It keeps on happening. People drive around the gates, past the flashing lights and clanging bells, and into the path of a locomotive. The most recent incident was Friday and involved a semi-trailer truck loaded with 70,000 pounds of bacon. It was struck by the northbound Texas Eagle in Wilmington, Illinois. Apparently there…
It’s been around a while, but I just came across this recently. It’s a startling bit of video that graphically demonstrates what can happen when a tornado intersects with a moving train. It was taken from a rear-facing camera mounted on a locomotive hauling a Union Pacific freight near Harvard, Illinois, in January of 2008….
When talking about the resurgence of interest in train travel, the tendency is to quote big numbers … noting, for example, that Amtrak ridership over the past three or four years has increased from 21 to 25 million passengers a year. The trouble is, it’s hard to grasp any practical meaning from numbers that big….
Amtrak’s train # 3, the Southwest Chief, leaves Chicago’s Union Station daily in the mid-afternoon on its two-night journey to Los Angeles. These photos were taken during my early-October trip aboard this train. I boarded the train in Galesburg, Illinois, a town about 200 miles southwest of Chicago and just a few miles from where…