Eastbound intermodal train 20E passes the Amtrak platform in Waterloo to get my day of photographing on the NS Chicago Line started right.
It had been a long time since I’d photographed operations of the Chicago Line of Norfolk Southern.
It had been so long that as I made my way to Waterloo, Indiana, last Sunday for my first railfan outing since early March it felt as though I’d been in another state or even another country for a few years and was returning home.
The Chicago Line has always had a mystique about it because of its heavy and diverse traffic.
I wasn’t expecting to find last weekend that same level of traffic of earlier years.
It was a holiday weekend, rail freight volume has been down by double digit numbers in the past several weeks, and NS is running fewer trains generally as it implements its version of precision scheduled railroading.
Still, I wasn’t sure what to expect.
I spent six hours on the Chicago Line and saw nine trains. Just as significant was what I didn’t see during those six hours.
I didn’t see a single auto rack car, I didn’t see any foreign motive power and, most surprising, I didn’t see any distributed power units.
There were no Canadian Pacific overhead trains running during the time I was trackside and no tank car trains.
There also were some very long lulls between trains that started in late morning.
The day got off to a promising start. As I reached the Amtrak station the gates at the main crossing in town went down for a westbound stack train.
About 20 minutes later came eastbound 20E followed 15 minutes later by the 24M.
About a half hour later came a westbound manifest freight and five minutes after that came the 18M, an eastbound manifest.
It was looking like the Chicago Line of old. But after that flurry of activity rail traffic died for more than an hour and a half before the lull was broken by an eastbound coal train.
The next train, a westbound manifest, showed up an hour later. Then came another lull of nearly an hour before a westbound intermodal came along. That would be my last train of the day.
Had I arrived an hour earlier I could have caught a 40-minute late westbound Lake Shore Limited led by a Phase III heritage unit.
And speaking of heritage units, various online reports had the Interstate heritage unit leading stack train 21T.
A railfan I talked with briefly said it should arrive in a couple hours. I thought he meant in Waterloo.
I followed the progress of NS 8104 on a Facebook group devoted to the Chicago Line.
I heard a scratchy radio transmission about 11:15 a.m. and thought, “that must be the 21T.”
I got out and hung around the Amtrak platform. I waited and waited and waited. I periodically checked the Facebook page and HeritageUnits.com, but nothing new had been posted since MP 248.
The minutes ticked away and I kept thinking I should be seeing a headlight any minute.
Something must have happened. Maybe the train went into emergency, struck a car at a grade crossing, or who knows what.
It was boiling hot and I feared getting dehydrated. I didn’t dare dash back to my car to get my radio and/or some water for fear of missing the photograph.
On Labor Day weekend 2017 Marty Surdyk and his brother Robert had been in Indiana for a weekend outing and chased a Chicago, Fort Wayne & Eastern train on the Fort Wayne Line that didn’t exist where they thought it did.
They had, as Marty put it in a trip report, been chasing air for two hours and 40 miles.
I never left Waterloo, but it turned out I was waiting for air for more than an hour.
The 21T goes to Kansas City and not Chicago as I had thought. It had turned left at Butler, Indiana, and gotten on the former Wabash to head to Fort Wayne and points beyond.
There is in Indiana, it seems, a lot of air. On that same Labor Day outing Marty and Robert had “lost” into that same thin air an NS train they had been chasing.
So it meant that I have still not seen or photographed an NS heritage unit since last August when I caught the Illinois Terminal H unit in Marion.
That disappointment aside, it had still been an enjoyable day because I had seen and photographed something which is better than nothing.
With railroad traffic in contraction mode for the foreseeable future my expectations have adjusted accordingly. This is a year to take whatever you can and make the best of it.
The 18M was long but had no DPUs today.
The 24M may be an an afternoon train in Cleveland but it’s a morning train in Waterloo, Indiana.
An eastbound coal train broke a lull of more than an hour and a half.
Some reefer cars are mixed in with the last cut of box cars on this westbound.
My last sighting of the day was a westbound intermodal.
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