Chicago Day 3 - Rondout

Another hotel breakfast this morning before checking out of the Hampton Inn and heading north on a series of tollways to the village of Rondout, a railway junction on the west side of the far north Chicago suburbs of Lake Bluff and Lake Forest (ie practically in Wisconsin). These suburbs were filled with tree lined streets and beautiful old houses which I'm sure cost a fortune. Parked in the business district surronding the Lake Bluff Metra station I discovered a fairly tricked out Electric Blue Mini S reminding me of the vehciel that would be waiting to pick me up at Love Field later in the evening. While naviagting the roads leading into Lake Bluff, I was stopped by a UP train heading north on the old CNW freight district. The train of auto parts boxcars was led by a pair of former Rio Grande tunnel motors, quite far removed from their originally intended duty prowling the tough grades of the mainline through the Rockies of Colorado.

I grabbed lunch at Subway before parking near the interlocking tower at Rondout which guards the crossing of the Canadian Pacific line to Milwaukee (former Milwaukee Road) with the EJ&E belt line. Although not one of the most scenic, accessible or busy spot in Chicago, it is an interesting place to catch some action on the CP, which, thanks to my Winnipeg upbringing, is the railroad I'm most interested in. As I pulled up, a manifest freight headed south on the CP, which meant that a big lull in the action was looming. After eating my lunch and sitting for a while, I was about to leave when the sound of an oncoming horn drifted through the rental car window. A northbound CP train cruised through the interlocking and had no sooner disappeared when the headlight of a southbound CP train popped over the horizon. The southbound train was heading to a perfectly lit and composed shot, with the lead locomotives nicely framed by the overhead pedestrian bridge just north of the diamond. Unortunately, the train was a bare-table intermodal train pulled by a single leased SD70M, not the nice heavy CP freight pulled by some action red units I was hoping for but a nice shot nonetheless.

After watching the train pass, I headed back to Midway, checked in the rental car and boarded my Southwest flight back to Houston. In HOuston I actually managed to make a good connection and caught an earlier flight to Dallas, getting me back in the early evenign instead of at 10 at night.

It was a good weekend filled with lots of passing trains that recharged my railroad batteries. There's nothing like some time at trackside to renew my interest in working on the railroad designs that appear as somewhat abstract lines and 3-d models on my computer screen at work each day.

Chicago - Day 2 - Embrace your inner train geek

After a nice breakfast in the hotel lobby, I gathered up my gear, jumped in the Elantra and headed up to Illinois Route 38, which parallels the Union Pacific line running west from Chicago. This line is actually the old Chicago North Western to Omaha and is noted as being the route of the CNW's famed Falcon hotshot intermodal trains of the 70s and 80s. Although the CNW image has essentially vanished in the years since it was purchased by UP in 1995, there is no mistaking this as CNW territory thanks to the CNW tradition of running left-handed on double track, a practice which continues to this day.

I caught up with the line in Geneva, a pretty little town on the Fox river and terminus of the very first rail line built west from downtown Chicago. Geneva has a picturesqe station and is at the end of the Metra service territory, but no trains were present during my time at the depot. Of course, as soon as I left and headed west, an eastbound UP double stack train came roaring through. Such is the life of one who watches trains.

A few miles west of Geneva, I encountered the headlight of a stopped eastbound train. Behind it I could see two more headlights before the tracks vanished over the horizon. The Overland route was at full stop this morning and on my drive to Rochelle I encountered over a half-dozen eastbounds stopped nose-to-tail on the north track. At Creston, while taking pics of a stopped train, I finally saw a train in motion as a westbound manifest was on the move meeting the string of stopped trains.

I arrived at Rochelle right at noon and grabbed lunch at Wendy's. After the quick meal, I drove through Rochelle to the intersection of the UP Chicago-Omaha line with the BNSF Chicago-MInneapolis line. Both routes are double track through Rochelle with plenty of traffic making this a popular location for railway enthusiasts and photographers to gather. So popular, that the town of Rochelle has constructed a "railfan park" adjacent to the railway intersection, consisting of a covered gazebo viewing platform and picnic shelter surrounded by a safe fenced off grassy area. The park also features a large parking lot and a small visitors center with washrooms and a store selling model trains and railway books. During my stay at the park, there were as many as two dozen visitors there at a time, with some staying for a train or two, and others who had been there since early morning and planning to stay well after I left. There was one individual at the park whom every year starts a new notebook on January 1st and records all of the trains he sees, writing down location, railroad, direction, type of train, locomotives etc. When he showed up at the park he had recorded 3824 trains so far this year. My calendar indicated that today was day 239 of the year so that's an average of 16 trains per day. I'm a little jealous.

The number of trains that passed through Rochelle during my afternoon and early evening in town was staggering. Anybody who doubts the importance of the rail industry to transportation in North America needs to pay a visit. String after string of double stack cars carrying containers packed with goods imported from Japan and China, 125-car trains of coal from Wyoming destined for midwestern power plants, short fast trains with flatcars carrying UPS trailers filled with packages and the occasional merchandise train loaded with grain, paper, cement, lumber and countelss other loads that would otherise be clogging the nation's highways.

Both Rochelle and DeKalb (where it happened to be the fist weekend of classes at North Illinois University) were hosting small-town fairs, and traffic detours slowed my progress on my return trip to Chicago along Route 38 so I arrived back at the hotel around 8. After a short stop at the hotel to wash the trackside grime off, I went to a nearby Connie's to pick up some famous Chicago-style deep dish pizza and a Dominick's grocery store to pick up beverages and Teddy Grahams to serve as my feast back at the hotel. Sadly the episode of Foster's that was on cartoon Network was one I had seen before.

Chicago - Day 1 - Jiminized

Friday morning, Amy dropped me off at Love Field on her way to work and I flew to Houston where I changed planes and then flew on to Midway Airport in Chicago. This was my first time flying in to Midway, and the more southerly approach into the city allowed me to see some new areas from the air. Unfortunately it's areas I'm not as familiar with so I didn't know exactly which freeways, rail yards and intermodal terminals I was flying over (that's how I navigate my final approaches to cities) but they were impressive. The newer terminal areas at Midway were nice.

I picked up my rental car around 2PM, a decent black Hyundai Elantra, and navigated my way out of the airport. While on the plane, my grad-school buddy and fellow railroad enthusiast Jim who works for BNSF in Joliet had called. We set up a plan to meet at the La Grange Road Metra station on the BNSF west line, not too far from Midway and just down the freeway from Joliet. JIm and I have been on several rail-related adventures in the past and someday I need to get a copy of all of the video he shot on those trips. Jim is also known for his aggressive model railroad weathering techniques and is the only person I know who often claims that the Penn Central is his favorite railroad.

The La Grange Road station is in the middle of the La Grange neighbourhood of Chicago, and the blocks surrounding the station have nice small town downtown feel, populated by coffee shops, family-run restaurants and unique shops, and, of course, a Borders right at the intersection of La Grange Road and the BNSF tracks, diagonally adjacent to the train station. The BNSF line at this point has three tracks and is fairly busy. As we were both arriving, Amtrak's California Zephyr raced past on its way out of Chicago. Jim and I dug out our cameras to waste some film recoding the passage of several freight trains before communter train traffic picked up as the rush hour began. Betwen trains I was able to catch up with Jim, who just recently discovered that his wife Attalee is expecting, and within a few weeks would be moving Omaha to take a position with the Union Pacific Railroad. So the timing of the trip couldn't have been better.

We grabbed a quick dinner at a strange fast food but not fast food Mexican place about a block from the tracks, getting our meals to go so we could eat them while sitting on the station platform (of course). At the peak of rush hour as traffic on La Grange road slowed to a crwal across the BNSF line, a truck pulling a K-Line container snagged a crossing gate as it began to descend, snapping the gate arm and leavining it dangling precariously in front of traffic. The La Grange police were soon on the scene and the next Metra train was forced to stop and drop off a flagman at the crossing who would flag the crossing by hand util the gate could be repaired. Another Tyler and Jim railfan adventure classic.

With the rush of commuter trains slowing down, Jim headed off to prepare his house for in-laws he had visiting that weekend. I drove west along the BNSF Racetrack, zig-zagging through the suburbs through Hinsdale, Clarendon Hills (where I saw a grain train cruise around the curve Jim had modelled faithfully in N-scale), Downers Grove and Lisle before losing the tracks and taking US 34 out to Naperville. In downtown Downers Grove, I stopped to check out a car show being held in the main business district near the tracks; some very impressive classics lined the streets.

It was dark by the time I checked in to the Hampton Inn in north part of Naperville near I-88. It turned out that the hotel was in the middle of a big business park full of headquarters buildings that were largely abandoned for the weekend, so it was very quiet with the excpetion of what seemed to be a large extended family group in town for a wedding. After some cartoon network and a call to Ames it was time for sleep.

Rapid Rewards

Flying to Chicago on Southwest for the weekend for FREE!

Should be fun...

Incompressible

So I did a bunch of research on NewBeetle.org about causes of A/C failure in bugs and tried checking all of the easy things myself, like looking to see if the leftmost fuse in the fuse block on top of the battery had melted. This meant that I had no choice but to pay a visit to my friend Jason, who happens to work at metro VW and is a VW Tech, well sort of, and could hook the bug up to the VAG-tool diagnostic system to see what was going on. All of the electrical system controlling the A/C checked out fine. Rats, that meant that all of the stuff that is inexpensive to repair was working fine. In the end, the cause was just what I suspected, the A/C compressor or compressor cluth had failed and needed to be replaced. Of course, on the bug these are one in the same since VW conveneiently integrated these two parts on the NB. On nb.org people have reported quotes from $1000 to $1600 for a compressor replacement at the VW dealership. Ouch!

Happy Birthday Ames!

So today is Amy's birthday, which means there is cake. Two cakes in fact, the angle food cake with atomic pink icing I baked last night and a backup cake (incase the angle food didn't turn out) I picked up today at lunch. Transporting a cake in a car without air conditioning during the 100-degree heat of the day is a challenge. Fortunately it was only a short drive over to the Bluebonnet Bakery over on camp Bowie in the Arts District. They have good stuff, including the white cake with retro 60s-style pink, orange and green daisies on it that caught my eye.

To celebrate, we went to dinner at Reata, the famous downtown Fort Worth restaurant. Strangely, though I live and work just blocks away from it, this was the first time either of us had been there for dinner. I had the double cut porkchop and Amy had one of the specials that included both steak and some sort of fish with tons of veggies. The food was spectacular and the service was great. Afterwards we came home for the cake buffet and watched a bunch of Futurama on DVD. Not too bad for having a birthday on a school night.

Like a surgeon

I'm baking an angel food cake. This is a very delicate process. Wish me luck. No sudden movements.

Rolling

Today was a big day. Amy and I went shopping for baby stuff for an upcoming shower at Babies R Us. Man, that's the racket to get into. So much stuff, so expensive and it's not like the industry is going to go away because people are not going to suddenly stop having kids. I'd also mention that we went to the fabric store next door but that would mean this post would start sounding like a certain scene from the movie "Old School". Would it help to say that afterwards we had pizza at Tony's in Arlington while a jazz band played?

On another note, why is it that bowling is universally made fun of but yet on a Saturday night you can't find a bowling alley in Arlington or Fort Worth that doesn't have a two-hour wait for an open lane?

B-I-N-G-O but no A/C

So Amy and our friends Rodney and Stephanie got this crazy idea to go play Bingo somewhere out in east Dallas. What more could you want to do on a sweltering Texas night but sit inside a smoky bingo hall with hopes of winning riches? To meet the crew, I drove over to Dallas after work, stopping at Amy's apartment to pick up the dobbers. Yes we have bingo dobbers from a previous bingo expereince and let me leave it at that. When I got back in the bug and departed Amy's apartment complex, the bug didn't seem to be cooling down as fast as normal. As I approached downtown Dallas it was downright sweltering inside the bug and I noticed that pressing the A/C buttom wasn't doing a thing. Great, the hotteest weekend of the year and the A/C goes out in the bug. It's even more retro now.

Bingo was fun. I wasn't very lucky at it though and hardly even came close to winning. A few times I probably could have won a prize for fewest numbers covered. But we were up against stiff competition as they sell these bingo playing computers that allow one to play several dozen cards at once. They're pretty slick. Between bingo games they were going around selling "Tabs" (or what we called breakers or break open tickets at home) and the people were going nuts for these things. One old lady actually had such a giant pile of non winning tabs that she looked like a hampster building a nest.

No A/C in the bug... this is not good.

The Killers @ Nokia Theatre

The Killers, everybody's new favorite band after extensive radio airplay of songs like Somebody Told Me and Mr. Brightside from their debut album Hot Fuss, rolled through DFW tonight. The Killers played a nice tight set complete with a couple B-sides to fill things out that had the crowd jumping. The sing-along to the "I've Got Soul But I'm Not A Soldier" portion of All These Things That I've Done brought the show to a climactic end.

I must say that this was probably the trendiest show I've been to in a while, full of trendy people that outnumbered the scenesters, indie kids and music geeks by a good four-to-one ratio. Definately a high-maintenance crowd, caring more to be seen at the show than seeing the show itself. This did not detract from the experience, it just meant there was an overabundance of bitchy-looking high-maintenance sororrity type chicks for Amy and I to check out between the opener Louis XIV and The Killers, and that's always fun.

Back Updates

Yes, it's been a month since my last post on here... I was cruising along fine until I went on vacation and haven't had a chance to get caught up again. However, I'm working on filling in the missing entries and getting this year's road trip site wrapped up.

Take me out to the ballgame...

So tonight I went to my very first major league baseball game, watching the Tampa Bay Devil Rays come back to defeat the hometown Texas Rangers at the Ballpark (aka Ameriquest Field) in Arlington. Although the view from three decks up isn't quite the same as the AA minor league stadiums I am used to that have housed teams such as the Winnipeg Goldeyes and Chattanooga Lookouts, goign to the ballpark was an enjoyable experience. I mean how can you possibly go wrong on dollar hot dog night? The night was capped off when, with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, the Rangers cracked off back-to-back homers, sending the stadium into exploding madness. It proved to be too little too late however, as a long fly on the next pitch was caught to end the came and stifle any attempts at a comeback.

I'll go back sometime, hopefully to see the Blue Jays play, because after all they are Canada's team.