The Manly Rock Island Caboose

This Rock Island caboose stands as a monument to a town that the railroad built. Manly was laid out in eighteen seventy-seven as Manly Junction, where the Rock Island line crossed the Chicago Great Western. In nineteen twelve the Rock Island made it a division point, with a roundhouse and shops that employed several hundred workers.

At the town's peak in the early nineteen fifties, as many as fourteen passenger trains a day stopped here. The caboose sits near the crossing of Highway Nine, joined in two thousand six by a Rock Island engine and a statue made in the likeness of a railroad worker. Together they mark the days when this small Worth County town was a busy hub on one of the Midwest's great rail networks.