10 minutes in Brookfield: Good for the common cold
BROOKFIELD, Wis. – Saturday was a gift in southeastern Wisconsin: A winter thaw, a rare January day in the 40s. I was just back from a quick road trip for work, fighting a head cold, and trying not to think about how much fun my friends in Mississippi or North Carolina were having riding or photographing Iowa Pacific special trains operating that day. I suffered through moving boxes around the house my wife and I bought last fall, did a few household chores, and welcomed emails from friends who were watching Norfolk Southern’s Interstate Railroad heritage unit work its way westbound out of Chicago on a Canadian Pacific empty oil can job. It would be here in the Milwaukee area in a few hours. Maybe I could win a consolation prize.
After a few hours, I decided to take a well-timed break. The head cold was still raging, but the clouds of the day were parting. A friend of mine, Nick Brown, alerted me when the train with the prize got into Milwaukee, and I headed for a nearby grade crossing for the show. The signal was set for a westbound, and soon enough the crossing gates dropped, the flashers blinked, and the air horn announced a train. Instead of a heritage unit, though, a stack train with CP units roared by. Nice, but not the win I wanted or needed. Could the train with the Interstate unit be following? Yes. The signal on the second track went green, so I figured that the train would be along soon on the closer of the two main lines. But then the other track went green. What the …? Minutes later, we had our answer: the heritage unit zipping right along on the normal westbound main. Cue the sun. Click. Ah. It was indeed the consolation prize that I desired.
As they say on the game shows, “but, wait, there’s more!” As I was driving off, the gates drop again and third westbound with a former UP SD90MAC now in the NS fold rolls on the normal eastbound track. The dispatcher is trying to hustle his freight out ahead of Amtrak’s Empire Builder. In doing so, he’s lifted my spirits and made me forget about the head cold, the jet lag, and the friends eating up rare mileage and burning up pixels hundreds of miles away.
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