Can You Top This? by Stanwood C. Griffith Continued from the Spring
Can You Top This? By Stanwood C. Griffith Continued from the Spring 2009 First & Fastest While I was in college at Champaign, Illinois, in 1947-1948, I had a car. A group of trolley fans were glad to help me get some good out of it, and we used to do fantrips to Iowa. We did plenty to St. Louis too, but we had the Illinois Terminal to furnish the transportation there. Speaking of the Illinois Terminal, you may add St. Louis, and the St. Louis Waterworks railway. Not everyone has ridden this. On one of our Iowa trips we stopped at the Rock Island Southern Galesburg switching yard. They had a big beautiful box express motor bought from the Eastern Michigan Railway when they abandoned, but it was out of service. This car lives on though in the 2’ gauge, half-scale box motor, on the Rock River Valley Traction line. This particular day they were switching with a CD&M passenger car with the back half of the body cut off making a freight deck. One of these Iowa trips was a Fort Dodge trip from Des Moines all the way out the Rockwell City line. This was the line where several months later, a Fort Dodge steeple cab with a train ran into the middle of another train already actively occupying a steam railroad crossing. From Rockwell City we went back to the main line to Fort Dodge, then up to Fort Dodge, and east to Webster City. There was a very strong wind blowing from the northwest and the trip outbound to Rockwell was not too fast, but the wind pushed the car along at high speed to the east.
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