This was day 9 of the trip and was completely dedicated to railfanning. We had an amazing day in Blue Island and Homewood with tons of action and drowning in good power.
I have been to this exact spot dozens and dozens of times, mostly in the very late 1970s through the very early 1980s when I had a customer in nearby Calumet Park Illinois. Back in those days there was a manned Tower at this location and it was a somewhat more safe location than it is today. I recall vividly many many trains coming through there all day long including BRC and IHB freights. I am retired now and don’t travel nearly as far from home as I did in those days so I haven’t been here in many years but it is good to see that the volume of rail traffic has not diminished at all and perhaps has even increased measurably.
The tower is still there behind all the trees, and IHB runs but what I've heard is very sporadic. BRC though is almost fully contained to their yards now.
@@eolafan100 there's no tower by the sidewalk anymore. I'm not familiar with the area but I think it's the old Grand Trunk tower between all the bridges that is for sure still there as I saw a couple of MOW trucks moving back there. And you can see it a bit through the trees in some of the pictures I took.
If you get a chance check out the Illinois Central Gulf line in Monee Illinois. South of Homewood. There the tracks are below grade because of the hill that Monee Illinois is on. The old steamers had trouble to climb the hill. Stand on one of the bridges and face the train going under you. It's a awesome thrill. I used to live along the tracks there for most of my life.
Nah I love GE's, but they're operationally bad after their service life is up and compared to EMD bland past the standard cab C40-9's unless you know what to look for and both of those are why they get a bad rap.
The answer is yes, we were only there for a little over four hours and got 21 separate trains including Metra so about five an hour using that logic which two of those are Metra, one each way.
Out of all those Engine's only 6 were Awesome Engine's the rest of those were JUNK Engine's figure out which 6 were the Best. I will give you a clue All 6 of them start with a E the rest of the JUNK started with a G...
There were for sure more than six EMD's, and some of the GE's aren't that bad. I've heard specifically the rebuilt standard cab Dash 8's are pretty good at least compared to the non rebuilds and they for sure have air conditioners which the standard cab EMD's are starting to take on when they go in for major work.
For Homewood the dispatcher there was helpful, but for Blue Island all the CSX trains called out a mile post around there and the rest were educated guesses if I did give one and Iowa Interstate only runs one set of trains through there so that was helpful as well.
