Local historians, Brian and Joyce Ostberg, return to Wednesdays @ One with a discussion of the Chicago Great Western railroad, the last major railway created in the United States. Its route passed through northern Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Missouri, and served St Charles from the late 1880s to the early 1970s.
The talk will explore the origins of the railroad, how it evolved, its major challenges, and its ultimate decline and abandonment.
Brian and Joyce Ostberg started their YouTube channel, BeHistoric, in the autumn of 2020, a channel devoted to regional history and prehistory. They have since published over 70 documentaries on regional topics related to history, archeology, and geology.
Brian is a retired software engineering Director for AT&T Bell Labs, more recently Nokia, in Naperville, Illinois. Joyce is a retired Molecular Biologist, having worked at Abbott Labs in North Chicago, before retiring to raise their family. Both she and Brian have an avid interest in history and prehistory and started their BeHistoric YouTube channel as a way of scratching that itch. They have lived in DuPage County, Illinois, since 1985, where they raised their family.