Do you live in the area or were you just here visiting? This is very disorienting for me to have just spent the week/end with Jerome a Paris (among others) in Chicago and come back to ET to find someone else writing about Chicago trains!
Is Chicago part of Europe and I just don't know about it? "Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.
The post is from a resident of DeKalb, Illinois, who has an account with the European Tribune for the train-blogging (and the opportunity to set the record straight about numerous misperceptions of North American railroading.) So an excursion to Downers Grove (and an evening basketball game in Chicago) is a relatively simple day trip. I use "relatively" because the easiest day trip to Chicago uses the old Chicago and North Western (two words is correct) from Elburn. But I had reason after some comments on my main site to conduct a clinic on real railroading.
I was aware that residents of Princeton(in New Jersey, not Illinois) referred to the Pennsylvania Railroad shuttle (also called the PJ&B, "Princeton Junction and Back") as the "dinky." In Chicago, the various railroads had different names for the commuter trains. The Burlington used the term "dinky" (at one time they were, now imagine today's eleven car monsters arriving Chicago at three-minute intervals, as they do at the climax of the morning dinky parade) while the Milwaukee Road and Chicago and North Western called them "scoots" and the Pennsylvania had the "Valparaiso dummy."
Sure, they're all diesels, and we had our version of paraffin cans (the Union Pacific's early aluminum streamliners) and buzz boxes. But the Diesel was instrumental in the Arsenal of Democracy, and its successors -- check out those Dash Nines on the intermodal -- are impressive in their own way. And yes, you do want 132 pound to the yard cross-section rail or something similar on those tracks. The inner bogies of an articulated double-stack car carry a load of 125 short tons and some of the coal and grain cars are pushing 130. Stephen Karlson ATTITUDE is a nine letter word. BOATSPEED.
