Westmore

History:

Westmore was a local station on the Chicago, Aurora & Elgin’s main line at Westmore-Meyers Road between South Broadway Avenue and North Broadway Street in the village of Lombard. The stop opened in 1902 as Meyers Road. Although plans called for it to do so, it did not open on August 25, 1902, when the Aurora, Elgin and Chicago Railway went into service, instead opening at some point prior to October along with a number of other stops in the same predicament.1

Meyers Road consisted of two side platforms on opposing sides of Meyers [Westmore-Meyers] Road. The eastbound platform was on the west side of the crossing while the westbound platform was on the east side.2 Upon opening, the station was most likely typical of local stops on the early Aurora, Elgin & Chicago, consisting of nothing more than short, low level platforms of wood construction with a wooden sign at one end naming the station. Prior to 1920, the stop was renamed Westmore and a passenger shelter with a hipped roof was added to the eastbound platform. This shelter was a wooden frame building 20 ft. 3 in. wide by 14 ft. 2 in. deep with clapboard siding, overhanging eaves, and a shingled, hipped roof.3 The westbound platform was lengthened but was slightly unusual in that it was broken up into two sections; one portion consisted of a then-standard cinder strip 75 ft. in length while another, shorter section (only 12 ft. 2 in. long) was constructed of wood and was high level, having been built 4 ft. tall.4 (This arrangement of high and low level platform sections was also used at Seminary Ave., eastbound.)5 The eastbound platform was also converted to cinder, but was only 49ft long.6 Eventually the high level section was removed.

Westmore (like all local stations on the CA&E) was a flag stop. To facilitate this kind of operation, each platform was equipped with a flag stop semaphore which was activated with a pull chain. People wishing to catch a train pulled the chain raising the semaphore (the “flag”) into a horizontal position which was notification to the motorman to stop. If the flag was not raised, the train did not stop even if it was listed as a stop for that train on the timetable. To alight at a flag stop, passengers onboard a train had to notify a conductor of his or her intention to disembark.

With the cutback of service from Wells Street to Forest Park due to the construction of the Congress Street Superhighway [Eisenhower Expressway (I-290)] in 1953, passengers abandoned the CA&E in droves making the financial situation of the railroad untenable. In response, in 1956, the Chicago Transit Authority reviewed two similar plans for assuming operation of the line between Forest Park and Wheaton. Under both schemes A/B skip-stop service would have been implemented with Westmore becoming a “B” stop.7, 8 Neither of these plans came to pass and on July 3, 1957, the Chicago, Aurora & Elgin abandoned its passenger service. Eventually the stop was razed, most likely when the railroad was scrapped in 1961.

Full station profile and history coming soon.