flowergirl
Train Attendant
- Joined
- May 17, 2010
- Messages
- 16
Back home after our 10-day cross country trip. Last night on southbound CNO, my 16-year-old daughter and I waited in corner hall [just beyond coffee and snack station] while car attendant made up beds in our roomette. We were going through Kankakee, Ill. and we heard what sounded like a tornado siren. After we got back into our roomette, I got on Weather Channel on my phone, and indeed, there was a tornado warning for Kankakee and other nearby areas. Shortly after, the train stopped. No announcements. My son, who was rooming with his father in roomette across from ours came to our door. He also heard the sirens. I found car attendant in his roomette and asked if train was stopped for storms. He said, "No, we are stopped because of a frieght having problems below us." A few minutes later, the dining car crew passed through and one of them stopped and told the CA, "I hope that freight gets here soon, so we can move. There's a tornado coming near here." Upon hearing this, my daughter became really frightened. I got my husband up to help calm her. I continued to monitor the warnings on Weather Channel, which said the tornado was a mile wide and traveling 40 mph. and was being followed by spotters. None of the other places other than Kankakee in the path of the storm were familiar to me. Finally, we heard the freight and our train started moving. As we moved along, we could see cars pulled off highways with lights on. Really creepy. We live near an interstate and in an area that gets storm/tornado warnings, but I have never seen cars pulled off the road like that. A few minutes later, we seemed to have left the threatened area and the lightening that filled sky to ground. I checked the stops ahead of us--Champaign and Centralia--and didn't find tornado warnings for them. This weather event was a sudden and scary surprise for me, since I had been monitoring the radar since the night before, traveling through Kansas on SWC.