I just came in on the Capitol Limited today, and boy - has it been a day for trains 29 and 30!
Coming out of Chicago on time yesterday (20 September), train 30 got hung up for over an hour in Indiana some 35 miles west of South Bend when a Norfolk Southern eastbound freight suffered a two engine failure (crankcase over-pressure problems, as I heard), and we sat at “Woodside” until they could crawl forward.
I went to bed before Toledo and when I awoke at dawn, we were stopped next to Conway Yard, 22 miles west of Pittsburgh. A hillside construction site east of Leetsdale had become saturated in rains during an eastbound cold front that passed through on Tuesday and Wednesday, had given way in the early morning and had buried a highway under 30 feet of earth and spilled out onto two of three tracks of the former Pennsylvania Railroad/ PC/Conrail line west out Pittsburgh now operated by Norfolk Southern. We waited 90 minutes on the banks of the Ohio River while NS moved two westbound container trains through the bottleneck. Train 42, the Pennsylvanian, was held in Pittsburgh until we could get our connecting passengers there.
As we crept past the earth slide, two bucket shovels were digging as fast as they could go, but the hillside was still moving and sifting granulated dirt. The highway inboard of the three-track main was covered for the width of a football field. Trees and boulders had broken loose as the hillside shifted. Crumbled soil was already encroaching over the north rail of the track closest to the river as we crept by at 10 mph. A buddy of mine told me this past evening that he saw footage on the Weather Channel of a freight creeping past the site. At Pittsburgh we detrained passengers for 42, as well as those with connections out of Washington on trains 91, 95, and 19. They rode an Amtrak charter bus to D.C. via the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and I-70 to save the time the Capitol Limited takes to snake alo