Rock island rocket

The Rock Island never went through Mundelien.

They would have departed from Chicago's LaSalle St. Station.

Rusty

Possibly not a Rocket, but the Golden State? http://www.streamlinerschedule...goldstate194812.html

Rock Island at some point dropped the names of their trains and just went to numbers. The last time I rode on a Rock Island train was in 1968 (across Kansas and into Colorado Springs), it was no longer called a Rocket - with good reason, I might add.

Just for the fun of it, if you have sound turned up on your computer, give this a go: Hank Snow and his Rainbow Ranch Boys from 1950 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_jQFi6ve2k

Thanks I will pass this info to an old friend.

Love that Hank Snow tune!! That's going on my YOUTUBE playlist.    Here's another classic eulogizing the Rock Island Line, done by the immortal Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter, about 1940. The Rock Island despite financial difficulties really was a "mighty fine line" in those days.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCiJ4QQG9WQ

Oh, heck, here's another neat railroad song done by Roy Acuff......"The Fireball Mail", accompanied by a rather obscure film that appears to have been filmed on the Burlington out in Colorado in the late '30's:    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4VIOdzdHlM

"The Rock Island line is a mighty good road. If you wanna ride it gotta ride it like you find it, get your ticket at the station for the Rock Island Line."

I used to have a lot of Leadbelly on vinyl re-issues. May still have them in my stacks of records upstairs. One of these days I'll have to get ambitious and go through all of that stuff.

If you're interested in such things, there was an album put out years ago called "all about trains". One side was Hank Snow and the other Jimmy Rodgers. It was compiled by Hank Snow's son, who was named after Jimmy Rodgers.

Leadbelly's life story is really kind of fascinating, once you get into it. A lot of stuff he wrote ended up being really popular during the folk music craze of the early sixties - unaccredited, of course.

Good Acuff - Josh Graves on the Dobro before he joined Flatt and Scruggs who had quit Acuff to try and make a go of it on their own. I think I heard somewhere that they succeeded.

>>Rock Island at some point dropped the names of their trains and just went to
numbers.

Seems to me that the last two RI trains were still called the Peoria and Quad Cities "Rockets" even after Amtrak!