Galesburg, the Knox County seat in western Illinois, grew up around the railroad. For generations the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway’s yards and shops were among the city’s largest employers, alongside appliance manufacturing and other industry. Those operations were built and maintained through the decades when asbestos-containing materials were the standard for insulation, fireproofing, and friction and sealing components.
Why asbestos-containing materials were common in Galesburg
Locomotive and rail-car shops, and the factories around them, relied heavily on asbestos-containing materials from roughly the 1930s through the late 1970s — pipe and boiler insulation, gaskets and packing, brake and friction components, block insulation, and cement. Shop workers, machinists, pipefitters, and the crews who later stripped and replaced that insulation may have been exposed to airborne fibers, a hazard now known to cause mesothelioma, asbestosis, and other diseases decades later.
Documented Galesburg sites
The facilities documented below — including the Santa Fe Railway operations and area manufacturing — are drawn from publicly available records: Illinois EPA asbestos-abatement (NESHAP) notifications, OSHA and EPA inspection data, and other public sources. Each page summarizes the site’s history, the trades likely to have worked around asbestos-containing materials, and the categories of material reportedly present.
Trades most often affected
Railroad machinists and carmen, insulators, pipefitters and steamfitters, boilermakers, electricians, and laborers were typically the trades with the most direct contact with asbestos-containing materials at Galesburg-area sites.
Information on this page is compiled from public records and is provided as a free reference. RightsWatch Media is an independent publisher.