Amtrak
6:51 am
Tue June 19, 2012
Amtrak Investigates Delay
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Amtrak passengers heading from Carbondale to Chicago had an unscheduled stop, and, as Dave Dahl reports, an unpleasant one.
An unscheduled stop lasted about four hours for a Carbondale-to-Chicago Amtrak run Sunday evening.
Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari says the Illini experienced a still-undetermined mechanical problem about 7:30 and stopped near Paxton, approximately 30 miles north of Champaign.
Passengers were kept on board, despite the lack of air conditioning and everything else electric. Magliari says that was for safety reasons.
“Although it was certainly unpleasant, it was safer to keep passengers on the train and not disembark them at a place that’s not designed to be a place where people can step on and off the train and be somewhere near corn fields and bean fields,” he said.
Magliarisays with the help of a freight train and a southbound Amtrak train, the Illini was pushed out the way until the problem could be corrected. The delay lasted almost four hours.