I have mentioned in another blog about how I spent a day in Chicago courtesy of Amtrak due to a late arrival and missed connection. The main reason was a very wet thunderstorm resulting in a flash flood warning restricting all trains in the area of the warning to 20 mph or less.
That was an isolated incident on top of chronic problems caused by weather this summer. As a matter of fact every Amtrak east-west cross country route west of the Mississippi was affected in a major way this summer.
First, the Empire Builder running from Chicago to the Pacific northwest was affected by the major floods in Minot, ND, this spring and early summer. For a couple of months in late spring the train only ran from Chicago to St. Paul and from Havre , MT, to Seattle, with nothing running between St. Paul and Havre.
Second in this same time period, with the Missouri River downstream from North Dakota in flood due to the same rains that flooded Minot, the California Zephyr did not run from Chicago to Denver, running only from Denver west to San Francisco.
Tracks were flooded in the Omaha, NE, area, affecting not only railroads but major highways such as I-29 north-south through Council Bluffs, IA.
In driving west through Blair, NE, in August, my wife and I went through about two miles of US Highway 30 that was sandbagged due to this flood. Though the flood was going down by then, high water was still evident everywhere.
Third, the Southwest Chief running between Chicago and Los Angeles had to be rerouted around Raton Pass this spring due to the fires in New Mexico.
Finally, my brother who works for Union Pacific told me that UP had put a speed restriction on the route the Sunset Limited follows between New Orleans and Los Angeles due to the drought in Texas and New Mexico.
The ground is so dry that massive cracks are opening up. Where these cracks are in rail roadbed, the ballast is falling down into them creating instability in the track and its roadbed necessitating the speed restrictions.
This indeed was a summer of record flood and record drought. Not only in North Dakota but also in the Northeast US were there record floods. I have no report of how the railroads were affected in the Northeast, particularly in Vermont, but I would imagine there were some major problems. Which goes to show that even the railroads can be affected by the weather.
--Dale
Comments