Bensenville Yard is a Canadian Pacific Kansas City Cargo and Rail yard located in Bensenville and Franklin Park, Illinois. It is located 15 miles (25 km) northwest of Chicago, below O'Hare International Airport. Its origins date back to the first freight yard of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad (Milwaukee Road) in 1916, which by the early 1950s had grown into a large marshaling yard with 70 directional tracks. The Milwaukee Road was taken over by Canadian Pacific in the late 1980s, which rebuilt and modernized the facilities. Today, Bensenville Yard is CPKC's largest freight and marshaling yard (21 tracks on the western part and 34 on the eastern part; 55 tracks total) in the USA.
Due to the strong increase in freight traffic during and after World War II, the Milwaukee Road expanded the Bensenville Yard into one of the world's largest marshaling yards with a total of 70 directional tracks by 1953. Covering an area of over 130 Hectare, including the entry and exit group, it had around 200 km of track with a total capacity of almost 9,000 freight wagons. Classification YardsChicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, 1956, S. 4 f. In 1958, the Milwaukee Road began piggyback transport of Semi-trailer, which meant that the manual reloading of goods could be avoided. A loading station for Flat wagon was built on the east side of Bensenville Yard for this purpose, covering an area of almost 19 hectares by the late 1960s. This type of handling in intermodal freight transport was later increasingly replaced by the emergence of ISO containers and the site was developed into a Container port. Welcome to the Milwaukee Road. und Chicago Switching Dist. & Terre Haute Division Connections. In: Engineering Department Employee’s Handbook. Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, 1969.
In 1986, the SOO Line Railroad took over the Milwaukee Road, which in turn was purchased by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1990. The Bensenville Yard was rebuilt and modernizedMichael Rhodes: North American Railyards. Arcadia Publishing, 2011, , S. 126 f. in the late 1990s. It is now Canadian Pacific's largest freight and marshaling yard in the USA with over 220,000 containers handled at the CP Rail Chicago Intermodal Terminal in 2016. CP consolidated in 2023 with Kansas City Southern to form CPKC. Chicago Intermodal Facility Lift Counts and Regional TEU Estimate (May 2017). Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, May 2017. Accessed September 22nd, 2018.
Since the 1960s, the Tri-State Tollway (Interstate 294) has crossed the Bensenville Yard on the east side. As part of the planned expansion of the road network around Chicago O'Hare International Airport, a ring highway will also run across the site of the old locomotive shed on the west side and cross the outer end of the rail yard there. Western Access to O’Hare Nearing Reality. Construction Equipment, 13th June, 2018. Accessed September 22nd, 2018.Marni Pyke: Tollway close to deal on land to build O’Hare ring road. Daily Herald, 12th June, 2018. Accessed September 22, 2018.
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