NS Forrest District
Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2023 11:19 am
You may be asking yourself, what is this line? Well here’s the thing, it’s been abandoned. What’s left of it is Metra’s Southwest Service from Chicago to Manhattan, IL. Now for the history of this line: this is the former Wabash line (later N&W and NS) from Chicago which eventually connected to the Lafayette District somewhere in southern illinois to ultimately reach Decatur. Now in the early 90s, NS decided for some reason to use trackage rights on the IC (later CN) instead of the Forrest District. This proved to be a bad idea as in another forum I read a while back, NS in 2009 I think was having trouble with the CN trackage rights and was thinking of bringing back the Forrest district but ultimately didn’t. If anyone knows more on the history of this line and it’s trains please do send photographs and other historic stuff! And yes I’m fully aware of those N&W commuter trains before metra which looked cool af!