Trip to Southern Illinois
Rochelle to Centralia, Sept. 8-9, 2011

Photos by Dave Ingles

Our route was I-43, 39, and 74 to Champaign, and the first "break" was the "obligatory detour" through Rochelle. After lunching at Culver's (from which you can see the UP on the city's east side, at Dement interlocking--we saw nothing on the UP), we were thinking we'd be totally skunked, but at the last minute on the south side of town we heard BNSF's Lee detector go off, and waited for this westbound intermodal to enter town, behind 4151/5260, at 1:48 p.m.

The next rail action was true serendipity. As we cruised down I-39 nearing Mendota, the scanner alerted us on the BNSF Mendota Sub frequency when what was obviously the UP Troy Grove branch job (out of West Chicago to DeKalb, then down the branch) tell the BNSF d.s. he was "about 8 minutes out of Earlville" and wanted to cross. We exited at US 34 and headed east, and I figured I'd be over to the UP in time, despite two sharp S-curves on 34, to get "the drive-in movie shot." I've shot or chased this train 3 or 4 times, the first one in 1996 after the UP merger but when the units were still C&NW, and had done the "drive-in" shot once, but on a cloudy day. During the C&NW chase, and on one other UP encounter, we got the Troy Grove train crossing the diamonds in Earlville. It's dicey to try both. Anyway, we had about 30 seconds to set up for the drive-in this time.

The train serves mainly two spots on the line: a large grain elevator in Triumph, the last little burg before Troy Grove, and silica sand mining firms at Troy Grove, now the end of the line. The branch used to go to Spring Valley and a Rock Island connection, and at one time there was a C&NW motor-car mostly-mail run on this line from Rockford, via Belvidere and De Kalb, to Spring Valley. The drive-in shot was at 2:32 p.m., and navigating blindly (no time to even pull out the Illinois DeLorme) but staying on paved roads, we roared up to trackside a couple of miles on south for this shot at 2:42. The units, which usually are all Y-series GP15's, this time had an "interloper," the third unit. They are Y709/Y701/2097/Y715. I think the 2097 is a GP60, probably ex-SP, but I didn't look it up. The quartet was toting a hefty 56-car train.

We are on a north-south road here, and the railroad is angling toward us, but these across-the-field shots about 2:47 were well ahead of when we would cross the grade crossing far enough ahead of the train to not alarm the crew. This field of soybeans was a nice change from the others, mostly corn, at this time of year too high to see across.

We'd had a sunny day so far, but the spinoff remnants of tropical storm Lee were coming in from the northeast to bring clouds, and precipitation, to Chicago, most suburbs, Indiana, and eastern Illinois. We'd run under clouds someplace around Bloomington.

One last shot before Triumph, at 2:50. The sun was pretty much straight down the rail, but no complaints.

As I suspected, and had happened on the first C&NW chase, the train stopped at Triumph to spend some time swapping out empties for loads at the local elevator, which is on the far west side of the community. Time of arrival here: 2:53. We'd take our last shot of him here at 3:05 as he was preparing to finish up his work and go on to Troy Grove. We skipped that, returning to I-39 on US 52 for an express run, with one leg-stretch, to Champaign. The goal was to arrive in time to go to dinner and return to the motel in time to watch the Packers-Saints NFL opener, won in an exiciting finish by Green Bay. So these were the last photos of the day.

The C&NW station sign present here 15 years ago apparently is gone -- at least I couldn't spot it from the grade-crossing area.

His head-room move blocked the crossing, and I wanted to be east of it to leave town and not get blocked in by a subsequent move.

Friday dawned, as predicted, cloudy and drizzly, off and on, account the remnants of tropical storm Lee, and it pretty much stayed that way, drying up only as we got closer to Carbondale. With only a 3 1/2-hour, 200-mile ride to Carbondale to arrive by 5 p.m. or so, in time to freshen up and attend the 6 p.m. rehearsal dinner, and all day to get there, we took the opportunity to look around "Cham-Bana," home of the Univ. of Illinois campus, which we hadn't been over to in more years than I care to think about. Our "free time" on this trip was spent visiting areas and counties of southern Illinois where we either had not been or had not been in years and years, and Urbana was the first example of the latter. (I'd been to all 102 Illinois counties, as of 2003, but just "thru" a few and not to several in the southeastern area of  the state in many decades.) For the trip, I photographed 20 depots, 9 of them for the first time, plus 1 interlocking tower. Not all will be presented in this file, but the first one, the old Peoria & Eastern (Big Four/New York Central) in Urbana, leads off our Friday for a blatantly commercial reason. This photo, taken at 9:30 or so, is from northeast of the building, now part of "The Station Theatre" just north of downtown. A 1960's photo of it, from the southeast, with a Peoria & Eastern EMD switcher with one boxcar parked in front of it, appears in "Central Illinois Rails Color Pictorial, 1950's-1970's," by Dick Wallin and myself, just published by Four Ways West Publications of suburban Los Angeles. If you haven't seen an adv for it, or a flyer, let me know and I'll e-mail you a pdf of the flyer. It's a limited-run, 144-page hardcover with over 350 photos of 30 or more railroads, all color slides taken between 1954 and 1982. End of commercial. The track in the photo now is operated by Norfolk Southern, which comes in from Mansfield on one of the few P&E remnants still extant in Illinois, off the former Wabash/N&W Decatur-Chicago route. There is one customer to the east (behind me), at the site of the P&E backshop active early in the 20th century, whose building still stood in the 1960's (and in our book, show up in the background of a photo of an NYC FM C-Line diesel at the P&E engine terminal). OK, now it's the end of the commercial.

The cars visible are at that customer. The boarded up brick building in center is the old P&E yard office, now someone's storage building. I'm amazed it survives -- you'd never know the ground at right in this view once held 2 or 3 tracks that I once saw full of P&E GP7's.

In the 2011 view above, if you went to the pile of crossties at middle right and stepped onto the one track that still exists and looked generally east, this is what you'd have seen in 1962, as P&E switcher 8908 works the Urbana yard. A couple of views from this Urbana visit are in Dick Wallin's and my new hardcover picture book, "Central Illinois Rails Pictorial, 1950's-1970s," published this fall by Four Ways West.

East side of the old yard office, close-up.

In 1962, there were tracks south of the yard and old yard office (pictured above in 2011). If these three GP7's, with 5620, 5623, and a third P&E GP7 in that series, moved east (to the right), you would see the yard office building behind where 5620 is; the auto visible is that of a yard employee parked in the lot by the building, which is behind a couple of the trees whose tops are visible. We look northwest here.

OK, this is not railroad except in the name of the bus firm. We were southbound along the east side of the UofI campus, leaving town, when we chanced upon it.

As we headed west to reach US 45 in far southern Champaign, a southbound CN freight went over the street ahead of us. Fighting a string of traffic signals down thru Savoy, I finally got ahead of him north of Tolono for this shot. It is train #397, with 5728/5610, and 158 cars. Time here is 10:08 a.m. It's as boring of motive power CN offers, and we see the same stuff at home all the time, but hey, it's a train and it's moving!

Waiting for #397 at Tolono was Amtrak #390, the Saluki from Carbondale, photographed here north of the CN passing siding and NS diamond at the north end of town at 10:18 (he was due into Champaign, about 10 miles north, at 10:08). Engine 28, 6 cars, and engine 81, train consists which I think are common to the Wolverine and Blue Water trains in Michigan. Engines in the 20's and 30's series are equipped for the cab signals on Amtrak's Michigan line.

Both engines were "on line," working, which surprised me in these high-fuel-price times.

An eastbound stack train was waiting on the NS just west of the diamond, and after I took this photo, we raced thru Tolono to get all the engine numbers but couldn't get to a crossing in time for a slide. Units are 7718/2577/6564. The IC depot, also used by Wabash/N&W, stood southeast of the diamond; we look south here. When Amtrak's Illini was extended from Champaign to Decatur in the 1980's, it used a connection at the right, foreground, in the northwest quadrant, which had hand-throw switches. Now the only connection tracks (there had been one in the northeast quadrant, too) are in the SE quad, behind where the depot was.

We took "the old road," US 45, south since we had the time, following the railroad, instead of I-57. At Tuscola, an eastbound UP freight crept up toward the diamond but stopped behind a big grain complex west of town, unshootable, to wait for Amtrak #391, the Illini, and with no good photo angles there for Amtrak, we went on south. At 11:07, he caught up to us at Arcola, at one of the rare "open spots" between road and track. Engine 26, 6 cars, and engine 203; he was due into Mattoon, still ahead of him here a few miles, at 11:05. Dispatching on this now-single-track ex-IC main line is not noted for being good.

We played tag with CN #397 again, but I didn't bother shooting him, and at Mattoon he overtook another southbound, numbered CN #432, which I did get ahead of south of Neoga, for this shot at 11:46, with units 5762/IC 1029. Soon we stopped in Effingham for lunch (Steak n Shake, where else!), but it was raining so I didn't bother with going to the diamond or to the Effingham Railroad's location, already photographed a time or two.

This is the depot at Edgewood, Ill., where the "cutoff" (Bluford Dist.) diverges for the Paducah, Ky., area, and which handles the majority of CN/IC through freights. It is in use by CN, but is aligned with the former B&O branch (Beardstown-Springfield-Flora-Shawneetown) which crossed here. It was, in fact, a B&O building. As you can see, CN MofW people still use it.

This is a city water tower (and a new one is being built as part of a govt. program) at Kinmundy, but it's of a style and close enough to the former IC main track (visible here) that I wonder about its history.

While riding the charter trip from Paducah to Galesburg in May, I was taken by surprise as we headed north on the BNSF (ex-BN) through the hamlet of Shattuc and crossed CSX's ex-B&O St. Louis-Cincinnati line, to see the interlocking tower still standing. I was unprepared to take a photo, so it was a primary "target" for this trip, which I knew in May already we'd be in this area. We look southeast in the afternoon; it was a B&O building. The BNSF line crosses left to right.

Carol lived and worked in Centralia, at the Sentinel newspaper, for 2 years before moving to Springfield (where we met in 1968), so we took some time to look around the town, where I hadn't been since Frisco 4-8-2 1522 hauled an excursion here from St. Louis on NS's ex-Southern line. Its yard is parallel to BNSF's ex-CB&Q yard in the north end of town, and we found this coal train parked here. Time is 2:29; units are 6433/9717. This is the south or east end, but the cars look loaded, so these may be DPUs.

A few minutes later, a northbound coal train changed crews downtown; it is coming off the CN/IC from the south, headed north on the BNSF. Units are 6085/8863/9730; time is 2:36.

The small Amtrak station replaced a larger IC building set just about as far back from the main line (between the BNSF and the depot) as this one is. Behind the water tower is a BN caboose on display.

Trying to leave Centralia on old US 51, we saw a stopped freight train on the NS. Thanks to our GPS, I was able to navigate back neighborhood streets to get across in front of him just as he started up, the BNSF coal train having cleared the shared trackage through town. The train is St. Louis-bound, with units 9475/9294, at 2:57 p.m. This concluded the railroad photos for the day; the only other "thing" we saw was a blue GTW GP38 on the CN at DuQuoin, but in the rain, and with trees in between us, I took a pass. We pulled into Carbondale well before 5 p.m.

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