Wednesday, June 20, 2018

What happened at 63rd/State in May 1950?

This post may be a bit outside of the scope of this blog. Over 68 years ago a bad accident involved a CTA streetcar and a gasoline tanker truck. Many of you may have heard about this unfortunate accident at 63rd & State Streets over the years, especially if you're an old-timer who might have been old enough to see this in the news when it happened.

I'll let J.R. Schmidt tell the story and he provides some of the period photographs from back in May 1950. If you're young Chicago no longer have streetcars - or what might referred to in other cities these days as light rail (the L would be considered heavy rail or rapid transit) - they streetcars were taken out of service and replaced by buses in 1958. Many of these bus route numbers we know today originated from the many routes of streetcars of the past.

Here's one shot of that intersection fairly recently shot by the local historian Schmidt.

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