A bone-chilling Arctic cold wave with temperatures as low as 42 below zero shut down schools for thousands of youngsters Monday, halted some Amtrak service and disabled car batteries from the northern Plains across the Great Lakes.

“Anybody in their right mind wouldn’t want to be out in weather like this,” Lawrence Wiley, 57, said at the Drop Inn Center homeless shelter where he has been living in Cincinnati. Monday lows in the area were in the single digits.

In Illinois, temperatures dipped as low as 15 below in Freeport, in the northwest part of the state, and reached minus 10 at O’Hare International Airport. With the wind, it felt more like minus 30 in Chicago, said Mark Ratzer, a senior forecaster with the National Weather Service in Romeoville.

“It’s bitterly cold … (but) the coldest of it is over,” said Ratzer, who said a low-pressure system and accompanying cloud cover should ease bitter temperatures slightly on Tuesday.

The teeth-chattering weather increased call volume at Chicago’s 311 line by 20 percent, as people reported broken pipes and insufficient heating, said Kevin Smith, spokesman for the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications.

“I think Chicagoans so far have been weathering it pretty well,” he said.

Usually hardy school districts across Illinois and throughout the Midwest canceled classes.

“We were concerned with students who would be on the bus stops with extreme cold weather and the wind chill,” said Joel Morris, the superintendent of Maine Township High School District in Park Ridge, Ill., where cold-weather closures are rare.

The cold weather sapped energy from batteries, paralyzing a fleet of buses at Bloomington’s Unit 5 school district.

The cold also brought calls for help from car owners faced with dead batteries and frozen locks.

“During the weekend, 10,000 motorists called for assistance. And that’s a record in recent years,” Nancy Cain, spokeswoman for AAA Michigan, said Monday.