Incident at Medill

Little things tell you a lot. Mark Hinsdale and I are exploring the Chicago-Kansas City artery of the former Santa Fe Railway. Leaving the southeast corner of Iowa at Fort Madison and entering Missouri, we may as well be traversing a foreign country. The present BNSF Railway veers southwest through a depopulated countryside. In fact, the biggest town in the 215 miles between Fort Madison and Kansas City is Carrollton, population 3,784. The population of Medill, where we end up, is almost zero; it even merits a mention in Ghosttowns.com.

Mark is looking for cantilever signals, a rapidly vanishing species of hardware on the eve of positive train control; cantilevers are hosts to searchlight signals, whose moving parts are forbidden by the specifications of PTC, so they are rapidly being replaced by three-indication signals on new masts. Me, I’m just having fun.

So we get to Medill, a town whose name has been familiar to me for maybe 50 years. But when we get there, I have to wonder why. Names that loom so large in employee timetables can be deceiving, because there is virtually nothing left of Medill but the railroad.

But today there’s another visitor there to greet us: an eastbound intermodal train. A look-see quickly tells us this is an abandoned train, its three forward locomotives consecutively cycling on and off. More than a mile long, it is comprised solely of 40-foot double-stack containers that most likely were loaded at the Port of Long Beach or Los Angeles. We have been hearing of a lot of BNSF Railway trains on the Transcon being left for a day or two in Kansas, Missouri, and Illinois, and have seen a few of them ourselves since leaving Chicago a day ago.

We easily see that the eastbound signal on track two is lit green, almost certainly for the Southwest Chief¸ due by any minute. Mark walks past the westbound signal and reports that the signal for track one is green as well. This could be interesting.

In its day, Medill was, if not an important way point on Santa Fe’s old Missouri Division, at least an interesting one. Until the 1960s, this part of the railway was signaled for one-way traffic, westbounds on the north track, eastbounds on the south. But sometimes you needed to run trains on the opposing main track, for overtakes, for example. So every 20 or so miles between Chicago and KC, Santa Fe had a 24-hour office with an interlocking plant inside the depot. The levermen reversed crossover switches, lined siding switches, and delivered the train orders giving trains authority to use the opposing main track.

Medill was one of those places. It was made more interesting because a Burlington Lines branch, long since gone, crossed the Santa Fe right beside the depot. See the page from a 1950 Santa Fe track chart at the bottom of this essay.

My musings are interrupted, first by a whistle entering my right ear — that would be Amtrak 4, heading for Chicago — and then by the slightly less melodic sound in my left ear of a BNSF locomotive whistle headed in the other direction. I call this railroad ping pong, and I cannot think of music more welcome at this hour than those two harmonies converging on each other, Mark and I in the middle.

It all happens very quickly, so quickly that I cannot get my camera to do its job for me in time (the pictures you see are Mark’s). First the Amtrak train whips by the stranded intermodal train that sits in the siding. Several hundred feet east of us, the Southwest Chief meets a westbound Z train with J.B. Hunt Transport double stack containers on the head end and Roadway and United Parcel Service trailers on the rear.

I said little things tell you a lot. What did I mean? First, looks are deceiving. Medill is a mouse that once roared, a tiny village in its best days that nevertheless was an outpost that Santa Fe staffed 24-7-365. Today, Medill is little more than a name in the employee timetable, populated only by that abandoned train. The railroad hosted lots of trains in 1950, but many more today, yet except for its siding, Medill is not a needed part of the plan.

Now think about that train: Why is it sitting there? BNSF does not reveal its secrets to me. All I ever learn is that it is destined for CSX in Chicago, has been there more than 12 hours, and will remain there at least another 12 hours. I am left to conclude that BNSF is short of crews or that CSX does not want the train delivered to it anytime soon. I feel sorry for the customers of these two railroads, whose expectations are not being met.

As I said, this is happening elsewhere on the Chicago-LA Transcon. An acquaintance of mine this very day is called as a relief conductor for a Kansas City-Fort Worth manifest train that has been sitting just west of Emporia, Kan., for more than a day. Jam-ups on each side of BNSF’s big Argentine classification yard in Kansas City, Kan., are the norm; I suspect that retirements have robbed the railroad of talent that knew how to rapidly process the inbound trains and get their cars on their way east and west.

The brain drain and trains left for dust to settle on are not problems peculiar to BNSF, either. A correspondent tells me that Union Pacific is dragging made-up trains out of its big yard in North Platte, Neb., for which locomotives or crews or both are not available.

And a related point: All the big railroads are promoting people who don’t really know the ropes they have to manipulate. One Class I not long ago made a man four years off the street a division superintendent, and I doubt that he was ready for the challenge. Carload traffic on the railroads has never reached the levels achieved prior to the Great Recession of 2009, and when that day comes, I wonder whether railroads will be up to the task of providing the service that customers expect.

All these thoughts arise from a brief visit to little — make that microscopic — Medill. Funny the things you can learn and surmise at places like this. — Fred W. Frailey