As a Roepke Research Scholar last fall, I helped Dr. Julie Cidell investigate railyard redevelopment in Chicago. Starting from a 1915 Chicago Association of Commerce report, I used Google Maps and basic georeferencing strategies to locate and gather modern-day imagery of railyards detailed in the report and determine their current usage. Had a particular railyard been decommissioned and redeveloped, abandoned entirely, or intensified as an intermodal transportation hub? For each yard that had undergone these structural changes, I dug deep into newspaper archives, tax records, and even rail enthusiast web forums for information on when those shifts occurred. This experience laid the track (so to speak) for me to conduct additional transportation research in the spring semester, when I joined the Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP) and worked with mentor/geography PhD student Gyudae Kim to track the development of nuclear weapon transportation methods from 1945 to the present day.
From reviewing the Manhattan Project archive, declassified government documents, and international relations papers, we found that the vehicles of transportation shifted from “white” trains to semitrailer trucks, which allowed for greater secrecy and security during the Cold War. We then gathered historical railroad data from the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, and used GIS software to compare it to modern highway route data from the US Census Bureau to illustrate how much vaster and more complex the interstate network has become relative to the railroads. I created a poster to illustrate our findings and presented it at the Undergraduate Research Symposium at the Illini Union last April.
The Roepke Research Scholarship and URAP were both excellent opportunities to work with GGIS faculty and graduate students and learn how to research primary documents, model transportation networks, and appreciate the geography of movement. After graduation, I plan to pursue a career using GIS technology for public safety. I would also like to continue conducting research, as these experiences have given me both the enthusiasm to ask a research question and the skills to answer it.
