The New York Central was one of America's largest operating railroads in the United States northeast throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Headquartered in, you guessed it, New York City, the railroad was known as the "Water Level Route" for its extensive miles of steel highway along the Great Lakes region with tracks serving the states of New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois. Far less acclaimed was the railroad's Egyptian Line on the western edge of their operating map which connected the sprawling urban mass of Chicago to the "Little Egypt" delta lands of Illinois' southern third. February 1968 saw the New York Central absorb the Pennsylvania Railroad which became the Penn Central who shortly after filed for bankruptcy in 1970. Conrail, formed by the federal government to purchase potentially profit rich railroad lines from multiple bankrupt carriers including the Penn Central, abandoned the Egypt Line in the mid-1990s after finding no real use for it. Most of this track has been out of service in the years ever since. However, a handful of small sections still remain active with the clickity-clack of steel wheels on polished rails including this short jog linking the town of Stewart, IN with the KB&S former NKP Peoria Line via a single switch in the farmland between Ambia and Talbot. Becoming part of the Kankakee Beaverville & Southern shortline in 1994, this small 10-mile branch became officially known as the "Bee Line Railroad." Here, 25 empty company grain hoppers from Stockland, IL to the elevator at Stewart rock back and forth over the Bee Line's jointed rail south of the connection with a pair of the company's GP38M-2 locomotives running in a 1x1 push-pull fashion. With its better days long gone, the now defunct distance signal for the Nickel Plate connection at Handy Tower still stands, hanging its head in an inverted fashion after many years of neglect. Negative 20 degree weather along with the accompanying holiday of Martin Luther King Jr. Day weren't enough to keep the KB&S huddled away on this chilly Sunday morning in January.
