Train155 is my online alias and the name I use to publish my work. The name comes from my Roblox account, which I created in December 2016. What began as an online identity tied to games gradually became the umbrella for a much broader set of my interests: transportation, infrastructure, maps, regional systems, local history, and the built environment.
I've always been tinkering with the city and built environment. My collection of Matchbox diecast cars still sits in the closet in my room. I had my own world: cars, houses, train tracks, the whole nine yards. Armed with the library's internet, I learned about the police and fire departments and how trains were scheduled, which led me to the city-building genre of games with the release of Cities: Skylines in 2015. Without a powerful enough computer (or let alone any computer) around me, I continued to mimic the strategies and elements of gameplay I saw in my own world.
On December 20th, 2016, I created my aptly named Roblox account. I actually made the account because I wanted to play Lumber Tycoon 2 (and I'm happy to report I still do sometimes), but I then immediately joined the legendary Ultimate Driving: Westover Islands for its roleplay potential. Around this time, Norfolk was still the major professional roleplay game of the time. As an eleven-year-old, I delved into the Roblox law enforcement roleplay scene and started my YouTube channel. In early 2017, Midwestern_Law (later aTypicalMid, or "Mid") had published his trailer for a Los Angeles game. At the time, I was living in California. Seeing this trailer, I was inclined to join, and the rest is history. While the Los Angeles game was successful, Mid would later join a highly successful Chicago game, forever changing my journey.
Los Angeles was the classic 2016 Roblox feeling: a generic map meant to evoke the feeling of a real place.
This Chicago game (by zacblox33) was different: a game that (somewhat) accurately represented Chicago. The map's boundaries were Congress Parkway (since renamed to Ida B. Wells Drive) on the north, Cermak Road (2200 S) on the south, State Street (0 E/W), and roughly Princeton Avenue (360 W) and Clark Street (132 W). Later versions of the map would fictionalize a state park, expressways, and a later expansion added the area around the Sears Tower. I would never advance past the role of Police Officer I, but it was here that Mid would make it all the way to Commander. With his notoriety, he would go on to make a game also based in Illinois, around Lake Villa.
This project is the prehistory of The Illinois Project (TIP). The Lake County, Illinois games moved through several versions, from the northwestern Lake County communities around Lake Villa, Antioch, and Fox Lake (V1), to later versions centered more tightly on Waukegan and the Lake Michigan shore (V2, V3). With each version, the work became more ambitious, more visually refined, and more committed to making the setting feel like a real place rather than a loose approximation. Those projects mattered because they established the habits that still shape my work now. They treated roads, municipal borders, agencies, and landscapes as things that had to make sense together. They also taught an important lesson: realism is not just a matter of visual detail. A believable place depends on structure, history, and relationships. Over time, though, the burden of direct replication became harder to sustain. Each new version of Lake County aimed for greater fidelity and scope, but that same ambition made the work more difficult to maintain. Eventually, the question was no longer how to make the next version better, but whether one-to-one replication had reached its limit.
That realization eventually became The Illinois Project, or TIP, the main project featured on this site. TIP is not a direct replica of Chicagoland, nor is it a setting detached from recognizable geography. It is a fictional regional universe shaped by the same forces that shape real metropolitan landscapes: transportation, settlement, annexation, industrialization, suburbanization, local government, and accumulated historical choices. Chicago remains a powerful reference point in that work because it is central to understanding movement, infrastructure, settlement, and identity. The region is not just a backdrop to me. It is the framework through which I have learned to read place.
In the years since TIP took shape, my interests have continued to expand. What started as online building and regional replication developed into a broader practice of research, writing, mapping, and long-term worldbuilding. I began formally studying urban planning in the fall of 2024. As my academic interest in planning deepened, I came to understand places less as isolated scenes and more as systems bound together by geography, governance, infrastructure, and history. That shift changed the way I approached everything. Towns could no longer be designed in isolation. Corridors implied institutions, land use, and uneven importance. Even seemingly ordinary landscapes demanded explanation.
This site exists to give that work a public home. While TIP sits at its center, Train155 also includes other projects, such as research, visual documentation, historical writing, and studies of infrastructure and regional landscapes. Some of these projects are analytical, some are creative, and some fall somewhere between the two. What ties them together is a shared interest in how places are formed, maintained, interpreted, and imagined.
At its core, Train155 is about taking the kinds of places and systems that are often treated as background and giving them closer attention. Roads, rail lines, street signs, utility corridors, municipal borders, industrial districts, suburban growth patterns, and local institutions all tell stories about how regions develop over time. This site is where I collect those stories, build on them, and continue the work that began years ago under the same online name.