History
In the mid-1930s, waterway improvements were made on the Illinois River to improve barge movement (for example, new wider and deeper locks at Lockport). These improvements enabled the Illinois River to handle larger barges as well as movement of Tank Landing Ships (LST) constructed by the Chicago Bridge and Iron Company at Seneca, IL during World War II to New Orleans. After these improvements, significant grain traffic (primarily corn) was drawn away from the railroads to the river barges. Corn was now being moved to Chicago by barge, transferred to rail car at Great Lakes facilities and then shipped to Eastern US destinations by rail.
Prior to 1957, barge rates from ports along the Illinois River to Chicago and then via rail from Chicago to eastern destinations had a total shipping cost of 53.625 cents for corn and 54.125 cents for corn products. At the same time, the rates for shipping corn via all-rail routes from origins on the Kankakee Belt Line to eastern markets averaged 72 cents for corn and 72.5 cents for corn products.
What took place from 1956 to the Supreme Court decision in 1964 MECHLING BARGE LINES v. U.S., 376 U.S. 375 (1964) is another episode in the long and continued competitive struggle between the railroads and waterway barge lines.
Read more about this topic: Kankakee Belt Route
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“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“There is no history of how bad became better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)