It's Alive! Chicago Terminal Still Active Out of North Avenue Yard!

[TBurke]

I spoke to a Chicago Terminal representative on Saturday who was at TrainFest in Milwaukee (West Allis) with the Iowa Pacific display. 

He stated that the operation based out of the North Avenue Yard is still in operation and they switch out Sipi Metals as needed.  They hope to restore service to General Iron which wants to use rail again but the cost to replace the wiring that vandals stripped out of the bridge is $10K.  The intention is to repair the bridge and reinstate service on the east side of the river.  When Finkl was there security guards of the steel plant kept an eye on things and with it gone there is less protection.

Here are photos I took yesterday of two gondolas on the Sipi spur.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/39092860@N06/30923324721/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/39092860@N06/30923324341/in/photostream/

[Jsu]

This is really amazing.  Nice to know there will still be some traffic for me to hopefully catch in the future.

[chrism]

Great news, I wonder why they were talking about turning this part into a bike trail.

[Jsu]

I was reading about a few similar urban & suburban switching lines in and around the Seattle area, and in similar cases there, people jump on the idea of converting any semi-underused (or even regularly used, but just 'inconveniently' placed) rail lines into bike trails.  I love to bike and all, and I love riding on rail-trails for many reasons, but pushing for the conversion of still-used rails to bike usage just isn't right on many levels.  On the upside, with rail-trails at least the ROW is preserved instead of bieng built over.

[cnwnorthline]

I was thinking the other day that this sounds kind of familiar.  I wonder if we're going to have another Whole Foods incident on our hands.  Are they just saying that General Iron is coming back on as leverage to get the most cash for the ROW from the trail builders?  If so, we could enjoy some nice STB reports again soon.

-Matt