Two of the busiest freight main lines in North America cross each other at grade on the west side of Rochelle, and the crossing is why the town calls itself the Hub City. The older of the two arrived first: the Air Line Railroad reached the settlement then called Lane in 1854, running west out of Chicago, and in time became the Chicago and North Western and then Union Pacific. Sixteen years later, in 1870, the Chicago and Iowa Railroad was built through the town on a different heading and crossed the first line between 11th and 12th streets. That line became the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy, and is now BNSF. The place where two railroads intersect at grade is called a diamond, after the shape the rails cut, and Rochelle has a double one: each railroad brings two tracks through, making four in all. Nothing about it is decorative. A diamond is a bottleneck by definition, because only one railroad can be using it at a time, and it has to be maintained under pounding that ordinary track never takes. What it buys the town is traffic: freight bound for the Pacific Northwest, California, the Gulf and the eastern seaboard all passes through the same few hundred feet of Ogle County. That is the reason a place of nine and a half thousand people has drawn intermodal terminals, distribution warehouses and its own municipal railroad.
Getting there
41.9204, -89.0725
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