If any of you midwesterners want to avoid shopping this Friday (or if you can tear yourself away from “24 hours of Eastwood” on TV), a few of us Kalmbach employees are heading to the Rochelle, IL railroad park (home of the Trains.com Web cam) and the surrounding area to do some railfanning.
Myself, TRAINS and Model Railroader art director Tom Danneman, books editor Kent Johnson, and Model Railroader assistant editor Cody Grivno will be there. We’ll probably get there around 10am. I’m not sure how much time we’ll spend at the park (depending on the weather and lighting).
If see four guys jumping out of a burgandy mini-van [B)] with Wisconsin plates, that’ll be us. (You can also see my picture by clicking on my username.) Please feel free to say hello. We’d love to hear what you guys think about our products.
Erik…I tried to watch and did but my computer wanted to do something else part of the time but at 10:13 Rochelle time I did see someone go to the end of the fence and turn towards the camera and wave with both arms…Person had dark clothing on. One person, not four…Was wondering if it may have been one of you fellows. Light snow was falling at the time and the scene looked like a dark winter day. And of course no trains.
…Yes, when I was watching in the hour leading up to 10 this morning light snow was coming down and eventually covered a streak near the street on the right and the ties on the track making them white. Snow it was.
Bergie, sorry I was not able to join you guys at Rochelle, I really wanted to but my “boss” (aka wife) had me running all over with her and then “asked” me to take her to eat and to the movies (Master and Commander, great movie by the way). We did manage to get to Naperville station for a short while and saw both eastbound Chief and Zephyr within ten minutes (rare occurance, must be living right). Hope to see you guys in Rochelle once it gets a bit warmer (colder first I think). JIm
My railfan group and I did not go to Rochelle with Bergie and the Kalmbach guys
We went to Kenosha WI near the Illinois border. Kenosha has a nice trolley system using restored PCC cars – and the ride costs 25 cents for as long as you want to ride. It was snowing so there were some decent photo opportunities. We caught a Metra train arriving at the Depot (this is as far north as Chicago’s Metra system comes), saw the Rock Train on the ex CNW farm sub heading to Bain WI and most interestingly, found an old Alco prime mover sitting behind a fence near the Kenosha Depot. Kenosha has two public museums and both are free. One is a natural history museum with a mammoth that was found nearby but we went to the history museum which focuses on Kenosha industry: Nash Rambler, Jockey underwear, Simmons mattress, a fire truck mgfr, a chair mgfr, and so on. There was some railroad related material there and the gift shop has some interesting great lakes shipwreck videos for sale (tie in is the nearby light house). We stayed mostly in our cars, in the PCC cars, in the depot and in the museums. It bet folks were a bit chilly at Rochelle on Friday (by contrast, today - Sunday – is gorgeous).
Dave Nelson
I hope you all saw something because around here I don’t think I heard more than 1 train all Thanksgiving day and only a couple Friday. Saturday and today they got busy again. And this is one of the most busiest routes in the country at a major junction, the Emporia Sub in Kansas straight out of Kansas City.
That was me. [^] Later, all four of us were down there. We didn’t spend too much time hanging out around the park, because it was freezing. We’ll have to do it sometime this summer when the weather’s more coorporative. I’ll try to give you guys a little more heads up in the future, too.