This week has been another business trip to Chicago. This was all finished yesterday afternoon, so I picked up a hire car and headed for Elkhart Indiana.
Elkhart is my favourite location on Virtual Railfan, a godsend during the lockdown.
Elkhart is smallish town in northern Indiana, about 120 miles from downtown Chicago, there is a decent hotel on main street, where I'm staying, and I can see the trains from my 8th floor room, I can also hear them very clearly, but fortunately they didn't keep me awake last night.
Elkhart is the junction for the Grand Elk railway, this runs to Grand Rapids, via Kalamazoo, there appears to be branch train arriving each day, usually about mid morning, hauled by a pair of SD40s, which then returns sometime in the afternoon. The plan to head towards Kalamazoo and photograph the train on the way into Elkhart. However the weather forecast for today was terrible, heavy rain all day long.
As it was only drizzling when I got up about 7, I decided to go see what was happening down at the station. Elkhart typically gets 120 trains a day passing through on what was the New York Central mainline between New York and Chicago, it is now Norfolk Southern, but you can see anyones locos and you do get Canadian Pacific trains and loaded east bound coal trains hauled by BNSF.
This was the first train I got to photograph this morning.
It is about 8am in the morning, well after dawn but the weather is grim, light rain is falling.
Next up it was the turn of amtrak to arrive with the Lake Shore Ltd from New York
I was about to head back to the hotel for breakfast when I heard the crossing bells ringing again to see this.
This is a caboose leading one of the locals that run from Elkharts huge marshalling yard. I asked in virtual railfan where it was going and the reply was to Brank Plastics in Goshen. Goshen is about 10 miles to the south of Elkhart, but they are almost one large town.
This is the engine doing all the work GP38-2 number 5624
Having seen the local head off in this direction many times on virtual railfan, I knew it would be several hours before it returned, so plenty of time for breakfast.