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The bridge in the background is the old highway #80 bridge. There used to be a small wooden/steel bridge east of the highway bridge that was closed about 1970 and now has been removed and the photo may have been taken from that. I would like to speculate on what westbound train this is. I am assuming that the picture was taken in the early 1960s, probably on one of the steam trips as the late Robert Collins lived in New Jersey. If I am wrong on these speculations please correct me. The time that the pic was taken appears to be around noon, too early for #97 from Cicero. If the train had just arrived it must have been a very late running #81 from Cicero which usually arrived around dawn as the junction then with the line from Galesburg then was at Savanna tower near the highway bridge and a westbound from Galesburg would have to pull down to the west end and then back into the yard. However if this was a westbound that had just been made up in Savanna Yard from #81 from Cicero and #97 or a section thereof from Galesburg, the noon time would be about right. The Q in the sixties usually ran an extra west out of Savanna in the late morning or around noon that ran off the above trains. On some days two extra wests would be run several hours apart in that time frame. There is about 7000 feet of clearance between this point and the west end of the yard and these late morning extra wests could run up to 150 cars in length so this train being a long extra west that has just had its caboose attached makes sense to me. The rest of the story is that much of my information on the train times at Savanna in the 1960s comes from the late Robert Malinoski, a close friend of Robert Collins who took the picture. Dick Eisfeller Big “E” Productions Greenland, NH 800-832-1228
I will shortly be releasing a new DVD showing all of the trains through Savanna in the fall of 2013.
And I grew up ten miles from Savanna in Mount Carroll. __._,_.___ Posted by: bigeee@trainvideos.com __,_._,___ |