Kankakee and Urbana Traction

A couple of years ago I was working on presenting some of the material from the Scalzo Collection.  Work stopped when I got to the Kankakee and Urbana Traction Company, and I now recall why.

There's already an excellent online history of the company at this link, written by H. George Friedman Jr. on his site "Street Railways of Urbana and Champaign".   This website has a number of very interesting and well-researched articles on various subjects, and is highly recommended.

Basically all of the material that Stephen Scalzo had collected was already presented by Mr. Friedman.  The only things I can add are some more detailed track maps.  These are too big to scan, so I've taken pictures of them, which seemed to work out pretty well.  The K&UT was really a side-of-the-road interurban, and I can remember looking for remnants back in the late seventies without success.

But things were different in 1958.  This map of the carbarn in Urbana is based on observations made then by Howard Morris.  The Fehl map shown on the Friedman site here gives the overall location of all electric railway tracks in the area.

The other maps were drawn up by the IC roadmaster's office.

Here in Rantoul, the mainline of the IC is on the far left of the map.  The K&UT comes in from the north, about a block east of the IC, and crosses the branch to Gifford just east of the roundhouse.  From there it heads south down the middle of Chandler St., which is now called Century Blvd.  

And then there are two maps of Paxton, the northern end of the K&UT.  Unfortunately, the cut-down copies in the Scalzo collection are missing some information, such as the names of the cross streets and the long-gone east-west railroad.

On these maps north is to the left.  Coming in from the south (upper right), the interurban was in the middle of Railroad Ave., then turned off just before reaching what I think must be Holmes St.  There were no switches, the track just comes to an end.

Farther south, the track moves off to the side of the street, then crosses it to head straight south for a short distance.

And as usual, it would be nice to have more, but that's all there is.  I'll try to keep going on the Scalzo collection, so stay tuned!