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.