Wolverine detoured through interesting places on Tuesday

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Wolverine detoured through interesting places on Tuesday

Interesting rare mileage unless you are a regular South Shore passenger. They made up a lot of time, getting into Kalamazoo only 30 minutes late.

Former South Shore? I think its still very much active.

Great idea AMTRAK! They should use that route more often…trying to think of where they got back onto the NS line…that would be at Burns Harbor. A set of crossovers were installed some time ago at that point for CSSB interchange. NOW I REMEMBER! Heck I ran that line on CSX freights for many a year out of GRR. But its been many a year since I did it…went into the yard up here in 1998 and havn’t been back on the road since.

The connection is a mile or two east of the NICTD Portage/Ogden Dunes station. The train flew through the station at track speed on the wrong main, then had to wait for the NS Chicago West Dispatcher to give permission to back through the connection onto NS Main 2. It’s a hand throw switch on the South Shore side. There would really be no advantage to Amtrak to use that route normally, even if a new connection was built so they didn’t have to back through. The reverse move to get onto the SCAL eats up a lot of time.

How about a map?

I can see some delay on such a detour, particularly with the two backup … but seeing as all the routes utilized have regular passenger train service (and I have traveled each of them at one time or another), doesn’t an hour-and-a-half-delay seem rather excessive?