Illinois
Three U.S. Presidents have been elected while they were living in Illinois — Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and Barack Obama. But only one US president was actually born in Illinois. Do you know which one? The answer is below.
Illinois (www.enjoyillinois.com) is known as the prairie state. That tells you a lot about the terrain and the scenery ideas. It’s generally flat, as seen in the photos at the bottom, but it’s active. Today approximately 74 percent of the state’s population lives in the northeastern corner of the state, primarily in Chicago (www.explorechicago.org) and the surrounding area.
However, railroads and John Deere’s invention of the steel plow made central Illinois’ rich prairie into some of the world's most productive and valuable farmlands.
Illinois has an extensive passenger and freight rail transportation network. Because of its central location to the Rust Belt (the area around Lake Erie is considered to be the "hub" of the Rust Belt) and Grain Belt (an informal name for the United States region composed of the prairie-region states across the Midwest), Illinois is a national crossroads for air, auto, truck and rail traffic.
Chicago, by the way, has the largest suburban commuter rail system in the United States, operated by Metra (below).
Chicago is also a national Amtrak hub. Nearly every North American railway meets at Chicago, making it one of the largest and most active rail hubs in the world. Reportedly, the trains that daily pass through Chicago’s underground freight tunnels would extend more than ten miles in length.
The only US President actually born in Illinois, by the way, was Ronald Reagan. He was born in Tampico, raised in Dixon and attended Eureka College in, well, Eureka, Illinois. A teenage Reagan is seen below in Dixon, Illinois.
Okay. Check out a few Illinois train photos.
