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Illinois Railway Museum

7000 Olson Rd, Union, IL 60180
Frisco 1630

Frisco 1630 crossing Olson Rd. in front of the museum.

Photo credit: By Caleb D Phillips (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

The Illinois Railway Museum, 55 miles northwest of Chicago, is the largest railroad museum in the United States. Its mission is to demonstrate the role railroads have played in the growth of the Chicago area as well as the United States as a whole. There are over 450 pieces of prototype equipment in its collection as well as numerous displays. The main campus includes an 1853 train depot, a complete Chicago Rapid Transit Company ground-level station, and four streetcar stations of varying design. Visitors may ride on some of the museum's electric, steam and diesel powered trains from April through October. Due to its proximity to Chicago and its extensive collection of historic railroad equipment, IRM has been used in several films. The most apparent may be in the 1992 film "A League of Their Own." Scenes depicting steam era operations in the late 1920s were shot for the 1993 television series "The Untouchables."

This description includes material adapted from the Wikipedia article "Illinois Railway Museum", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0. It has been edited for brevity and to conform with the style of this website. The edited description is distributed under the terms of the same Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 license.

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