As a hot summer sun rises in the clear, July sky, a 130-car eastbound North Antelope Mine, WY to Oak Creek, WI loaded coal train (UP CNAOK 17) hustles through the town of Cortland and past the Chicago & Northwestern style searchlights that still guard the control point here. The train will hop off this line 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 to head east. Once on the Lake Sub (Milwaukee-Kenosha Sub connector), the train will merge onto the Kenosha Subdivision at KO Tower (Lake Bluff, IL), continuing to head compass north, for the remainder of its trip to the power plant at Oak Creek. Solid strings of Wisconsin Electric Power Company (WEPX) bethgon coal hoppers make up these Oak Creek trains. Cortland sits at milepost 55.4 on Union Pacific's busy, east-west Geneva Subdivision between the towns of Dekalb (west) and Maple Park (east), eighty three and a half miles east of Clinton, IA.
