ABOVE: Big power rules on Sub 2 this day as a local BUSW crew is heading through Henry, Ill., to make a trade with the Tazewell & Peo- ria interchange in Peoria. Crews will swap 30 grain empties for a heavy loaded coal train, on December 11, 2009. LEFT: The freshly paint- ed 513 is seen on her maiden voyage to the east with CBBI (Council Bluffs-Blue Island), working the small yard at Iowa City while westbound counterpart BICB awaits its turn on January 24, 2010.
that take care of switching and indus- trial work amongst the various termi- nals. On the east side of operations, there are Blue Island, Bureau, Silvis, Rock Island and Iowa City Switchers, symboled BISW, BUSW, SISW, RISW, and ICSW respectively. All the jobs mainly take care of inter-
change traffic and local yard work, with the exception of the BUSW, which can actually do quite a bit of main line run- ning. Nicknamed “The Rocket” after Rock Island’s famous Peoria Rocket, BUSW has two crews, one called at 8:00 a.m. daily, and 8:00 p.m. Monday through Friday. The three main jobs for BUSW are making the run to Peoria and back with interchange grain or coal
with the Tazewell & Peoria or to work a rather large industrial park in Henry; operating east to Utica to interchange with CSX and work the Buzzi Unichem Cement interchange in LaSalle; or make the run all the way west to Silvis with cars to alleviate traffic from the east or west trains. Traffic and indus- try work all varies on a day to day ba- sis. The easiest way to railfan this op- eration is to show up at Bureau before the crew goes on duty at 8:00 a.m., and see which direction they head. With the amount of traffic being for-
warded from Cedar Rapids eastward, there is the possibility of an extra east train operating out of Silvis for Blue Is- land symboled SIBI. Of course, using
the old adage, “what goes east must come west,” extra westbound move- ments are symboled BISI. In addition to these multiple day a week extras, there are a plethora of other extra and unscheduled trains that operate the east end, such as eastbound ethanol move ANBIU (Annawan, Ill., to Blue Island). There is also an ethanol plant located at Menlo, Iowa, just west of Des Moines, but these loads are usually picked up by the day’s east train, and switched out at Silvis to run the re- mainder of the way as an SIBI. West- bound empty ethanol moves are either combined with that day’s West train out of Blue Island, or are run as an ex- tra BISI train. Extra seasonal grain moves are also
very common, and can have a varying array of symbols. One popular one is a NTCR, (Newton, Iowa, to Cedar Rapids), as most western grain now goes to Cedar Rapids. Coal trains are also a bi-weekly occurrence on The Iowa, operated from Peoria to the ADM power plant in Cedar Rapids. Loads come from a mine in southern Illinois and are interchanged to the IAIS in Peoria from Norfolk Southern via the
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