Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 152, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 June 1916 — Touring Chicago’s Loop District on a Handcar [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Touring Chicago’s Loop District on a Handcar

CHICAGO.— Policemen Jones and Connors of the Hinman street station thought they had seen all possible stunts that a pair of men out for a large evening could invent, but Anton Ketske, 2320 Kroll street, and an unknown friend showed them a new one the

other night The policemen were at Robey and West Twenty-first streets when a low craft bore down in the offing. It was without lights fore or aft, but the two officers could see aboard it two men alternately bobbing up and down as they tore along the Robey street car tracks. The vehicle was a self-starting, man-propelled railroad handcar of the model of 1900. The police hailed the

craft, but it sped by like a neutral merchantman ducking a German U-boat Jones fired two shots across her bow and the handcar hove to. One passenger escape. Ketske, a Mexican, surrendered. “We was out for a tour of the loop,” he said. Ketske was taken to the Hinman street station in the patrol wagon, with the handcar trailing as evidence. The car had been stolen from the yards of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy railroad. When Ketske was asked why he wanted to tour the loop in a handcar, he said "because it was so unusual.”