Posted on 01/07/2014 8:51:21 AM PST by afraidfortherepublic
About 500 passengers aboard three Amtrak trains were stranded overnight in a remote part of northern Illinois because of blowing and drifting snow, Amtrak officials said today.
The trains were halted late Monday near Mendota, about 80 miles west of Chicago. The passengers were aboard the Southwest Chief from Los Angeles, the Illinois Zephyr from Quincy, Ill., and the California Zephyr from the San Francisco Bay area, Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari told The Associated Press.
The trains became stuck around 4:15 p.m. ET Monday after they hit a 12-foot snow drift that paralyzed the engines, passenger Bryan Plummer told ABC News today by cellphone.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
EXACTLY . . . I live 25 east of Mendota and certainly do not consider it “remote”.
We had power for around an hour, then the lights went out, then it got cold. I mean COLD.
It was the middle of the night.
It took another several hours for the front part to come back and pick us up.
I remember thinking, what the HELL would we do if they didn't come back and left us there?
That part of ND is so isolated, I remember thinking, even if I got out and walked for help, there wasn't a house within 30 miles.
We'd be dead.
Seems like every year or two someone freezes to death because they tried to walk to that farmhouse just over there...
Distances on the prairie can be deceiving, especially at night. What looks a half mile away is often much farther.
Best to stay with shelter. If you can't read the house number, or count the steps to the front door, it is likely too far to walk in subzero cold. Very few people dress for the weather (even here in ND) adequately enough to be out in it any length of time, and a half hour can kill you.
When he was in the Air Force in the early '60s, a couple of buddies and he got drunk while parked on a remote highway in Montana in the deep winter. Once they sobered up, the car wouldn't start, so he walked to some farmhouse many miles away.
He made it, and woke up the VERY unhappy farmer, but the guy came out and helped jump start their car.
My husband and I are doing an experiment on the dumb voters in our lives. We are saying this weather is caused by global warming in the same way you can actually freeze water by boiling it for a long time. It is our monthly, stump the socialists scheme.
actually, Mendota is pretty remote. You get there after leaving US hiway 58 at Hiltons.
It is home to the Carter Family Fold, the home of the Carter Family , country music and June Carter Cash, wife of Johnny Cash.
The Southwest Chief runs right through my little town, and the route has been cancelled the last two days. There is just no getting through yet.
“It is home to the Carter Family Fold, the home of the Carter Family , country music and June Carter Cash, wife of Johnny Cash.”
Does she still live there?
No, she died years ago.
The Carter Fold is now run by sons and maybe grandsons.
It is still Mecca and most desired credit for blue grass bands
One other totally irrelevant factoid.
On Clinch Mountain, there is the obsolete Mendota Fire Tower. It is on the mountain just over Mendota
Every fall, lots of bird watchers climb the mountain to make a continuous watch and count of raptors. It is all rigorously mapped out so there is always someone there during the migration to make the count.
The hawks of all species migrating south follow the Clinch mountain line by the thousands. The faithful bird watchers meticulously spot, identify and record the passages. It is said that the continuous air currents up lifted by the extremely long Clinch Mountain ridgeline make soaring easier thus reducing the burden of the long flight south.
If you are a bird person and want to see lots of raptors of all species, the Mendota Fire Tower is the place to go.
I think the locomotive could not get traction on the rails. From what I gather the train had slowed down and then could not get traction on the steel rails.
Not just these three...
The Cardinal was stuck in Indianapolis due to frozen switches.
Amtrak put them up in the Crown Plaza overnight, but local media, showing the stranded Greyhound passengers sleeping in the station, made it appear Amtrak left them all on their own, and sleeping on the floor.
Did that occur in December of 1997? If so, we were on the same train.
No, must have been 1990.
“Engines” here doesn’t mean the internal engines of the locomotives. It’s a general reference to the locomotives themselves. The protestation that the sentence is somehow bad journalism isn’t justified, it simply requires some abstract thinking while reading.
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