(The following story by Bill Wundram appeared on the Quad City Times website on June 25.)
DAVENPORT, Iowa — All aboard and all that good old Casey Jones railroad jargon. By the time you finish your morning coffee, I should be rollin’ along out of Chicago for the Quad-Cities on a half-mile-long passenger train pulled by a roaring steam locomotive.
We’re to be passengers, helping re-create the ride when East met West by rails — a reason for this Grand Excursion of 2004 that you’ve been reading all about.
At least 10 Quad-Citizens will join about 500 others from all over the world to board 17 vintage (if you call 1950s “vintage”) railroad coaches for the trip. It will be a sentimental journey, with smoke blowing, whistle tooting and sparks flying from No. 261, a 460,000-pound locomotive with six-foot wheels that are taller than many men.
We’ll chug out of Chicago and into the Quad-Cities, and along the way — through towns like Sandwich, Mendota and Bureau — we’re expected to be met by waving multitudes and railroad buffs following us along in cars. Some roads will be close enough for us to hear their honking.
We expect to roll into the Quad-Cities — by way of Galesburg — about 5:30 p.m., rumbling along tracks not far from places like The Mark in Moline. Fingers are crossed about the exact arrival time. Good old No. 261 is a huffing mammoth, but just in case — just in case, mind you — there will be a pair of 4,000 horsepower Amtrak diesel locomotives right behind the steam engine. You know what I mean, to give the old girl a push if she runs out of steam or some such thing.
If all goes well (we all know it will), that makes for a seven-hour trip to Modern Woodmen in Rock Island, where there will be much flag-waving and a special party for the Quad-City high and mighty.
Old No. 261, built in the height of World War II, is not exactly the Rocket streamliner that so many of us remember. Tracks and roadbeds are not the same. No. 261 is capable of god’s speed, but the days of leaving Chicago at 5:30 p.m. — dinner on the diner — and getting home to be tucked into bed by 8:30 are gone forever into railroad heaven’s timetable.
“Why, there was a straight-as-an-arrow stretch between Sheffield and Geneseo — about 40 miles — when the Rocket zipped along at 90 miles an hour,” says Tom Farance, a longtime railroad man who is superintendent of the Iowa, Chicago and Eastern Railroad Corp., which is helping to shepherd the Grand Excursion train from Chicago to the Quad-Cities.
Farance intends to climb into the cab after No. 261 arrives in Rock Island to take her across the Crescent Bridge into Davenport. Because of the locomotive’s weight and trail of coaches, railroaders feared it would be too much for the bridge. She’ll travel solo, to be reunited later in Davenport with the diesels, pulling the coaches.
A locomotive like No. 261 needs special attention. She carries 30,000 gallons of water to boil up all that steam and lots of coal to fire the boilers. So-o-o-o, in Davenport, she will take on water from a fire hydrant on Marquette Street, and there will be a truckload of coal to be loaded onto its tender on Schmidt Road.
It may be the last time for a loaded passenger train to thunder into the Quad-Cities from Chicago.
That is more than a little heartbreaking. Great-grandpa and great-grandma remember back in 1925 when 74 passenger trains were in and out of the Quad-Cities every 24 hours!