These photos weren't taken in Ainsworth, but still they caught my fancy. They show a Grand Trunk Western passenger train pulled by a steam engine. To judge by the number of gawkers, it's some kind of special train. The slides are stamped "Oct 60F," and a date of 1960 would be consistent with the automobiles in the first picture (thanks, R.F.!).
I especially like this first one, where the photographer climbed atop a boxcar to get a better view:
(Click on images to enlarge)
The second picture immortalizes the backs of some spectators' heads. It was a good spot for a view, I gather, though I haven't a clue what they were standing on.
From page 35 of this little booklet (page 19 of the PDF) we learn that the Grand Trunk agent at the Ainsworth depot earned $60.00 a month (about $1,308.34 in today's dollars). It wasn't as much as the Sedley agent made, and look — Sedley had two operators besides, just like Valparaiso. I had no idea Sedley was such a big operation.
The railroad did not provide the Ainsworth agent with a house, fuel or light. I gather the agent (and his family, if he had one) rented rooms with some local family; e.g., we've already seen Agent P.H. Swain rooming with the Dotzers and then the Chesters.
Looks like Ainsworth had more trains stopping in 1924 than in 1928. A daily train westbound train from Valpo to Chicago, stopping in Ainsworth at 7:55 a.m. (the "milk train," I suppose), a daily eastbound stopping at 5:13 p.m.; and two daily-except-Sunday trains, westbound stopping at 5:20 p.m., eastbound at 10:18 a.m.
(How could there not be a 7-days-a-week milk train in 1928? What did the cows do on Sunday?)
(Don't talk to me about refrigeration. I prefer to think the cows had Sunday off.)
Here's an article from the December 1945 issue of Trains magazine about the Grand Trunk depot in Durand, Michigan. Nothing to do with Ainsworth, of course, but some interesting photos.
It really makes me want to put on my good traveling suit, pack an overnight bag and walk over to the Ainsworth station to wait for the next eastbound passenger train.
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When I started this thing I thought that blogging was a good platform for this project. Not only would the immediate gratification of seeing my words on the internet keep me motivated to work, but the episodic nature of a blog perfectly reflected the fragmentary and disjointed way information about Ainsworth was coming into my hands. However, the information I've blogged remains pretty disorganized, and I have a naturally disorganized mind, so this is reinforcing my weakness. On the other hand, it's the best I've got. There is a (brief) history of Ainsworth from the beginning to the present day that could be written, and maybe the Hobart Historical Society would print it up just like the other helpful history booklets they've prepared — but I'm not the person to write it. I have to do episodes: I can't concentrate long enough on one impersonal topic, like the history of a town (as opposed to the history of a family, or one memorable event in a person's life), to bring together a coherent synopsis.
Now I'm finding that even researching one memorable event in a person's life, or at the end of it as in this murder case, takes so much time that it interferes with my blogging. If you blog, you're supposed to update frequently. But I'm spending so much time and energy comparing newspaper reports to reconcile their inconsistent statements, poring over old plat books to figure out where things happened, speculating over census reports to guess at a first name where only a surname was reported, that I just can't produce something on the side to put into the blog while I'm working on another story in the background.
All of this just to explain to you thousands of adoring Ainsworth fans out there why I'm not updating very often.
It's going to keep on that way, too, because I've got two more research-intensive stories I want to work on after the present one — I'd like to educate myself about the Indians who lived in this area, and then there seems to have been some big guy on the Chicago labor-union scene in the 1920s-30s, with a shady history and dubious friends, who bought a dairy farm out here in the mid-1930s, and I'd like to look into that whole thing.
So, in sum, sorry about the infrequent updates. Now back to work.
Continuing on the theme of stuff that relates to Ainsworth only because it relates to the Grand Trunk Railroad, which passes through Ainsworth, here's an ICC report on an accident that happened near Charlotte, Michigan, in April 1963.
See the link over there in the sidebar — "Grand Trunk Western Railroad Historical Images"? I just wasted a couple days of my life putting that together. I had to figure out a lot of things that were very taxing on my poor little brain.
It's just an assemblage of old images from places along the Grand Trunk line that goes past Ainsworth, linking them to their place on a map from one of my timetables. This is a work in progress, obviously, since I've got only four images at the moment! I will update it as I manage to track down more. Right now, I'm tired.
The Index to Stations lists Ainsworth, but tells us that if we want to know when the train stops there, we have to consult the Chicago District Timetable, which apparently is a separate publication. *sigh*
As you can see, I've gone back to Scribd.com. All relationships have their problems; we're going to try to work things out.
Gee, guys, nice of you to mention Ainsworth. And you even mentioned that telephone on the pole at Ainsworth. What? — the siding? — oh, please don't trouble yourself to mention that.
Another day, another document-sharing site. I'd have stuck with scribd.com forever if only it weren't so temperamental about uploading documents.
Page 41 of this timetable (page 42 in the PDF scan) mentions the Ainsworth siding, including its length (660 feet) and the location of its switching point. Apparently in 1984 the siding hadn’t been abandoned and disconnected yet.
Page 132 (133 PDF) tells us that there was a train dispatcher telephone box at Ainsworth.
First of all I have to apologize for the fact that pages 9 and 10 of this timetable are at the back of the document. I didn’t realize I had skipped over them until I was finished scanning, and I wasn’t going to subject this fragile old document to re-scanning, nor was I going to pay for Adobe Writer which would allow me to insert pages into the middle of a document. So that’s me — half curator, half cheapskate.
First stop — the Index to Stations on page 3, where we note that Ainsworth’s 1899 population is given as 60. Then we have to go to pages 19 and 20 of the timetable (the 13th page of this PDF), to find any further mention of Ainsworth. Eastward trains stop at the Ainsworth station daily except Sunday at 11:03 a.m., and daily at 6:06 p.m. Westward trains stop at 7:14 a.m., and daily except Sunday at 3:58 p.m.
Looking through all these old timetables has given me a hankering to take a long trip on Amtrak, just to ride the train. In fact I went to the Amtrak site and found a nice long journey across the northernmost states to Everett, Washington. A bit pricey, since I would simply have to have a roomette, but I’d like to do it someday.
Someday in the distant future, because I just got off the phone with Chicago Title and — yikes! There goes my Amtrak ride, and they’ve only got back as far as 1911.
More to come on that, and also more timetables to come. I’m starting to collect these timetables for their own sake, with only a passing curiosity as to whether they mention Ainsworth.
On page 7, we see that the eastbound train, from Chicago to Valparaiso, stops in Ainsworth at 9:27 a.m. daily except Sunday. The westbound train stops at 4:59 p.m. daily except Sunday. That's it.
Am I supposed to believe that during the Roaring '20s, the train stopped only once a day (except Sunday) in Ainsworth, when it stopped there four times daily (three on Sunday) in 1932, during the Depression?
On second thought, that may make sense. During the boom times, everyone buys a car. Come the bust, they all lose their cars, they need the train again.*
It's interesting to see all those little places between the stops we know, places where the train doesn't stop: for example, between the familiar stops of Lottaville and Ainsworth, we see Turkey Creek, Atkins, Adams and Pierces. I never heard of any of these places before. ____________________________ *Conjecture pulled out of thin air.
The train stops at Sedley. It stops at Lottaville. Poor Ainsworth, lying between them, gets passed by.
The only mention I could find of Ainsworth is under "Additional Tracks" on page 24. I assume additional tracks refers to the siding; here it's noted to have a car capacity of 19. That's not bad, but in the 1958 freight cars weren't as big as they are now. I have no cite for that; I just remember the freight trains of my youth in the 1960s.
I did not scan the three pages in this schedule that were superseded by the May 1, 1959 supplemental pages. Any railroadiana purist out there who wants to see those three pages, drop me a note.
I wish someone who actually knows something about trains could explain to me why they bother showing Ainsworth on the timetable if nothing stops there!
Are there trains that stop at Ainsworth that don't rate a mention on the timetable?
I don't know whether in 1880 the Grand Trunk Railroad was double track or single track, but by 1932, as this employees timetable tells us, it was double track except between Sedley and Valparaiso, which would not include Ainsworth.
Westbound passenger trains traveling from Port Huron, Michigan, to Chicago, Illinois, stopped in Ainsworth daily at 5:38 a.m., 7:14 a.m., and 7:07 p.m. Westbound way freight trains stopped (I think, but I don't know exactly how to read this thing) daily, except Sunday, at 10:30 a.m.
Eastbound passenger trains traveling from Chicago to Port Huron stopped in Ainsworth daily at 10:10 a.m., 7:50 p.m. and 12:07 a.m. (12:07 a.m.?? What honest Indiana farmer would be awake at that hour? — lots of them, I suppose, if the whistle was loud enough.) Way freights stopped daily, except Sunday, at 9:10 a.m.
The train order office in Ainsworth was open from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily except Sunday.
There was no railroad surgeon here. If you got hurt on the train in Ainsworth, you had to go to Valpo. Actually I don't know what a "surgeon" was for purposes of this schedule.
And that's all this schedule has to tell us about Ainsworth.
Whenever I speak of the railroad that passes through Ainsworth, that is such a prominent feature of life in Ainsworth, I'm going to call it the Grand Trunk Railroad, even though I'm aware that it's actually the Canadian National Railway. It's also been called the Grand Trunk Western, and you will find much information on it by Googling that phrase. I have a newsletter from 1883, which was distributed to passengers at all stations, wherein the railroad refers to itself as the Chicago and Grand Trunk Railway. I've seen maps whereon it's designated as "G.T.R.R."
I'm not a purist. To me "Grand Trunk Railroad" is the most evocative name, and what I'm doing here is all about evocation.
