Mike's Railroad Crossing Forum

Well finally some exciting things have been happening in Morris. They're replacing the old jointed rail from the Rock Island days to new welded rail. This could be for a factor of reasons. CSX is wanting to build a yard 10 miles west in Seneca for grain intermodal business. Iowa Interstate's traffic seems to really be increasing as they're bringing more of their GP38-2s and SD38-2s out of storage. Also Amtrak has proposed a line through Morris to go to Iowa City, IA, to connect the universities and Chicago. One or two or all of these are probably influencing this upgrade. They've got the new rail laid through town, except by the depot which is actually welded by looks old. Also some other new track is laid for repaving some of the crossings including Union. I haven't seen any signs of CSX upgrading any of the crossings yet but they might since some signals are pretty old. On Saturday they brought a work train down with the equipment to put the jointed rail to death. Today they've been putting some of the rail in the center of line for some reason. They did this before and then put it back on the outside Don't know why they did that. Anyway I'll keep you guys updated on what's going on over the next few weeks.

Also something weird happened last week. If you don't know 6 Gevo's have a different K5HL horn that rolled out in October 2005. These six units are:
BNSF 7606
BNSF 7607
BNSF 7608
CSX 5284
CSX 5288
CP 8705

Well last week, 2 ballast trains came through, one with 5288 trailing and one with 5284 leading! I don't how that happened But it was awesome nonetheless. I've also now seen all six units. 5284 was the last to be seen.

Got some news from the announcements at school. They said Union and Shabbona Streets are going to be closed starting tomorrow through next Tuesday. This means that this will be the upgrading time But I have to say good bye to the famous jointed rail.

The big change is finally occuring today. They closed both Union and Shabbona and tore out both of the grades. They installed the south side of the rail from just west of Wauponsee to Shabbona, but not the crossings.