Park Forest Rail Fan Park

Park Forest Rail Fan Park is a small municipal park built for one purpose: watching trains work the junction between two Canadian National main lines. It is owned and operated by the Village of Park Forest even though it sits inside Matteson, beside the Metra commuter lot at Homan Avenue and North Street.

From the lot, a 500-foot (150 m) accessible boardwalk climbs an earth mound to a viewing platform 35 feet (11 m) above the ground (Visit Chicago Southland lists it at 40 feet). The platform looks over the connecting tracks CN built after it bought the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern in 2009. A restored EJ&E caboose sits at the foot of the mound, and Visit Chicago Southland counts eight interpretive signs on regional railroad history. The park is listed as open 24 hours a day, and the Matteson Metra Electric station is about two blocks away, so the site can be reached by train from downtown Chicago.

What sets a visit here apart is movement between the lines rather than straight-through running: freights leaving the ex-EJ&E climb a long double-track connection and curve onto the ex-Illinois Central, and wyes at both ends let them head either way. ChicagoRailfan lists 160.920 MHz (AAR 54) as the Matteson Subdivision road channel and 160.350 MHz (AAR 16) as its dispatcher channel; program them before arriving.

The park is a patch of prairie planting on a raised earth mound in the flat south-suburban landscape of commuter parking, rail embankments and low housing. The Village of Park Forest describes the site as a "highway cloverleaf interchange for trains": the ex-EJ&E line passes under the north-south main line, and the connecting tracks loop between the two, so from the platform the rails spread out in several directions and at different levels.

OpenStreetMap places the ex-EJ&E main line about 300 m (1,000 ft) south of the park and the CN and Metra Electric main lines about 300 m to the west, with the connecting tracks running right past the mound. Metra Electric's overhead catenary marks the western side of the view. The Old Plank Road Trail, a paved rail-trail on the former New York Central alignment, passes a few hundred feet to the north.

Both lines here are older than the park by more than a century. The Elgin, Joliet & Eastern began operations on December 4, 1888 and became the "Chicago Outer Belt Line," a circular route through the suburbs linking the Class I railroads that radiated from the city (Wikipedia). The north-south line is the former Illinois Central main line south of Chicago, now CN's Chicago Subdivision. According to ChicagoRailfan, the EJ&E between Joliet and Matteson was single-tracked in 1987.

For most of that time the two lines simply crossed. That changed when CN bought the EJ&E: the U.S. Surface Transportation Board approved the purchase on December 24, 2008 and it took effect on February 1, 2009 (Wikipedia). CN then built the $30 million Matteson Connection between the ex-EJ&E and ex-IC main lines. The Old Plank Road Trail website notes that it was the first CN location in the United States to use concrete ties, and that it lets CN trains longer than three-quarters of a mile pass over themselves on the route between Joliet and Champaign. Chicago-rail.info describes Matteson as a minor location until fall 2011 and one of the most important interlockings on the CN system afterward.

The park followed the junction. An EJ&E caboose built in 1953 by Morrison International Corporation was placed on a short length of track in the park in May 2012 (Old Plank Road Trail website; Village of Park Forest).

• A purpose-built public viewing platform, 35 feet high and reached by a 500-foot accessible boardwalk, over a four-direction junction between two CN main lines, which the Village of Park Forest calls a "highway cloverleaf interchange for trains."
• A park owned and operated by one village (Park Forest) inside the limits of another (Matteson).
• A two-level crossing with connecting tracks: trains can be watched changing from one main line to the other, not just passing through.
• A Metra Electric station about two blocks away, so the site is reachable without a car.
• A restored EJ&E caboose (No. 531, per Visit Chicago Southland) and interpretive signs on regional railroad history.
• About 4.9 miles (7.8 km) south of the Homewood railroad viewing platform on the same ex-IC main line, which makes a two-stop day possible.