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n 1973, Dolton Mayor Norman MacKay traveled to Capitol Hill to plead for federal aid in fixing a major problem that disturbed the quality of life in his close-knit, blue-collar suburb — a town that was in many ways a model of post-war America.

Dolton, in the shadow of mills and factories that long defined Chicagoland as an industrial powerhouse, offered plentiful nearby jobs, affordable homes, solid schools, reliable services and bustling retail shops. It was, in the words of a Dolton marketing pamphlet of the era, “close enough to the city for industry — far enough away for good clean suburban living.”

But one big downside to life in the 4.5-square mile village just south of the city was freight trains that crawled through day and night. They often came to maddening stops, endlessly blocking crossings and transforming even short hops to the grocery, school or job site into logistical quagmires.

“There is no ‘wrong side of the tracks’ in Dolton, nor is there a right side,” MacKay told the House Committee on Public Works.

“In whatever direction one attempts to travel, nine times out of ten he is halted by a freight train, laboriously pulling up to 200 cars into, or out of, one of the freight yards on the outskirts of the village. … Even more frustrating is having the freight trains stand motionless, across the crossings, while auto traffic piles up at the intersection to a distance that sometimes attains two miles in each direction.”

In the intervening 45 years, almost everything in and around Dolton has changed. The mills are long gone and factories thinned out, an early harbinger of the vulnerabilities of globalization that have become front and center in today’s political debates.

https://projects.bettergov.org/2018/dolton/