Science & Industry Museum

Today we only had one thing planned, which was to head down to the Museum of Science and Industry. It's located around ten miles from the hotel, but honestly, it felt a lot further somehow! The first part of getting there involved taking the Red Line train downtown to the Chicago & State Street station, which only takes about ten minutes.

Hold Your Breath

Then, we had to take a ride up to street level in a lift that absolutely reeked of pee – definitely not the most pleasant start! It was a real relief to get out onto the street after that, even into the hot and humid weather of the day. From there, it was just a short walk of about half a block to catch the J10 bus. I've since found out that this bus only actually runs at certain times of the year, but the great thing about it is that it stops right outside the entrance to the museum, saving our legs a good ten-minute walk from the main road.

The interesting thing about this bus route is that after just a few stops, it runs express straight down the aptly named Lake Shore Motorway. It's basically like an eight-lane motorway, but apparently, it's not technically a freeway because freeways have even more lanes! There were plenty of automated announcements telling you clearly that this bus was about to go express and that there would be no more stops for the best part of twenty minutes. But, as always seems to happen, there was somebody on board who clearly had no idea what they were doing or where they were going.

The first thing that happened as soon as the bus got onto the motorway was, somebody frantically rang the bell – way too late! The next stop was a solid six miles away at that point. Honestly, that sort of thing always makes me smile; you just wonder what's going through their head.

Museum of Science and Industry

A Museum With Hidden Depths

It's actually very deceptive just how big this museum is. When you get off the bus, you see this very grand, traditional-looking building standing about 400 feet away, with impressive steps leading up to the front. However, over the years, the museum has been expanded, and pretty much all of that new work has taken place underground! The actual entrance you use is just a small room with a couple of large lifts that take you down to this incredibly vast underground chamber. This is where you'll find the car park, the ticket office, and even a real train – the Burlington Zephyr – that they have permanently located underground in the lobby, and you can actually go inside it!

A Train In The Lobby Underground

It's certainly not one of the cheapest places to get into; it was $18 each for basic admission. If you wanted to add on things like the submarine tour or the 3D cinema, it would have cost somewhere around $35 each, I think. Anyway, once we were inside and had our tickets from the office down in the chamber, we headed to the lifts on the far side. These ones take you up into the part of the building you could see from the bus stop. It's only when you get up into this main, visible part that you really get a proper idea of just how enormous this place is, even before they added all the underground extensions. We grabbed a map and decided to visit a couple of the nearby halls before we looked for somewhere to have lunch.

I have to say, the cafe here is really very good. There's a wide variety of food available from different retailers dotted around, so you figure what they sell has to be decent, otherwise people would just go and buy food from elsewhere. They had everything from Mexican to Thai food, so there was absolutely loads to choose from. I think in the end, we just opted for a good old burger. For a museum cafe, the food was actually really nice, and they definitely didn't overcharge you like in some other places we've been, so it felt well worth the money, especially as you can't easily just pop out anywhere else nearby to eat.

Tractor Boy

After lunch, we headed into the first hall, which was all about agriculture. I even got Jane to take a photo of me sitting in a massive tractor – standard tourist behaviour, I know! Then there's the fantastic transportation hall, featuring quite possibly the largest model railway you've ever seen. It includes a brilliant replica of the city with the local trains running above the streets, just like they do in the Loop. It also has displays that chart how the railways cross the entire US, all the way to the west coast.

We even ended up buying a small plastic train made right there in a machine after putting in a couple of dollars. I've since found out these specific machines are actually quite rare, with only about 250 of them ever made, and each one apparently produces a unique model! We had seen a couple in other places during our trip but never thought to actually get anything from one before. It's quite fun to watch the whole process: you see the mould close, then it injects hot melted plastic resin before squeezing it a bit more. Then, it opens the mould and pushes the finished little train out to you. It's still quite warm when it pops out!

Indoor Submarine

Hard To Believe How Big This U Boat Is

Without a doubt, the most spectacular exhibit has to be the German submarine. When I first caught sight of it, I honestly thought it must be a replica, but being in the USA, they naturally just do everything bigger! It is, in fact, a real captured German U-boat from the war. I believe it sat in a dock somewhere for many years just rusting away until they finally made it watertight enough to tow it here. It's only when you see the time-lapse video on the way out that you truly get your head around the sheer scale of the task involved in bringing this thing all the way to Chicago.

It basically travelled right through the Great Lakes until it reached a spot just south of the city. From there, they had to load it onto a massive trailer that had about a hundred wheels! It only had to travel a quarter of a mile to reach the museum building itself, but even that short distance apparently took two full days to complete! It's only then, seeing how it arrived, that you properly appreciate the enormous hole they had to dig for it.

As I mentioned earlier, there's a significant distance between the original museum building and where you enter now via the lifts, and that's precisely because this huge submarine occupies that entire underground area. The hole they dug for it was truly vast – over 1,000 feet long, 150 feet wide, and 100 feet deep. They then carefully moved the submarine over the hole and slowly lowered it in using massive hydraulic jacks, before putting a roof over it and even laying a lawn on top. Looking at this area from the outside, you would honestly never in a million years know what was hidden underneath.

Jane Put A Torpedo Through My Head

Apparently, they found the periscope a few months later; it wasn't inside the submarine anymore, as they thought it had been melted down years ago because it was made of brass. Unfortunately, by the time they found it, they were too far along with the building work to put it back in the submarine before they added the roof to the hall. Otherwise, you would have been able to look out through the periscope onto the lawn way up above, which would have been amazing. It's now laid out alongside the submarine instead, and just seeing that on its own gives you a real sense of how big these things truly are.

You can take a tour inside the boat, but there was an extra charge for that. Since the tours only started every forty minutes, and we were a bit pressed for time, not to mention the accessibility issues with getting inside a submarine, we decided not to pay the extra for that bit.

Galleries Galore

Working Modle Of How The Railroads Work

From the submarine level, we headed back up in the lift to the upstairs part. This area runs like a gallery around the top of the transportation hall, giving you a great vantage point. Up here, you can get a much better look at the various planes hanging from the ceiling, and you can even go inside an old United Airlines jet from the sixties, which was pretty cool. It makes you think about how planes are so much bigger these days, but ironically have way less legroom so they can cram people on even tighter! Because this is the top floor, it wraps all the way around the level below, offering views looking down onto the exhibitions downstairs as well.

They also have some really cool exhibits up on this floor. One that sticks in your mind is the one that looks a bit like a phone box, but when you close the glass door, it blows an 80 mph wind all around you – it's supposed to simulate what it's like to be inside a tornado. There were honestly many other things up there, probably too numerous to list everything, but a couple that immediately come to mind are a recreation of an entire old street, complete with the very first Walgreen's store from when they started out in Chicago, and also a whole coal mine you can explore. But I suppose those specific things are probably best left for the photo album!

Rush Hour Crush Hour

By about 4:30, we figured it was time to start heading back. After using the free Wi-Fi inside the museum to check things, we found there was plenty of time to grab a cup of coffee before walking out to the bus stop just out front for the thirty-minute ride back towards The Loop. Once we got there, we crossed a couple of blocks to catch the Red Line train back towards the hotel. In hindsight though, this really wasn't the best idea.

I'd thought getting the train would be a better option because of the traffic we might hit on the bus, but when we got onto the train, it was already absolutely packed, and with every single stop, more and more people just kept cramming on. It was frustrating enough, but to make it worse, the next train was just sitting behind us in the tunnel, along with several others further back. If we could have possibly got off that train at any point, we absolutely would have, but there was simply no room to get past anyone at all.

When we finally arrived at our stop, you literally had to force your way past people just to get towards the doors, and then I had to hold them open so Jane had time to get off with the wheelchair as well. By this point, the train driver was actually shouting at people, telling them that if some didn't get off, then the train wasn't going to move any further. Thank Christ we didn't have to go any further on it!

Once we were safely off the train, we just hung around on the platform for a few minutes to see how many people were on the next train coming through, which was only about a minute behind ours. That one was busy too, but it had noticeably more space. We watched another two trains go through within about five minutes, and the last one was almost completely empty, just six minutes after we had squeezed off our packed 'sardine can' of a train.

Once we were finally out of the underground station, the heat of the late afternoon hit you again, so it was a real relief to get back to the cool, air-conditioned room of the hotel by about 5:45 pm. Time for a well-earned nap, then! I think we ended up getting something from Jimmy John's later, I seem to remember having tuna that night.

Reflections On The Day: Trains, Tornadoes & Too Many People

Monday was one of those days where you set out with a simple plan — “Let’s just go to one museum” — and somehow end up experiencing half a city’s worth of chaos, engineering marvels, and human behaviour that defies logic. The journey alone set the tone: a lift that smelled like it had been used as a public toilet for the last decade, followed by a bus ride where someone inevitably rang the bell six miles too late. Chicago really does know how to keep things interesting.

The Museum of Science and Industry was absolutely worth the trek, though. It’s one of those places that looks big from the outside but turns out to be colossal once you realise half of it is underground. The Burlington Zephyr sitting casually in the lobby like it’s waiting for its next departure was a brilliant touch, and the café was surprisingly good — a rare win for museum dining.

The exhibits were a perfect mix of nostalgia, engineering, and “only in America” spectacle. Sitting in a giant tractor, watching the enormous model railway city, and buying a freshly moulded plastic train that was still warm from the machine — all classic holiday moments. But nothing topped the submarine. Seeing a real German U‑boat sitting in a cavern the size of a small town was

 jaw‑dropping. The sheer effort it took to get it there — towing it across the Great Lakes, hauling it on a hundred‑wheeled trailer, lowering it into a hole big enough to bury a skyscraper on its side — was mind‑boggling. Only Chicago would casually build a lawn on top of a submarine and call it a day.

The upstairs galleries added even more variety: planes hanging from the ceiling, a tornado simulator that tried to blow your eyebrows off, an old street recreated brick by brick, and even the first ever Walgreen’s. It was the sort of museum where you could easily lose an entire day without realising it.

The journey back, however, was a different story. What should have been a simple train ride turned into a full‑blown sardine‑can experience. Being wedged into a carriage with half of Chicago, unable to move an inch, while more people forced their way on at every stop, was enough to make anyone question their life choices. The train driver shouting at passengers was the final touch — peak rush‑hour madness. Watching the next few trains glide by almost empty just minutes later was both hilarious and infuriating.

By the time we finally escaped and staggered back into the blessed air‑conditioning of the hotel, it felt like we’d survived some kind of urban endurance trial. A nap, a Jimmy John’s tuna sub, and the quiet of the evening were exactly what we needed.

Monday was a day of contrasts: awe‑inspiring engineering, fascinating history, good food, and a train journey that felt like a social experiment gone wrong. But it was memorable, full of character, and very, very Chicago.