Some morning cloud cover begins to build in the sky as eastbound loaded coal drag UP CNAOK 16 snakes on into Rochelle as it ducks beneath a pair of still standing C&NW style searchlight signals that guard the UP/BNSF xing here. Rochelle sits at milepost 75.3 on Union Pacific's busy east-west Geneva Subdivision. Loaded at the North Antelope Mine out in Wyoming's Powder River Basin, the 130 loaded hoppers are headed for the Oak Creek Power Plant (Oak Creek South), which is a coal-fired generating station that sits on the banks of Lake Michigan near the town of Oak Creek, WI. The train will hop off the Geneva Subdivision and onto the Milwaukee Sub at Proviso (Chicago), IL for a short, 30 mile jog north until swinging a right onto the only 2-mile long Lake Subdivision. Once on the Lake Sub (Milwaukee-Kenosha Sub connector), the train will merge back north onto the Kenosha Subdivision at KO Tower (Lake Bluff, IL) for the remainder of its trip to the power plant at Oak Creek. Solid strings of Wisconsin Electric Power Company (WEPX) coal cars make up these Oak Creek trains. PTC replacements have since gone up here, signalling the end of these classic signals.
