporary writers have reexamined the Great Depression years and found that thousands of disillusioned immigrants returned home within months after reaching the Golden State. Of the more than 200,000 refugees who journeyed west to California beginning in the early 1930s "less than 16,000 people from the Dust Bowl proper ended up in California."
• Road improvements and maintenance work was a central feature of the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and Works Project Administration (WPA) programs. From 1933 to 1938 thousands of unemployed male youths from virtually every state were put to work as laborers on road gangs. As a result of this monumental effort, the Chicago-to-Los Angeles highway was reported as "continuously paved" in 1938. In the final analysis, Route 66 affected more Americans on federal work relief than people who used it during the famous exodus to California.
• Studies by the Public Roads Administration (PRA) during 1941 to 1943 showed that at least 50% of all defense-related material destined for America's war production plants was transported and delivered by truck rather than by rail. As the shortest corridor between the west coast and the industrial heartland beyond Chicago, it was not uncommon to see mile-long convoys moving troops and supplies from one military reservation to another along U.S. Highway 66.
  

Curb, Pony Bridge, El Reno, OK Curbs between pavement and shoulder are rarely used anymore because they are an edge trap that tends to deflect vehicles running up on them causing a rollover. The style pictured is slightly inclined to the pavement. Engineers quit specifying it long ago in favor of curbs that were more abrupt. In the days before power steering, an inattentive driver could lose control by running up on a curb like this because it would yank the steering wheel to the right.

• Emergency road building measures developed during wartime left bridges and culverts woefully inadequate for postwar needs. During the 1940s most bridges in Illinois and Missouri used wood as a substitute for steel. Steel reinforcements were virtually nonexistent in concrete pavement, and sporadic maintenance left U.S. 66 and other highways riddled with potholes and gaping fissures.
• Ironically, the public lobby for rapid mobility and improved highways that gained Route 66 its enormous popularity in earlier decades also signaled its demise beginning in the mid-1950s. Mass federal sponsorship for an interstate system of divided highways markedly increased with Dwight D. Eisenhower's second term in the White House. General Eisenhower had returned from Germany very impressed by the strategic value of Hitler's Autobahn.
• The congressional response to the president's commitment was the passage of the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which provided a comprehensive financial umbrella to underwrite the cost of the national interstate and defense highway system. In accordance with the terms of the legislation. the major segment of U.S. 66 running west from Oklahoma City, the Texas Panhandle, New Mexico, [and] northern Arizona, to Barstow, California, would be replaced by Interstate 40.
• By 1970 the remaining segments of original Route 66 were replaced by two, equally modern four-lane highways ~ Interstate 55 between Chicago and St. Louis and Interstate 44, which absorbed the old diagonal section from St. Louis to Oklahoma City. On June 26, 1979, the American Association of State Highways and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) accepted the recommendation to eliminate the designation of Route 66.

New Bridge ~ Old Bridge ~ Old US Route 66 ~ North of Chenoa, IL The little towns had been bypassed in Illinois, and Route 66 had been widened to four lanes before I-55 was commissioned. After the Interstate was opened, the northbound lanes were signed for two-way traffic, and the southbound pair of lanes was abandoned; nevertheless, old crossings of low prestige remain dead-end stubs, and folks have lots of parking space to spare whose private drives abut on the abandoned side.

Road Ends ~ Old US Route 66 ~ North of Chenoa, IL Piles of rubble prevent drivers from venturing onto the derelict pavement at crossings that still exist. Jersey barriers block bridge access.