C&NW rerailing a Pacific Steam Locomotive with two "Big Hooks"

Information on Big Hooks in general.

C&NWHS posted
This is an A. W. Johnson photo taken at "Clinton and Kinzie" in Chicago on 3 June 1921. We, at the C&NW Archives, really like the car in the foreground but we cannot help but look beyond it in the photo to "Pacific" locomotive which seems to have lost its way on the double slip switches there and had to be rerailed. The photo his held at the archives of the C&NW Historical Society.

Note the two men on the boxcar watching the rerailing work. You don't see too many pictures of big hooks in action, and here we see two. The signalling bridge still exists, but it no longer uses semaphores. 1921 was during the transition from horses to cars, and we see a horse on the left, two trucks, and a car. I think there is a horse wagon behind the car.

The picture was taken from what is now Alta at K Station land. The boxcar, and the passenger car to the left of it, are on north/south tracks under the elevated tracks. The photographer was standing in the east end of a yard south of Kinzie. The tracks in the foreground of the photo continued across Clinton Street to the Kinzie Street RR Bridge.

1938 Aerial Photo from ILHAP

Note that the east/west yard was still intact in 1978, but most of the tracks had been removed from the north/south yard.

Wayne Hudak posted
A follow up to my 1984 Chicago Illinois commuter photo from the Sears Tower, this time 6 years earlier in 1978 showing all Chicago & Northwestern equipment.

By 1984, all of the yard tracks were gone.

Wayne Hudak posted
Chicago Illinois commuter trains as seen from the Sears Tower in October 1984.

VintageChicago photo of a Big Hook cleaning up an IC derailment