Entering Chicago, the hard way

I’ve written before about Norfolk Southern’s Funnel of Fun, its busy line into Chicago from Cleveland, Toledo, and Elkhart, Ind. It has always been a minefield of potential problems. Sixty years ago, New York Central ran 48 passenger trains on weekdays in and out of Chicago. But I wager today these tracks are even busier than in Central’s heyday. You’ve got 14 Amtrak trains, at least 30 NS freights, and 10 freights belonging to Canadian Pacific using trackage rights to get between Chicago and Detroit. Add to that Metra’s Rock Island and Southwest districts, which paralyze NS in the Englewood area for more than an hour morning and then evening. Plus, there are yard moves, locals, Indiana Harbor Belt trains, a busy crossing of Canadian National in South Bend, the congestion of the five-mile-long Elkhart terminal, and very active drawbridges over the Calumet River and Indiana Harbor Canal. This is a complex railroad, in other words.

In the space of a week, I’ve had two experiences with it. First, a friend sent me a Train Dispatcher 3 simulation covering Chicago to Butler, Ind., for a three-day period in 2008, using the trains that actually ran those days and incorporating all the planned stops and delays they would encounter. My first attempt to run this interactive software for a Friday was a disaster. But I kept starting over and finally was able to keep the priority trains moving and the railroad as a whole fairly fluid for a 10-hour stretch. I learned that failure to think at least two hours ahead and anticipate entanglements begs for disaster.

Then I got to observe this same railroad real time, as a passenger on the westbound Lake Shore Limited. We were having a great trip, right on time, until Amtrak 49 got to Goshen, Ind., 10 miles shy of Elkhart. There, we stop. The Chicago East dispatcher in Dearborn, Mich., says we need to wait for a tangle of freights to sort themselves out. An NS freight from the Marion Branch, which joins us at Goshen, waits on the branch main line, too, and an eastbound Canadian Pacific train of empty automobile cars goes east on track 2. On the radio, I can hear the dispatcher tell the westbound Capitol Limited, about 25 miles ahead of us, that a freight train just went into emergency near LaPorte, Ind., and to pass it on track 1 at restricted speed.

After 25 minutes of waiting, the dispatcher comes on the radio. “Well,” he says, “I got four trains out of your way. Follow the train ahead of you into Elkhart. You’ll need to work Elkhart from track 2, however [track 1 being next to the station] but I’ll put blocks up to protect you.”

So the Lake Shore gets to Elkhart, does its work quickly, and slides unimpeded out of town, 30 minutes late. We get in and out of South Bend without delay. But by now I’m in the almost-empty lounge car with my iPad tuned to the ATCS Monitor display of this same railroad on my desktop computer at home. ATCS Monitor gives you a dispatcher’s view of a railroad, showing the location of trains and the aspects of signals at control points. And what I see doesn’t look good.

From west of LaPorte all the way to Indiana Harbor, 40 miles, track 1 looks occupied, and some of those trains aren’t cleared to move. They’re just sitting. On track 2 the dispatcher has eastbound trains cleared. So we cannot run around the trains in front of us and are about to hit the wall. Just before we stop behind westbound NS intermodal train 21V, the train ahead of 21V is cleared on track 1 through Porter, which is where Amtrak trains from Detroit, Grand Rapids and Port Huron, Mich., join the NS tracks. Presently, the Lake Shore starts to more, but only on Approach signals.

We ease past Porter and four miles later, crawl past the giant ArcelorMittal steel mill at Burns Harbor. But at CP 487, at the west end of the mill, we stop again. On the ATCS display, I see Amtrak’s Grand Rapids train about to reach Porter. And there will be a Detroit train a few minutes behind it.

Four miles ahead, at CP 491, is a facing-point crossover that would get us to track 2 and around the stop-and-go line of trains on 1. But the Chicago West dispatcher says it may take a while to get us there. “If you’ll pull past CP 487, I’ll line the [trailing point] crossover and you can back through to track 2,” she says. This we do, as soon as our conductor can position himself in the rear vestibule to supervise the backup. Ironically, just as we start westward again, train 21V that was in front of us begins to move on track 1. Meanwhile, the Grand Rapids train is out of Porter, just a mile or two behind us on track 2, and the Detroit train is close behind.

I was hoping for more of the same — gosh, this is fun, experiencing the modern version of blood-and-guts railroading. But we make our way past the drawbridges, yards, mills, railroad diamonds, and whatnot without again stopping or even slowing, reaching Union Station 40 minutes late. (There is 30 minutes of “recovery time” in the schedule between South Bend and Chicago that we obviously absorb as well.)

Based on my analysis of recent arrivals of the Lake Shore Limited, my experience was pretty typical.

So I’ve seen life both ways now on Norfolk Southern, as a pretend dispatcher and as a passenger. This has to be one of the most challenging and fascinating 100 miles of railroad in America. Already, I miss it. — Fred W. Frailey