Wayne, Illinois

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Toward the western end of Army Trail Road here in the suburbs – where the territory is almost exurban – a handsome church caught my attention not long ago. Traffic was sparse, so pulling off the road and then taking a look on foot was a reasonable option.

Little Home Church by the Wayside, a United Church of Christ congregation. Closed, unfortunately.

Without realizing it, I’d arrived in Wayne, Illinois. I drive Army Trail Road a lot, but mainly its eastern reaches, an arterial thick with retail in suburbs like Bloomington, Glendale Heights, and Carol Stream. I had a social event to go to late last month, and since it was Saturday, I allowed myself a little extra time to do a spontaneous drive, such as follow Army Trail as far west as it goes, to see what I could see. Such as Wayne, a place I barely knew as a spot on maps.

Army Trail passes right through “downtown” Wayne. It isn’t very large, but it has a few good-looking buildings besides the church.

A bicentennial stone.

A nonfunctioning, yet well restored, train station. Nonfunctioning in the sense that trains don’t stop there anymore, but apparently events are held at the building. If I were going to throw a hootenanny or a shindig or a hoedown, I might consider renting it.

Provided local codes allow such noisy festivities.

Wayne, I later discovered, is a low-density suburb: a sizable 5.8 square miles with a population of about not quite 2,300. As such, I imagine there are a fair number of rules to enforce the quiet and semi-rural character. Zoning keeps lots large, four acres or more, which functions to make the town the province of those who can afford it, but there’s also a lot of open land. Such as the Dunham Forest Preserve.

Open to all, but the day I visited, near it was north of 90 degrees F. and, true to the prairie nature of much of Illinois, little shade was to be seen. Taking pictures around downtown and the former station was sweaty enough.

We’ve heard of one-horse towns, though the metaphor long ago became fossilized. Wayne, it turns out, is a many-horse town, the legacy of a major horse-breeding operation in the 19th century.

“By 1865, Mark W. Dunham… had begun breeding and selling prize Percheron horses which he originally imported from France,” the Village of Wayne says. “By 1883 he had over 1,300 mares and stallions grazing on 1,700 acres of land known as Oaklawn Farm. His residence, Oaklawn, now popularly known as ‘Dunham Castle,’ was also constructed as part of the farm, and the red brick building which had been the Dunham home (now the Dunham Woods Riding Club) was converted into offices for the farm and guest rooms for visiting horse buyers.

In 1893, Oaklawn Farm was accorded the honor of serving as one of the agricultural displays for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and visitors traveled Wayne Road from Wayne Station out to the Broad expanse. The old railroad station still exists and has been returned to its original site in the Village Center. By 1905, Oaklawn Farm produced more Percheron horses for American and European buyers than the next eight establishments combined.”

The market for Percheron work horses isn’t what it used to be, but Wayne’s open spaces and many trails – pretty much invisible when you’re driving through – accommodate a good many horses even now, according to the village: “[Wayne] is one of the few communities in northeastern Illinois that provides and encourages equestrian uses and facilities.”

Marengo, Illinois

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US 20, according to the Federal Highway Administration, is the longest road in the country. That wasn’t the case in 1925 when the US highway system was created; it was number two at that time. Various adjustments afterward (told in highway-nerd detail on the FHA’s Highway History page) made it so by 1963.

“US 20 is 3,365 miles long, according to the 1989 log,” the site notes. “The route begins in Boston at a junction with Massachusetts Route 2 and ends in Newport, Oregon, at a junction with US 101. Because U.S. numbered highways are not designated with[in] National Parks, US 20 is divided into an East Section ending at the eastern entrance to Yellowstone National Park and a West Section beginning at the west entrance to the park.”

In Illinois, the highway is also the General Ulysses S. Grant Memorial Highway.

When time isn’t an issue, US 20 is my preferred route westward toward Rockford and, for an ambitious intrastate drive, Galena. Last month, it was our preferred route most of the way to Union, Illinois, to visit the Illinois RR Museum. On the way back, we stopped briefly in Marengo, which is one of the many towns along those 3,365 miles.

A modest downtown, but at pop. 7,500 or so, it doesn’t need to be anything else.

A run of buildings from the late 19th century, along Main St. Such as the current home to the Marengo Emporium, closed that late Saturday afternoon, in spite of what a red neon OPEN sign said.

The Marengo Union Chamber of Commerce notes that the building, dating from 1875, housed the first bank in McHenry County in its early years. “In the later years, Swonguer Furniture & Undertakers, Marengo Farm Store, Vidiots, Wholly Smokes and State Street Pub occupied the building but perhaps [it’s] best known for housing the Marie Ann Dress Shop,” the C of C says.

Swonguer Furniture & Undertakers. Not as odd as it might sound and, apparently, a known combination in a number of places more than a century ago. After all, how different is making pine boxes from making pine tables and chairs, at least for a skilled wood worker? Also, it explains this trace of the former furniture and undertaker establishment, in the form of abandoned commercial mosaic text.

Other buildings on the street.

There’s been a fair amount of re-bricking and other construction over the years on that last one. The building looks like it was assembled Frankenstein-style, though I’m sure it wasn’t. The corrugated metal awnings look a little out of place, but I suppose it was an economical addition. To one side, an unusual ghost sign.

First Presbyterian, a block from Main.

An 1898 rebuilding of a previous church. Naturally McHenry County says: “The architects, Tumbull and Jones of Elgin borrowed elements from various Romantic styles when they designed this church. Foremost is the Moorish-style square bell tower.”

I’ll say. How often does one encounter Moorish-style square bell towers here in the heart of North America? Maybe more often than I know, but I figure no one’s done a census.

Not far from downtown is East St., which takes you to the City of Marengo Cemetery. Cubs pitcher Lundy Lundgren (d. 1934) is buried there; I saw his marker across the street during a previous visit to Marengo. This time, I took a look at the older section of the cemetery.

I suspect there are more burials than stones, but in any case, the stones are worn.

In some cases, propped up by metal structures.

As usual for any cemetery, there are stones that hint at sad stories of extinguished youth.

Six years, three months and 24 days. Whatever else you can say about being old — and I’m at that point — you can be sure you aren’t going to die young.

Camp Kane & The Riverside Lift Station

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Along the highway Illinois 25 near the Fox River – within sight of the river – is Camp Kane. Or rather, the site of Camp Kane, since it was never intended to be anything but temporary, and in our time, the green space is known as Langum Park in St. Charles. A memorial to the men who gathered at the camp during the Civil War is inside a small stone ring.

In 1861, prominent Kane County resident John Farnsworth (d. 1897) – attorney, Congressman, politico on the ground floor of the Republican Party, ardent abolitionist and friend of Abraham Lincoln – organized the 8th Illinois Cavalry, which trained on land he owned along the Fox River. Camp Kane, it was called.

Below, Camp Kane in the day, a public domain image borrowed from the Digital Research Library of Illinois History. The 17th Illinois Cavalry also organized there, fairly late in the war.

For a time, Col. Farnsworth led the 8th, which served through the entire war in the Army of the Potomac. Most notably at Gettysburg, a little after Farnsworth’s command.

“It was the 8th Illinois Cavalry’s Lt. Marcellus Jones who fired the first shot of the famous battle [Gettysburg],” says the Digital Research Library of Illinois History. “Confederate Colonel John S. Mosby (The Grey Ghost) called the 8th Illinois Cavalry ‘The best cavalry regiment in the Army of the Potomac.’ On a more sorrowful note, the 8th Illinois Cavalry also had the disheartening yet distinguished honor of being the honor guards for Lincoln’s funeral train.”

A stone memorizes that first shot at Gettysburg.

Moved from elsewhere in St. Charles: the law office of Steven S. Jones (d. 1877), built in 1843. But it did have a wartime use: a holding area for deserters.

The site, as mentioned, isn’t far from the wide Fox. Cross the road, and you’re there. That pipe, I believe, is a channelized creek, nothing to do with wastewater.

One more thing. This.

The Riverside Lift Station.

Just the facts:

The lift station, completed in 2024, serves more than half of St. Charles households. It pumps wastewater from the lower reaches of the town slightly uphill to a water reclamation plant.

The $14.8 million project was funded by the IEPA Low-Interest Loan Program.

The new lift station has the capacity to pump 35 million gallons per day. This is an increase of 15.3 million gallons per day compared with the older station it replaced.

Designed by Trotter Associates, with construction by Whittaker Construction & Excavating.

I looked up Trotter. Municipal infrastructure is its specialty, and the company does a lot of it.

There are actual design elements at play in the expanse of brick. What could have been a hulking brick wall, hulking with sameness, instead has some texture for the eye. Nice work. Also, note the two doors in the front wall. Those are public restrooms, so you can add your little bit to the wastewater stream if need be.

***

This is John Farnsworth, looking about as 1860s as one graybeard can.

My AI prompt: Dutch Masters Style. Retain the look of the coat and beard.

Striking. Still looking 1860s, but with an enhanced presence, somehow. Maybe it’s the somewhat less gray beard.

North Cemetery and Union Cemetery, St. Charles

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One of the more pleasant drives in greater Chicago is along the Fox River. Two state routes parallel the river, Illinois 25 near the east bank and Illinois 31 near the west bank. The roads follow the river especially tightly from St. Charles to Oswego. During a recent drive on Illinois 25, I noticed North Cemetery, one of the six cemeteries in St. Charles (I later read).

“North Cemetery, aptly named for its location in relation to St. Charles, is the resting place for many of the community’s early settlers,” notes the St. Charles History Museum. “It was owned in the latter 1800s by William C. Irwin… Irwin was a cooper or barrel maker by trade. He was also the town funeral director for a number of years. He was probably best noted for developing Irwin’s Block, a collection of commercial buildings, located on W. Main St. between 1st and 2nd Streets. When he died in 1900, he was laid to rest in the cemetery he owned.”

Barrel maker, undertaker and commercial property developer: as always, I’m in awe of the professional flexibility of the 19th century, and just a little envious. I didn’t encounter Mr. Irwin during my short visit, since I never heard of him until later. But North Cemetery has a nice variety of stones, including some clearly from the early days of St. Charles.

Some very much beaten down by Time.

The cemetery is home to a few memorials of some size, but not so many. Before St. Charles became a far suburb, it was an ag village and river town. Prosperous, but even its city fathers were unlikely to have vast stores of wealth.

A mail-order memorial for veterans who, by 1902, were starting to disappear.

One such veteran. He was still around when the larger memorial went up, according to Find-A-Grave.

Another veteran. Who wasn’t born yet in 1902. There will always be more wars, though.

For years he rang the town bell.

A job as gone as Mr. Pettingell himself, who apparently was well enough known to a distant descendent to rate a spanking-new stone more than 150 years after his death.

Across Illinois 25 from North Cemetery is another one of the St. Charles cemeteries, Union Cemetery. Mostly newer stones, including a poignant section for children: a patch of ground enclosed by a ring of bushes in the shape of a heart.

Not far away, this stone. For an adult.

Always something new. I, for one, had never seen a circus monkey on a grave marker.

Viking Details

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A number of flags hang near the Viking under its protective structure in Geneva, Illinois. As “Bob” our guide told us, they represent flags associated with the ship and its voyage. Its ultimate destination is represented by the modern Stars and Stripes near the bow. Not to be nitpicky — sometimes I want to be, though — a 44-star flag would have been more appropriate, being current in 1893.

There are also a couple of Norwegian flags.

The current flag is to the left, of course. To the right, the flag that the ship actually flew, is the Norwegian flag bearing the union mark of Norway and Sweden. I don’t believe I’d ever seen that one before, and for good reason: the union mark was removed toward the end of the 19th century at insistence of the Norwegians, even before the union itself was dissolved in 1905.

Other flags associated with the ship (some retroactively) are behind the stern.

Left to right: The flag of Newfoundland and Labrador – really retroactive, considering it was adopted in 1980 – Greenland (even more retroactive, 1985), Iceland, the Faroe Islands and the Shetland Islands.

When we left the ship-shed, we weren’t quite done with the Viking. Turns out the ship’s figurehead, depicting the goddess Freya, isn’t attached to the ship, even though the same nonprofit owns it. For now, Freya is on display at the Geneva Public Library. We had to go see that.

The figurehead has been restored to its 1893 painting scheme. Freya, it seems, had acquired a number of coats in the decades after the fair. Currently, she stands on the second floor of the library, along with the — figuretail? — which attaches to the stern, anyway.

An impressive bit of work.

Nearby are a few Viking-related items behind glass. For my purposes, I had an AI image program remove the glass and its glare, but I left the artifacts looking the same. Such as the helmet. No horns, of course.

A model of the ship.

A copy of The Thrall of Lief the Lucky: A Story of Viking Days (1902) by Chicagoan Ottilie A. Liljencrantz (d. 1910). There’s an AI animation doable for the cover of this book, but I don’t feel like spending any credits on it. This is the script: The thrall, whom I assume is the dark-haired fellow, says, “In the final chapter, I die of typhus.”

Naturally, I’d never heard of Liljencrantz (who has?), but she wrote a number really popular of Norse-themed historical novels in the early 20th century, taking inspiration from her own Swedish heritage but also from visiting the Viking in 1893 as a teenager. She did much to popularize Viking stories in modern America, as did the visit of the ship itself – just another instance of the World’s Columbian Exposition being one of the founts of the modern world. I believe we have the fair to thank for Ernest Borgnine, among others, being a Viking (briefly), for the inanity of Hägar the Horrible, and for Donald Duck going to look for the Golden Helmet and the deed to North and South America.

For its part, The Thrall of Lief the Lucky was made into The Viking (1928), a Technicolor silent. Since the book is now well in the public domain – and available at Project Gutenberg – time for a gritty film reboot. If The Odyssey can do well at the box office, so can Lief; tough men in wooden ships are tough men in wooden ships, eh?

Just for fun, I took a dive into the Project Gutenberg posting of The Thrall of Lief the Lucky. File it under they for sure don’t write ’em like that anymore (unless AI does). Three more-or-less random samples:

Egil laughed, a hateful gloating laugh, and settled himself against a tree to see the finish. As Helga’s arm was flung up the second time, the thrall leaped upon her and tore the whip from her grasp and broke it in pieces. He would that he might have broken her as well; he thirsted to,—when he caught sight of the laughing Egil, and everything else was blotted out of his vision. Without a sound, but with the animal passion for killing upon his white face, he wheeled and leaped upon the Black One, crushing him, pinioning him against the tree, strangling him with the grip of his hands.

The attraction proved to be a chattering brown ape that some sailor had brought home from the East. Part of the spectators regarded it as a strange pagan god; part believed it to be an unfortunate being deformed by witchcraft; and the rest took it for a devil in his own proper person,—so there was great shrieking and scattering, whichever way it turned its ugly face. It happened that Sigurd was better informed, having seen a similar specimen kept as a pet at the court of the Norman Duke; so the terror of the others amused him and his companion mightily. They stayed until the creature put an end to the show by breaking away from its captor and taking refuge in the rigging.

Then both became silent, for Leif had faced about and was awaiting their full attention before announcing the next move. “I dislike to see brave men disgrace their beards with bondmaids’ gabble,” he said sternly. “Fix in your minds the shame that was spoken of Biorn Herjulfsson because of his lack of enterprise. The same shall not be said of us. Rolf Erlingsson and Ottar the Red and three others shall follow me; and we will walk inland until the light has entirely faded from the highest mountain peak yonder, and the next point below is yellow as a golden fir-cone. The others of you shall follow Valbrand for the same length of time, but walk southward along the shore, since it may be that something of interest is hidden behind these points—”

The Viking

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Quincy Adams Wagstaff Elementary has started classes for the year. I know that because I saw a mass of students and parents waiting outside the school this morning just before classes begin, as has been the first-day practice for many years. I went there myself, with daughters, from 2003 to 2014.

In 1893, a curious ship arrived in Chicago during the World’s Columbian Exposition.

That same ship, in 2026, can be found under a temporary, Quonset-like structure in a field in Geneva, Illinois, not far from the Fox River.

Once a month during the warm part of the year, the ship is open for tours, and we arrived on Saturday in the warm drizzle to take one. I knew about it because, examining Google Maps one day recently, I saw Friends of the Viking Ship.

Say what? It is a storied ship, and has good friends these days, since one of the first things the guide told us was that the nonprofit Friends of the Viking Ship recently acquired a site on which a permanent museum will be built to house the ship, whose formal name is the Viking.

“Christen Christens’s Frames Shipyard in Sandefjord, Norway built the Viking in 1892-1893 after the ancient Viking ship Gokstad,” notes the web site of the park that is currently home to the ship. “In 1893 the Viking sailed from Norway to Chicago, via the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes, to the World’s Columbian Exposition and now displayed at Good Templar Park.”

Good Templar Park in Geneva is a whole other kettle of fish: a park owned by a temperance society. But for now, more about the ship. How did it happen that a replica of a 9th-century Viking ship sailed across the wild North Atlantic in the days before wireless communication, ice patrols or weather reports? Apparently they did have 1890s navigation equipment – a compass, quadrant and barometer, for instance – so it wasn’t quite like the voyages of historic Vikings. Close enough, though, as it was undertaken in an open ship (with a tent) powered by sail and, sometimes, a dozen men pulling oars.

The tour involved a volunteer (let’s call him Bob) leading visitors all the way around the ship on a platform that allows you to look into, but not go onto, the vessel. Still, it’s a close look.

The why of it seems to be nascent nationalism on the part of Norwegians in the late 19th century, though that isn’t quite how Bob put it. Replicas of the famed (by 1893) Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria were due to visit Chicago – towed across the Atlantic from Spain – for the world’s fair. Who arrived in the New World long before Columbus? Plucky Vikings, of course, so a replica of a recently discovered Viking ship was built to sail to the fair under its own power. Norwegian pride, yes; and to upstage the johnny-come-lately Spaniards, too.

“The assertion had been frequently made that the Norsemen in their frail, lightly built galley could never have crossed the stormy Atlantic,” one Professor Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen of Columbia College wrote in The Chautauquan in 1894.

“It so happened that an old Viking ship was unearthed at Gokstad, near Sandefjord, twelve years ago, in the grave or tumulus of an ancient chieftain. The idea occurred to Captain Magnus Anderson, the editor of the Norwegian Seaman Gazette, that if an exact reproduction of this ship were made, he would undertake to sail her across the Atlantic and thus give an incontrovertible demonstration that the Norsemen, at least, could have discovered America…

“An invitation was issued for a national subscription and the required amount [to build the ship] was procured, mostly in the small sums of ten, twenty-five, and fifty cents. The undertaking, I am told, was not popular with the upper classes, while it appealed strongly to the imagination of the seafaring population which readily kindles at an enterprise with a touch of heroism. It was first proposed to christen the ship Leif Ericson; but for some reason the name The Viking was preferred. In every particular, even to the minutest detail, she was made to conform to her ancient model.

“She is clinker-built, of solid oak planks, is 78 feet long, 16 feet beam, draws 4 feet of water, and carries 200 yards of canvas. She has no real deck, but a loose bottom, which tends to give her that elasticity when striking the waves.”

The ship sailed for Chicago on April 30, 1893. “On May 10, when north of the Orkneys, she was caught in a heavy gale… That stanch little craft kept bravely ahead, though she shipped several seas, and the crew was kept busy bailing, until their horny hands were sore and the blood oozed forth under their finger nails. But not once did they think of turning tail; for they were all buoyed up by the thought that they had the honor of Norway in their keeping, and that, in a measure, they were to prove her claim to the glory of having first discovered the New World.”

When the Viking did reach the New World, its crew were feted on the Eastern Seaboard and elsewhere, and of course in Chicago. Ah, but fame is fleeting, etc. In the early 20th century, the ship was on display at the Field Museum but later suffered the indignity of being basically forgotten and in storage, owned by the Chicago Park District. The marvel is that she survived at all. Stabilization and restoration have been underway since the 1990s.

I was happy to do my little part – admission to the tour, and buying a few postcards – to put the ship in a proper museum, for its remarkable story, and the fact that it is probably the largest existing artifact of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

Tom’s Farm Stand

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The tropics have temporarily set up camp here a few degrees south of 45 degrees North, with a run of wet, humid days. Not quite as hot as the actual tropics might be during the intermissions between rain, but warm enough.

That didn’t keep us at home this weekend, and on Saturday while tooling along US 20 in Bartlett, Illinois (Lake Street, locally), we noticed that Tom’s Farm Stand was open for the season. The sight of the stand inspired in Yuriko a sudden hankering for corn on the cob, so we stopped.

Tom’s is between the road and a wall of corn.

I don’t know whether that cornfield is part of the farm. That would certainly be convenient for Tom or his heirs, but anyway we found corn for sale, along with other opportunities to take still life photography.

Also known as the Bartlett Farm Stand, it seems.

Other chalkboard signs.

My images didn’t capture it, but the place was fairly busy. I don’t know whether you can call the stand a Bartlett institution or not, but it does have staying power: founded in 1961, just like me, and maybe going to outlast me.

The Illinois Railroad Museum: Details

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The Illinois RR Museum, as mentioned, has plenty of impressive rolling stock, some of which actually rolls. But like any good museum, the showpieces aren’t the only pieces. The small items have their own stories to tell, or at least to suggest. At one point I went into a repurposed car — I forget what kind of car it was — and found myself in the Builder Plate Hall.

Builder Plate? “In this hall are the builder plates from the builders of steam, electric, diesel, interurban, streetcars and passenger cars,” said a sign in the car. “A builders plate is like the VIN plate on a car. It gives the car a serial number that is unique to that car. A builder plate can service [sic] the same purpose. It is used to identify a locomotive.”

Evocative, these plates.

Evoking the rumble of finished locomotives on tracks, but also the din and heat of the factory floors where working men put together these machine-age power marvels to specs that began on drafting tables by gas light and then early electric bulbs.

Illinois RR Museum

I don’t want to romanticize such hard jobs too much, but it’s hard not to.

Illinois RR Museum

Are all locomotives made in China in our time? No. According to this Wiki list, there are many more defunct U.S. locomotive makers than not, but there are still active ones, including major repair facilities. Good to know.

And damn it, every time I look into a subject like that, I uncover a new destination. In this case, the Altoona Works.

At the Illinois RR Museum, the cars themselves offer detail. Sometimes builder plates.

Or branding.

Or warnings.

A curious thing to put on your train, but there’s a story.

The train, or at least the locomotive, looks to have a name: The City of Moorhead. Where the Southern Crosses the Yellow Dog.

“W. C. Handy, ‘The Father of the Blues,’ immortalized the crossing of the Southern Railway and the Yazoo Delta (‘Yellow Dog’) Railroad at Moorhead in his 1914 song ‘Yellow Dog Rag,’ better known under its later title, ‘Yellow Dog Blues,’ ” notes Mississippi Blues Trail. “Handy wrote that he first heard the line ‘Goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog’ sung by a guitarist at the Tutwiler train station (c. 1903). Moorhead became a hub not only of rail transportation but of blues activity in local juke joints.”

A more recent interpretation of the song is, of course, on YouTube.

Larger signs. Where there’s a north, there’s a south.

Signals.

The museum has a railroad-oriented book store in another repurposed car.

Illinois RR Museum

Lots of material for the enthusiast.

One more item: a bit of re-embedded signage from the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad, which traversed Illinois not far from here.

Good to see it. Because, as we all should know, the Rock Island Line is a mighty good road, the Rock Island Line is the road to ride.

The Illinois Railroad Museum: The Rolling Stock

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Not long ago my friend Kevin and I were kicking around ideas for a day trip from our homes in Chicagoland, and we happened on a place he’d hadn’t been since he was a child nearly 60 years ago, and I hadn’t been in years, perhaps as long ago as 2005: the Illinois Railroad Museum, near the town of Union in McHenry County, in the northwestern exurbs. About an hour drive from my house. Definitely worth the trip.

Another example of a place people take their kids, but might not otherwise consider. Not how I think. Good for kids, good for everyone else whose admiration for and curiosity about trains hasn’t gone away. During our visit, on the last Saturday in July, the place was busy but not packed, with small children and their elders well represented, but they weren’t the entirety of visitor demographics. The Illinois RR Museum draws old men (old people) as well, sometimes without grandchildren in tow. In that, Kevin and I fit right in.

Not only that, the museum also seems to attract former railroad employees and railroad aficionados, enthusiasts and nerds of all ages and walks of life. Toward the end of our visit, near a display of dispatcher equipment, a visitor struck up a conversation with a museum volunteer that I was near enough to overhear. Old men both, older even than me, and both former dispatchers for lines long ago absorbed into the handful of U.S. railroads that still exist. They had a lot to talk about – with an intensity of jargon that was nearly opaque to us non-professionals.

But you don’t need to know every technical detail to appreciate the collection.

It’s massive, including locomotives and steam engines, freight cars, interurban cars, long-haul passenger and baggage cars, subway cars, streetcars, trolley buses, railroad work equipment, signals, signs and much more, either open to the elements or in several sizable train barns. Some of the rolling stock is still rolling, and visitors can take short rides out into the countryside along a few miles of right-of-way that the museum owns, with volunteers running the show.

And doing the maintenance: I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone in railroad garb oiling the machinery with a long-spout oil can, as you see (saw) in illustrations.

Mighty locomotives of various kinds.

The collection includes some rolling stock you don’t see that much, such as a 1949 steam-powered Leslie rotary snowplow designed to clear tracks of ice and snow, and one of the last ever made, as these too converted to diesel. To do its job, the blade at the front rotated at 150 rpm.

Illinois RR Museum

A wicked red maw, ready to grind its way forward. Just the thing for a fistfight, on the top of the car, between Bond and a nameless henchman; resulting in the henchman tumbling into the blade; think of your own Roger Moore bon mot for that situation (something about a grinding headache, maybe).

Interurban cars. Including this one, in which we rode out into the Illinois cornfields.

A few military cars.

The latter is a troop sleeping car, built by Pullman, doing its part for the war effort in the early 1940s.

Examples of the many streetcars and trolley cars in the collection.

The latter built in 1914, so it’s a little anachronistic, but I thought of it as a Meet Me in St. Louis streetcar.

And — of course it should be last — cabooses.

If you asked me, railroads should still be using cabooses. For aesthetic reasons. No railroad is going to do that, naturally, but that’s my opinion.

The interior of one of the cabooses. A good many of the cars at the museum are open, provided you’re willing to climb into them, and we certainly were in this case.

A somewhat newer caboose. We went in there, too.

This caboose was attached to another caboose and an engine, and you could take rides. We did. I couldn’t ever remember riding in a moving caboose before, but now I have.

Formerly Known as All Chocolate Kitchen

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On Third Street in Geneva, Illinois, a few weeks ago, we went looking for something cold to drink, since it was a warm day. A place called Coffee, Cones & Cabernet looked like it might provide something refreshing, and it did: iced coffee for Yuriko and lemonade – really good lemonade – for me. We weren’t in the market for the cone or cabernet part of the equation at that moment, but I’m sure everything else there is good, or better, certainly to judge by the racks of chocolates behind glass or the aroma produced by a coffee maker.

When selling luxury comestibles, retailers are at risk of a posh sameness, but there was absolutely no risk of that here. We’d stepped into the former All Chocolate Kitchen, whose legacy includes a display of sculptures around the shop: a life-sized depiction of Neil Armstrong in his moon suit, a dinosaur, a peacock, a New Orleans jazz man, and more, all made of chocolate and sugar.

The centerpiece chocolate sculpture is an enormous tree, “Chef Roby’s Enchanted Tree, ” lording over the customer seating area at center of the shop.

A thing of awe: 1,200 pounds of dark, milk and white chocolate, 23 feet tall and three feet in diameter. You know, as big as an actual tree. Chocolate isn’t usually accorded such permanence. I know I don’t think of it that way.

No samples, please.

Sugar is also a medium at this unusual gallery.

The shop changed hands only in November, when an employee, Marissa Kirch, bought the business from Chef Alain Roby and his wife Esther Roby when they retired.

Apparently we’d happened onto the work of Chef Roby, as famed a pastry chef as that profession has, at least to judge by his fairly long list of accomplishments and the fact that I don’t know much about that particular world. If for some reason he isn’t as famed in that world as I think he is, he should be.

“Coffee, Cones, & Cabernet continues to adhere to the recipes of Chef Alain Roby and the previous business and employees of All Chocolate Kitchen,” the shop web site says. “Chef Alain Roby is a three-time Guinness World Record holder, a world-renowned pastry chef, and an author who has made multiple appearances on the Food Network and The Martha Stewart Show.”

Being on the Food Network or rating an entry (or three! including world’s longest candy cane) in Guinness World Records is all well and good, but I’d say the grand scope of Roby’s talent is nowhere more apparent than the shop itself. We can start small – which isn’t small at all, considering the effort that must have gone into it – and work up from there.

A 50-lb. sugar peacock.

A chocolate dinosaur behind electrified bars. I’m sure you’d get an unpleasant but mild shock, but even so that’s a first at a chocolate shop. Or any kind of shop. I didn’t test it.

Neil Armstrong, bold explorer, done in white chocolate. Looking a little unnerving close up, to be honest, but still, quite the work.

Says blues in the background, but I’m reminded of jazz.

An homage to the shop itself, in sugar and food coloring.

We lounged around a little while, savoring our respective beverages, and enjoying the fact that the shop was about 15 degrees F. cooler than the outside. It occurred to me that the HVAC system has to work flawlessly during the summer. I hope it continues to do so for many summers to come.