Bill Vandervoort
At the Steel Yard, home of the Gary South Shore RailCats minor league baseball team. There are railroad themes to the game experience.
An actual K5LA locomotive horn is used to get the crowd fired up, visible towards the top of this photo. The Steel Yard is located a few blocks east of the Gary Metro Center station, served by NICTD/South Shore Line. The South Shore Line is just on the other side of the left field scoreboard.
The one train which sometimes confused me as a child was what I later learned was known as the "James Whitcomb Riley". This was a passenger train, but it had "freight" locomotives (GP7's) from the New York Central Railroad. My mother used to point out a car on that train painted blue yellow and silver. This was a Chesapeake and Ohio Railway sleeping car which, upon the train's arrival in Cincinnati, would be switched to the C&O's "Sportsman" to continue east into West Virginia. One of the few times that I haven't lived in Chicago was when I was 3 years old, when our family briefly lived in West Virginia, then New Jersey. It was this train which carried us for that move to West Virginia.
Another time I lived away from Chicago was at 10 years old, when our family lived in the Netherlands for a year. More on that later. But after becoming familiar with the railways of the Netherlands and other European countries, I concluded that the United States is too dependent on private automobiles. I feel lucky to live in Chicago, where I can get around without driving. I grew up riding the Illinois Central electric commuter trains, which at the time used the old heavyweight MU cars built in 1926. Those old cars were replaced with the new bilevel "Highliner" cars in 1971 and 1972, IC sold the commuter operation to Metra in 1987, and by 2016 the Highliner cars were replaced with new stainless steel bilevel cars. But unfortunately, political circumstances has resulted in Metra to be a less attractive transportation option within the city, with the less efficient CTA express buses having emerged as the more popular option.