Illinois Central Railroad

The Illinois Central Railroad, known by its reporting mark IC and sometimes called the Main Line of Mid-America, is a railroad of the central United States that operated independently from 1851 to 1998. Its primary routes join Chicago, Illinois, with New Orleans, Louisiana, and Mobile, Alabama, linking the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and an 1870 line ran west from Chicago to Sioux City, Iowa. It was the first land grant railroad in the United States, built with federal support signed into law in 1850 and chartered by the Illinois General Assembly in 1851. In 1972 it merged with the Gulf, Mobile and Ohio Railroad to form the Illinois Central Gulf Railroad. In 1998 the Canadian National Railway bought control of the company through the Grand Trunk Corporation, absorbed its operations the next year, and keeps the Illinois Central as a non-operating subsidiary. Steve Goodman's 1971 song City of New Orleans is about one of its trains.