A blog for remembering abandoned transportation routes, ghost towns, forgotten places, and Earth's interesting creations.
January 7th 2008 - A Tornado Meets a Train
Get link
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps
January 7th, 2008 was the apex of an unseasonably warm early January weather pattern in the Chicago area. O'Hare airport, where Chicago's official weather records are observed, recorded a record high of 65 degrees that day, just two degrees shy of the all-time high temperature in the entire month of January. Nearby, Gary, Indiana actually hit 70 degrees that day.
While meteorologists were predicting rain and thunderstorms in a pattern more typical of early May than January, no one could have predicted a tornado would accompany the storms.
Weather conditions deteriorated very quickly in the early afternoon as a storm system approached the area. And just before 3:30pm near Poplar Grove, IL, a tornado formed.
The storm moved northeast along a line running just north of Poplar Grove, Capron, Harvard, Hebron, and Richmond, before moving across into Wisconsin and weakening significantly. At its strongest, the tornado measured an EF3, with sustained winds of 136-165mph.
Easily the most iconic visual from the storm was the impact it had on a Union Pacific train that was traveling at the time, causing a derailment and evacuation as the result of a hazmat spill. The video is below, and you may have already seen it before!
Destruction of property along the 100 yard width of the storm was significant, although no fatal injuries were attributed to the storm. Nonetheless, four people were killed in tornadoes as part of the larger severe weather outbreak in the Southern US.
Ground-level view of house northeast of Poplar Grove destroyed by EF3 tornado. (NWS Chicago)
In addition to the tornado outbreak, significant flooding occurred with these storms, especially in the village of Watseka, IL. Less than two weeks later, temperatures were below zero in the area, making efforts to clean up after the floods that occurred south of Chicago very difficult, and a great reminder of weather's unpredictable nature.
This is a cross-post with my new blog Today in Weather History, if you like reading about weather history daily, please consider reading!
As somebody who enjoyed watching trains, but was not an employee of the railroad industry ( at least growing up ), when I would interact with railfans and historians, there was often a lot of technical jargon that applied only to the railroad industry thrown back and forth that made it difficult for a newcomer to understand what they were talking about. For example, what is a dinky? It's actually a passenger train. This non-inclusive language seems to keep the loop closed to members of the community, and to uncouple (no pun intended) that technical jargon and help make it easier for people to communicate with people in the industry, I am creating a list of railroad vocabulary that I'm hoping will make the industry more transparent. BNSF 2361 . Image: Matt Flores While I ultimately believe that such technical jargon has no place outside of perhaps technical communications between employees, I know quite well that I alone am not going to stop people from communicating in a non-i
Filmmaker John Hughes made a number of iconic movies in the 1980's, such as Planes Trains & Automobiles , and Ferris Buellers Day Off , two of my all time personal favorites. Shermer High School from The Breakfast Club . The building once housed Maine North High School . It still stands and is owned as use for offices (and kept in terrible shape) by the State of Illinois. Many of his films were located in/around the North Shore of the Chicago suburbs. Several of these were specifically located in a fictional town called Shermer. As Jay and Silent Bob would find out (link is NOT for children) in Dogma , there is no Shermer in Illinois. That being said however, there are numerous real-life references from where Hughes likely took inspiration for the town, including its former name. Shermer is largely based on the Northbrook, Illinois, which was originally named Shermerville . It was, and remains, a stop on the Milwaukee Road, now known as Northbrook Station on Metra's Mil
As we've done for the States of Illinois , Rhode Island and Florida , we've completed a static map of Abandoned and Out of Service Railroad Lines based on the abandonments, railbanked corridors, and out-of-service lines in the State of Washington. Abandoned/Out-of-Service Railroad Corridors in Washington State, 2021. FRRandP creation in QGIS using Mapbox Streets v10 as a background and state/county lines from US Census data. Clicking on this image will bring up the map in its original size. This data was gathered by us over the last five years and is available on our Abandoned & Out of Service Railroad Lines Map , and where we had missing/incomplete data, we pulled data from the WSDOT GIS Data Catalog , who maintains a shapefile of railroads active and abandoned in the State. Neither ours nor WSDOT's data is completely encompassing however, as there are numerous logging railroads that have not been mapped, many of which have little/no traces left, similar to our map in
Comments
Post a Comment