Amtrak Through Washington

For a 14-month period in the early 1980s, Amtrak trains passed through Washington.  You may not have noticed, as it passed through town very early or late on an East Peoria-to-Chicago route.

Representative Bob Michel was instrumental in bringing the Amtrak route to Peoria, pining for the move as early as 1976.  Peoria Mayor Richard Carver also supported the train.  Amtrak finally agreed to an experimental run in 1980 to see if ridership warranted a permanent route.  This Peoria-to-Chicago train service was to replace the Rock Island Rocket, discontinued in 1979 due to lack of use.  The Rocket took a different path to Chicago, going up through Chillicothe, and the trip took almost five hours.  Amtrak promised a time of under three hours.  For the new Amtrak train to be run on the TP&W line, it wasn’t feasible to run the station out of Peoria because the TP&W bridge over the river had been damaged by a barge in 1970, making it inoperable since then. Hence, the station had to be built in East Peoria.

Departure and arrival times were also a bit of an issue. To get to Chicago by 10:00 a.m., Amtrak scheduled an original departure time from the East Peoria station of 6:15 a.m. As for the return trip, due to the enormous amount of activity at Union Station in Chicago, the earliest departure after 5:00 p.m. the train could schedule was 6:00 p.m., returning to East Peoria after 9:00 p.m.

It was stated that the train would need to average 150 passengers per day to break even during the trial run, but over the course of the 14 months, ridership was well short of what they needed.  Amtrak lost approximately one million dollars in the first six months of the train’s run.  The experiment ended quietly, and the station in East Peoria was razed.

The run existed from August 10, 1980, to October 4, 1981. The train did not stop in Washington, but in July 1981, they added Eureka as a stop to attract college students. Previously, the only stop between East Peoria and Chicago was Joliet.

Below are some pictures of the Amtrak train, the “Prairie Marksman,” passing through Washington at Wood and Zinser streets on a November 1980 morning. The photos are courtesy of Larry Irvin.