In February 2023, two thousand feet of Chicago’s South Normal Boulevard disappeared. The street’s end came at the hands of Norfolk Southern’s 47th Street intermodal terminal, a facility which moves thousands of containers a year between trains and trucks. For over a decade, the railroad had been trying to expand the yard through a over a residential neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. When they finally prevailed over vigorous opposition in 2022, they closed another chapter in the intertwined histories of disinvestment, development, activism, and freight infrastructure in Chicago. But lurking behind those threads was another story: 47th Street Yard is a facility which need not have grown.
To understand Englewood’s rail terminal, you must focus on the trucks leaving it. Follow them, and you might end up at a nearby warehouse or factory. But unlike anywhere else in the United States, those trucks’ trails may also lead to another railroad’s yard. A significant portion of the containers unloaded 47th Street are in Chicago not to deliver goods, but to transfer between different railroads as they make journeys across the continent. This use of trucks to bridge gaps between rail carriers is, on its face, unexpected. Chicago is a city famous for its lattice of tracks which link American railroads together. It begs the question: why does this practice exist?