Five Miles Away

I often feel that the Midwest gets a bad reputation for being nothing but flat. Table-top boring-ness for as far as the eye can see. For the most part, though, this is an undeserved assumption. Yet there are a few places where the flatness is definitely not a myth. One such completely horizontal place is the area around Laura, IL. The rich, black Illinois soil stretches for miles in all directions from the small town of Laura, as flat as a ping-pong table. The BNSF’s fast mainline from Chicago to the West Coast takes advantage of this terrain here, though. As many as 80 intermodal trains per day fly through Laura, leaving the small town in their dust. Between topping out of the Illinois River valley at Edelstein, 17 miles east, to dropping down into the Spoon River valley at Dahinda, 10 miles to the west, the speedy fleet of trailers and containers moving along the BNSF’s Chillicothe Subdivision don’t encounter many obstacles to drop their speed below the 70mph allowed.

I’d always noticed how far away you could see the railroad around Laura. From just off the I-74 off ramp at Brimfield, you can make out lines of containers moving on the horizon. On the way back from shooting yesterday, I decided to stop off along IL Route 78 and wait for a train to show up on the horizon. I didn’t wait long. Across the flat prairie, I could see a solid line of containers moving west. And this is the time of year to execute a shot like this. Not only is the corn harvested, making this kind of thing impossible in the summer, but the cold crisp air cuts down on the heat waves coming off the ground. This makes the image a bit sharper than it would even a month later in the year. And it wasn’t until I got home that I truly figured out how far away that train was from my vantage point. I used mapmyrun.com to compute the distance. Five miles. Sure is flat out here.