Subscribe
Jobs
Cars
Real Estate
Apts
Classifieds
Shop
The concept of a high-speed rail system for Indiana has been pushed for years, and it sounds like a great concept: Make it to Chicago in a couple of hours, Indianapolis in less than that.
Railroad buffs will tell you, though, that all this talk of fast trains is nothing new. Sixty years ago, trains traveling at downright scary speeds zipped across the state.
One run made by the Nickel Plate Railroad that specialized in perishable produce made the run from Chicago to New York in 15 hours. Another train chugging out of Fort Wayne was named the Flying Saucer because of its speed.
Passenger trains headed for Chicago routinely went 80 to 100 mph, and the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks between Fort Wayne and Chicago were a popular place just to see what a train could do. Trains hit speed records of 110 to 135 mph on that route, and those were sustained speeds, not brief top ends, according to members of the Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society.
Some of those original high-speed trains still exist. One is the old 765 steam locomotive, which was built in 1944 and could hit 90 mph.
For most of the past 40 years, that locomotive has sat, either on display or stored away. But in 2005 the locomotive was completely rebuilt, and then, thanks to some exceptional cooperation from regular railroads, it underwent successful test runs. But it hasn’t pulled a passenger car since 1993.
That changes Memorial Day weekend.
The gigantic old locomotive will pull out of its garage in New Haven, hauling a string of passenger cars behind it, and head for North Judson in Starke County and the Hoosier Valley Railroad Museum. Over that weekend, it will make three excursions each day on Saturday, Sunday and Memorial Day, making a round trip from North Judson to LaCrosse and back. Each trip is about two hours.
Tickets for those rides are $25 for children 12 and younger and $30 for adults, and can be ordered online at www.765.org.
On June 20 and 21, the train will offer the same round-trip excursion.
Then in July, the train will head for Owosso, Mich., where it will take part in TrainFestival – an event that claims to be this year’s biggest celebration of railroading in the country.
Don’t look for any record-breaking speed runs on these inaugural trips. The old locomotive, though it could hit 90 mph, won’t be part of any high-speed resurgence in Indiana. The tracks it travels will limit it to speeds of 15 to 30 mph, about the right speed for an afternoon trip through the countryside.
The July TrainFestival in Owosso is expected to draw large crowds, but ticket sales for the North Judson event this month have been slow in the early going, said Kelly Lynch, communications director for the railroad historical society. One reason is that the train hasn’t had a passenger run for 16 years, he said. The train and its excursions need to be reinserted into the public consciousness, Lynch says.
The possibilities don’t stop there, Lynch says. Once the train has successfully traveled 1,000 miles, it will be eligible to use Amtrak lines and could conceivably be used to make high-speed – 60 mph – runs to Chicago.
First, it has to find passengers willing to buy tickets for the inaugural excursions, an important hurdle since it costs thousands of dollars a day just to operate the train.
