I just caught the post about stopping the Eastbound freight trains to make the set out at the IHB at Congress Park. I grew up a block from the Q tracks at Maple Avenue. It seemed that several times a year we would hear a loud "Ka-Boom" at the IHB interchange (South Wye), mostly at nite. It seems the grade from La Grange Road to Maple Avenue was not clearly understood by all engineers. They would get their train stopped, make the cut, pull ahead, the switch was thrown, and when backing up the train started to roll into the backing interchange cut. I saw at least two to three derailments a year being cleaned up, one with the livestock running loose from the stock cars. Day or nite, every time I heard the loud boom, I'd get on my bike and run to the tracks to what happened. During the day, I'd see a freight slowing for the set out on the IHB. I'd watch the action and see what would happen. One time I saw the brakeman seeing the train rolling forward,
quickly reset the switch straight, threw his fusee high in the air for the engineer to stop, and ran away from the tracks. He let the cars hit straight on with a big boom but no derailment. Later on the set outs to the IHB got smaller and not as often. That's part of life growing up next to the three train mainline.
Another little problem was the grade from Brookfield over Salt Creek, thru Hollywood to Riverside (Des Plaines River Bridge). I saw a number of long freights, after making their set out at Congress Park, slowly get their train rolling but stall trying to get up over the bridge. Of course that would tie up all the road crossings between Maple Avenue and Riverside. This was the F-Unit days and I wonder if the "Q" was maybe reducing the power off the mainline freights at Eola or somewhere for utilization purposes, or were some of the units DIT and not running.