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Downers Grove Main Street station

Downers Grove, IllinoisFormer Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad stationsIllinois railway station stubsMetra stations in IllinoisRailway stations in DuPage County, Illinois
Railway stations in the United States opened in 1911
20040511 29 Metra Downers Grove, IL
20040511 29 Metra Downers Grove, IL

Downers Grove Main Street (also known as Downers Grove or Main Street) is one of three railroad stations on Metra's BNSF Line in Downers Grove, Illinois. The station is at Main Street, 21.1 miles (34.0 km) from Union Station, the east end of the line. As of 2018, Downers Grove Main Street is the sixth busiest of Metra's 236 non-downtown stations, with an average of 2,492 weekday boardings. The local police department and library are nearby. Parking lots are managed by the Village of Downers Grove. The station has connections to multiple Pace Buses, including the Commuter Shuttle lines.This station was the site of the 1947 Zephyr train wreck that killed 3 and injured more than 30. The station went under a $1.1 million platform replacement project, which finished in the summer of 2015.Many trains on the BNSF run express to or from Downers Grove. This is common during the morning and evening rush hours, in an effort to get passengers to the busier stations quicker.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Downers Grove Main Street station (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Downers Grove Main Street station
Main Street,

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Latitude Longitude
N 41.7954 ° E -88.0099 °
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Downers Grove Metra Station

Main Street 5001
60515
Illinois, United States
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20040511 29 Metra Downers Grove, IL
20040511 29 Metra Downers Grove, IL
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Downers Grove train wreck
Downers Grove train wreck

The Downers Grove train wreck happened on April 3, 1947, at the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad station in Downers Grove, Illinois. The Twin Cities Zephyr, a high-speed inter-city passenger train, struck a tractor that had fallen from a freight train only seconds before. Three died and over thirty were injured in the wreck. The Twin Cities Zephyr had left Minneapolis at 5:10 PM with EMD E5 #9914A pulling a seven car trainset called "The Train of the Goddesses". The train carried many college students and others traveling for the coming Easter weekend and was due at Chicago's Union Station at midnight.At 10:41 PM, approaching the Downers Grove station at about 75 miles per hour (121 km/h), the eastbound Zephyr struck a heavy caterpillar-type tractor which had just fallen off a westbound freight train. The engineer, who later died from his injuries, told rescuers that he saw the tractor fall and immediately applied the brakes. At impact the locomotive went airborne, broke away from the trainset, landed on its side, skidded through the station, and caught fire. The first two cars jack-knifed into an empty office and waiting room of the brick masonry station building, which by chance had been closed early for the night. The freight train had just cleared the scene when all three tracks running through the depot were torn up.The response was fast. A signalman from the nearby tower went east and used flares to stop a westbound freight while a brakeman from the Zephyr climbed out a window after the crash and went west to flag a following local passenger train. The fire department, police, and townspeople (along with a Boy Scout troop) quickly began giving aid. Police from nearby towns also came to help, along with state police. After being given first aid at a doctor's office across from the station or in the lobby of the Tivoli Theatre, the injured were taken to the Hinsdale Hospital or Copley Memorial Hospital in Aurora. Two died and more than 30 were injured, the train's engineer died three days later.Unlike the Naperville train disaster less than a year earlier, there was no question of wrongdoing at the scene. On May 8, 1947, a DuPage County Coroner's jury found that International Harvester (the shipper) and the Burlington were negligent in loading and inspecting the tractor.

Avery Coonley School
Avery Coonley School

The Avery Coonley School (ACS), commonly called Avery Coonley, is an independent, coeducational day school serving academically gifted students in preschool through eighth grade (approximately ages 3 to 14), and is located in Downers Grove, DuPage County, Illinois. The school was founded in 1906 to promote the progressive educational theories developed by John Dewey and other turn-of-the-20th-century philosophers, and was a nationally recognized model for progressive education well into the 1940s. From 1943 to 1965, Avery Coonley was part of the National College of Education (now National Louis University), serving as a living laboratory for teacher training and educational research. In the 1960s, ACS became a regional research center and a leadership hub for independent schools, and began to focus on the education of the gifted. The school has occupied several structures in its history, including a small cottage on the Coonley Estate in Riverside, Illinois, and another building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It moved to Downers Grove in 1916 and became the Avery Coonley School in 1929, with a new 10.45-acre (4.23 ha) campus designed in the Prairie and Arts and Crafts styles, landscaped by Jens Jensen, who was known as "dean of the world's landscape architects". The campus has been expanded several times since the 1980s to create more space for arts, technology, and classrooms. Avery Coonley was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2007, citing the "long-lasting influence on schools throughout the country" of the educational program and the design of the building and grounds. The progressive legacy is still evident in the modern curriculum, which retains many traditions and educational activities dating back to the beginning of the school. Students work a minimum of one year above their current grade level, and explore broad themes allowing them to learn across subjects and engage in creative and collaborative projects, using instructional technology extensively. Opportunities to build on classroom studies are offered through a range of extracurricular activities. Admission is competitive and an IQ score of at least 124 is required. ACS is notable for its record of success in academic competitions at the state and national levels in mathematics, science, geography, and other subjects. ACS was recognized as a Blue Ribbon School by the United States Department of Education in 1988. Avery Coonley attracted national media attention in 1994 when the school was banned from competition in the Illinois State Science Fair after winning for the fourth year in a row. Although the decision was later reversed, the controversy was decried by the press as an example of the "dumbing down" of education and the victory of self-esteem over excellence in schools.