Waiting on the Train in Trempealeau: SP 4449 Makes a Rare Appearance

Usually if you are waiting on a train, you plan to get aboard. No so for the many people who gathered along the tracks in Trempealeau. They waited in anticipation. They followed tweets on Twitter. They clung to cell phones calling friends spread geographically along the track. Some stood, Ed sat. All hoped to get a photo, a video, a glimpse of the world famous steam engine SP 4449.

The Southern Pacific Daylight no. 4449, manufactured in 1941, was among the last mainline steam locomotives to be built. Coming out of retirement, SP 4449 is traveling across America on an Amtrak sponsored trip hauling passengers on a rare excursion.

Just by luck, Ed and I stopped in Trempealeau, Wisconsin on the morning of Saturday, July 18^th as we traveled along The Great River Road. A train enthusiast told us about engine SP 4449. He’d driven for more than 2-hours from his home to be trackside. With each rumble of the tracks, he and others jumped with excitement. These false-alarms were diesel engines hauling industrial cars on the tracks across the Mississippi River.

More waiting. Someone got a call! “The train just breezed through Cochrane,” he announced to anyone wanting a progress report. Serious calculations began – time and distance – guesses about arrival time rumored through the waiting crowd.

Soon we could felt the vibration of the ground and glimpsed the puff of steam. The engine approached without slowing at all. Someone with a stopwatch clocked 62 mph. SP 4449 thundered past then faded as quickly as it appeared.

July 18, 2009

Tempealeau: Along The Great River Road

Boondocking in the Village of Cochrane

The population of 435 people in the Village of Cochrane, Wisconsin increased by two recently. Ed and I stopped there for a night as we traveled on Wisconsin State Road 35, otherwise known as the “Great River Road.”

We found a church parking lot that wasn’t quite big enough for our 40-foot long Prevost “Dolly’s Pride.” For the moment, we parked there anyway just to walk around town and find a more appropriate spot. We didn’t walk more than a few feet. A woman got out of her compact car to take a photo of the church so we asked her about where we might boondock for the night.

She knew the community well. She grew up here. This had been where she went to church. Across the street, she fondly remembered as the home of her aunt who ran the town gas station and lived upstairs above the pumps. As she reminisced, we noticed her adolescent grandson squirming in the car. He had accompanied her back “home” so she could show him the place of his family roots. She said we could follow her to the community park, a place where “nobody will mind you staying the night.”

Nobody minded that “Dolly’s Pride” took up all the parking spaces in the small lot across from the village swimming pool. Nobody minded that the two of us dined lakeside in a picnic pavilion with seating for 60. Nobody minded that we feed the ducks waddling under the drooping branches of the ancient trees. And, nobody minded that we pressed our faces to the fence and watched a herd of reindeer graze.

July 16, 2009

Scenes from The Great River Road