Once upon a time, the New York Central's mainline from Indianapolis to St. Louis crossed the Wabash River at Terre Haute and embarked upon a roundabout journey across Illinois, visiting such exotic locales as St. Mary of the Woods (the favorite place to visit for every male college student in Terre Haute), Paris (where people don't speak French), Charleston (home of the Jimmy John's sub chain), Shelbyville (which the Simpsons have not visited) and Pana (originally founded with the unusual name of Stone Coal Precinct). Small towns notwithstanding, this was an important line for the Central, and it eventually rated a complete signal system -- which was of sufficiently high quality that Conrail later cannibalized the whole thing to serve as replacements for the position-light signals on its ex-Pennsy mainline that provided a much more direct route from Terre Haute to St. Louis. Late on a sunny spring evening many years later, local J721 rolls through the hamlet of Vermilion on its journey to Paris, about to pass foundations that once supported the signals of CP-83 -- a silent, subtle reminder of what used to exist in this rural town. Scanned from Provia 100F.
