MILWAUKEE RAILROAD SHOPS

The Milwaukee Railroad Shops were an important local employer. Photo courtesy--Bob Reding

MILWAUKEE RAILROAD SHOPS. Once one of the city's largest employers. In 1880 the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway obtained the north-south line from Clinton, Iowa, through Dubuque to La Crescent, Minnesota. This had been constructed by Dubuque shippers in 1873 who disliked the Illinois Central. The owners of the Chicago and Milwaukee decided they could not afford to close the railroad's huge shop area north of 17th Street. Instead they converted the Dubuque shops into a maintenance center responsible for 287 locomotives and 2,500 miles of track.

Through the early years of the 20th century as many as two thousand Dubuque workers unloaded coal, built coaches, and refurbished boxcars. A redbrick roundhouse constructed in 1871 was large enough to allow the simultaneous repair of twenty-four engines. It was said that the building was so well constructed that the heat from only two locomotives could warm the entire enclosure.

The Milwaukee Shops made Dubuque a division headquarters for the railroad in 1888. For years the forty-five acre site was Dubuque's largest employer. Wages, ranging from sixty to seventy cents per hour, were among the best paid in Dubuque. In 1922 a strike for higher pay lasted three months in an attempt to raise the top rate to eighty cents. By the time the unsuccessful strike ended, trucking had increased in popularity.

In 1929 the shops closed with some of the operations transferred out of the state. In 1934 when the shops reopened, the workers were hired to dismantle and not rebuild cars. In an area the employees called the "rip yard" the best lumber was saved and the rest was burned. The Dubuque Shops closed permanently about 1954, the victim of changing methods of transportation. The roundhouse has been used as a storage site.