thepdf.info sums up the history
Newton, IL, very well:
Newton was founded in 1828, platted in
1835, and incorporated in 1865. It was an important trading center
until the East-West railroad went through Olney and
shifted commerce there. That is what prompted the segment of the
G&M
between here and Olney to be built first. Newton is
also where the PD&E crossed the
line that would become the IC's line to Indianapolis; "The
High-Dry". It also had to cross the Embarrass River at this
location yet again. If one projects the line North-West from the
city at the same angle that it enters it from the South-East, the line
would have been a natural to follow on the West side of the Embarrass up
to Toledo, never having to had to cross it once, let alone twice.
One wonders if this was the original plan. The
PD&E depot was on
the Northwest corner of the diamond.
PD&E Abandonment
I waited until the leaves were off the trees and had my wife drive the stretch of IL-130 from Olney to Newton so that I could take pictures of the abandoned right-of-way (RoW). There is no place to pull off and stop near the wood trestle ruins, so I tested how well the camera could lock on a focus from a moving vehicle. The focus did OK. But I did a grab shot before I had the passenger window down, so I caught my reflection in that picture. But the pictures through the windshield came out OK.
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| 20150119 0128 |
The abandoned line has a high-tension power line next to it. That is how I spotted the RoW in the first place. In a
satellite image, you can see the right-of-way continued southwestish across a field after IL-130 turned south.
The RoW then joins IL-130. The grade is to the right (eastish) of the power line. In this stretch, the farmer has removed the grade. But further north, you can still see some of the grade.
And by the time you get to the woods, it has been left intact.
Along the woods you can see some small cuts and fills. As we get closer to the creek, it is just fill and...
...the fill gets deeper until we get to the wood trestle ruins (below).
Then we are back to fill. Is that brown line on top of the fill a rail?
There is a segment of the PD&E that goes south of the CN/IC track,
but from what I can see in a satellite image, that remnant ends at an
industry north of the trestle. Normally when they pull up the rails, they pull up all of them because they are worth money as steel scrap and because it probably changes the property tax rate. A
photo in
thepde.info was taken before the trees had a chance to cover everything.
Grain Elevators
At least one of the grain elevators next to the CN/IC/
Indianapolis Southern Railroad must be a major shipper of grain because when I was studying the satellite map I saw a cut of covered hoppers on a siding off the mainline.
And there were a lot covered hoppers parked on the PD&E remnant. But it has to be a lot more efficient loading cars by the
Tgm Grain elevator that is west of town because it has a long siding.
I included the bare white area in the lower-right corner because the photo below shows they were building a ground storage facility there. Remember, 2014 was a second year of bumper corn crops and the harvest was predicted to be more than the nation's storage capacity because there was still corn stored from the previous years harvest. See pictures near the end of
Onley' elevator to see how this pile of corn will be covered with plastic when the facility is full. If you look at
a corporate photo, you will notice that area was still a farmer's field.
By November 2014, the "corn pile area" was finished, and it was being filled.
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I zoomed into the camera's resolution from another photo to see the truck actively dumping grain into a portable auger elevator. You can see the grain coming out the end of the elevator on top of the pile. The truck is unusual because it is a regular construction dump truck rather than a grain truck.
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Jim Pearson Photography added
August 28, 2020 - Waiting on the fresh crew on a CN freight road pull west from the grain mill at Newton, Illinois and head for Effingham on CN’s Effingham Subdivision. Thanks to isaiah Bradford, Mike Jacobs, David Higdon Jr and everyone else on helping on our trip today in the Decatur, Illinois area! |
CN/IC Unit Grain Train
On this trip back to the Chicago area, I went west and north of Newton on IL-33 to Dieterich. I soon encountered an oncoming CN train. I took a couple of "car" pictures to establish that it was a unit grain train.
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