p. 222 | HOME TESTIMONY

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · April 1, 1880

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 14

HOME TESTIMONY.

THE recent completion of several branch roads in Minnesota, in the interest of the CHICAGO & NORTH-WESTERN RAILWAY COMPANY, suggests a statement of the total mileage of this giant corporation, and we give elsewhere a complete official table of the different lines which it operates, together with a map showing the entire system as now completed. It will be seen that the total length of lines of the CHICAGO & NORTH-WESTERN RAILWAY is 2,158½. This is the greatest mileage operated by any company in this country. It is made up of six divisions of the CHICAGO & NORTH-WESTERN proper, and eight proprietary lines, and the whole system is subdivided into twenty lines and branches. To control successfully such a vast and complex system of railways evidently requires talent of the highest order; and the splendid condition, financial as well as physical, which the property now exhibits is sufficient testimony to the ability of the management.

The nucleus of this great system, the old Galena & Chicago Union Railway, was opened from Chicago to Elgin, 42 miles, in 1850, only thirty years ago. The CHICAGO AND NORTH-WESTERN RAILWAY COMPANY came into being, as the successor of the Beloit & Madison, Rock River Valley Union, and Chicago, St. Paul & Fond du Lac companies, in 1859. In 1865 the Galena & Chicago Union was consolidated with it, and in the few short years that have followed, the young corporation has gone forward with astonishingly rapid strides, to its present proud position. What its future enlargement may be is left to imagination. A study of the map, which shows the system already reaches into five States and a Territory, may prove suggestive of possibilities yet ahead.—R. R. Age.