One story that keeps coming around about the 1967 snow storm was with no
place to put the snow, the Burlington along with many other Chicago railroads
loaded snow into any open gondola and hopper and sent it SOUTH! I was in 5th
grade at that time here in Aurora. Our old Corvair Station Wagon was one of the
.It is no story.
With my usual incredible sense of timing, I decided to spend the night of the
Big Snow with a college buddy and fellow Model Railroader.
We met for a drink in the Loop after work and walked over to the IC station to
catch the train to his house in Chicago Heights...... it never
dawned on us that the snow coming down HARD was out of the ordinary....nor the
thousand people waiting to get on the IC was also a sign!
We finally got to 211th Street at 11pm.... where we were told the only thing
moving was a National Guard 6x6 truck taking people to the
Midolothian Town Hall.... which didn't sound like a place we wanted to spend
the night. So we went over to the IC Tavern to wait for the next
train back downtown, which we finally caught at 3am.
After bucking drifts and many changes of track we made it back to Randolph
Street Station at 5am..... from where we walked over down the middle of
deserted, unplowed streets to Union Station and waited for the first train from
Aurora to come in. It ran only about 5 minutes late and must have had about
4 feet of snow on the cab car end.
We pulled out on time sometime around 6:30am and made it to Brookfield slightly
off the advertised because of the slower loading/unloading times
due to snow on the platforms... When we passed Clyde Yard I remember seeing
backhoes and cranes loading snow into and onto any car that didn't have
a load.... so the story is not an urban legend but is true.
Service was somewhat disrupted for the next few days as there were so many
people riding the trains that the Collectors couldn't move through the cars....
there was tight standing room only on the upper decks and getting down to the
center doors in time to get off for your stop was a real challenge! The Q
people and plant really performed superbly through the whole ordeal..... I can
only imagine what would happen now if we got such a snow....I doubt Ft. Worth
and Metra would be able to repeat the performance!!!
Charlie Vlk
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