by Matt Gentry
If there is anyone who absolutely despises cold weather, it is this guy right here. Don’t get me wrong, as much as I love summer and the heat it brings, cold weather provides a nice break. But, once Christmas and New Years is
over, I want the heat to return. This year has been exceptionally depressing on the temperature front with the “Polar Vortex” and the frozen precipitation we have had. And it goes without saying that no one in the area has been left out! Snow and ice down in Atlanta and the Carolina’s? OK, great Mother Nature, let’s get a little warmth back.
As it goes for many of us who share the same enjoyment of trains and railroading, it has not been a winter to get out to do much, if any, rail fanning. That is until mid February. I had been keeping an eye on the temperatures for about a week and saw that Tuesday, February 18th was potentially going to be a nice enough day to go chase trains. I made mention of it to Rick Bivins and we both threw out the idea of making a trip to one of our favorite spots, Gorham, Illinois. Albeit
last minute, to Gorham we went with Donny Knight and Thomas Bryan joining along for the day.
Upon arriving just about 45 minutes after Rick & Donny, we were immediately greeted with a northbound Union Pacific stack train with 2 brand new SD70Ace’s (possibly SD70AH) headed up the Mt. Vernon subdivision. My reaction? “It’s going to be a great day.”
What made this trip even more of an adventure for me was twofold; 1) the purchase of a new high definition digital video camera not two days before our journey (did I plan it that way? …maybe), and 2) for being my fourth trip to Gorham, all previous trips had actually been fairly lackluster for me! Gorham and lackluster in the same sentence you ask? Yes. Two of the previous three occasions had track maintenance being performed to the south and traffic on the Chester Subdivision was virtually at a standstill for the better part of eight hours. Thankfully, this day did not disappoint!
It wasn’t a few days later and the weather still continued to cooperate and I managed to catch some rail activity not a few miles from my house! As some of you know, I live not very far from the Alcoa aluminum plant and Vectren power plant to the east of Evansville along Highway 66 (Lloyd Expwy). This day, I witnessed Indiana Southern (now Genesee & Wyoming) pulling an empty coal drag north towards Boonville. Interestingly enough, there were two former Southern Pacific locomotives in the consist! I am fairly certain that these units were slugs only. They had no prime mover in the locomotive.
After this sighting, I figured what the heck, I’ll head up towards the power plant and see if I can see anything working in the yard. As luck would have it, I was able to catch one of the Yankeetown Dock Corp locomotives, #21, shoving loaded coal cars up to the docks to be unloaded! I couldn’t believe it! It still exists! With this kind of luck, I decided I should head up to Princeton Indiana to see what traffic I could see in the area. Princeton is a great train spotting location because the CSX and Norfolk Southern cross at grade on the south side of town.
After mentioning this to Rick, we decided to plan a day in Princeton. Once again, rather last minute, but we went to Princeton on Monday February 24th. We took a risk going on a Monday, but I wanted to arrive early enough to check and see what kind of NS trains would be going through. Surprisingly we were not disappointed in the slightest. We saw at least six NS trains and one (maybe two) CSX trains for the day.
After all of this, my plans for the year are to make as many outings as possible to do some rail fanning in the area and possibly make some longer distance trips to new locations. After all, I do have a new video camera to use!
And speaking of the camera and my videos, below there are videos to of our day in Gorham Illinois and a video containing the Indiana Southern and Yankeetown locomotives.
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