| Today marks the first day of the annual "Hub of the Wheel Trip" as my dad and I like to call it. Every year we go out to Galesburg Railroad Days in Galesburg, IL for the model train show, and some train action spread around it. Tonight we would be heading over toward Chicagoland to spend the night at the Holiday Inn in Portage. Usually we get a much earlier start, but dad had to work until 2 PM, so we ended up not getting started until around 3 PM. Interstate 69 has been undergoing some major construction in Fort Wayne, so we decided to go around town following State Roads 5 and 9. The original plan was to follow CSX up toward Northwest Indiana, but then we got the crazy idea of following the NS Chicago District up, something that we had not done in a long time. Unfortunately PSR has really ridded this line away from its action, and trains are very few and far between. Thankfully, however, we did have a NS 60P coming east. It was originally going to meet an outbound crew at South Whitley, so we decided to move further west and catch the train rolling through the small community of Sidney. Plans changed for the crew, however, as when they got by Sidney they were instructed to take the train to Dunfee. South Whitley would have been a much better place to shoot a train as the large concrete grain elevator and codeline polls still remain by the tracks, but we didnt know. The normal pair of CP GEs and a wide array of potash hoppers were in the consist of todays 60P. |