A Day On the UP Marion Subdivision and More!

On a nice, late August day in 2022, me and Brandon decided to take a trip down to the UP Marion Subdivision to see what was running between it and the BNSF Beardstown Subdivision in the joint section between Neilson Jct and Vienna Jct. In the later part of the morning, UP had already ran one coal load down to Cook Terminal in Metropolis, IL. This had led me to worry that we had missed the action since the word always was that Marion sub only saw 1 a day. Once Brandon arrived to my house in the afternoon, we decided to go down there anyways to check the area out. By the time we left Salem, UP was sending one out, giving us the option to catch something in case the Marion sub would be quiet, but this changed.
We had reached Benton and the UP Marion sub calls this southbound and says "You'll be meeting a coal loads at Benton." Finally! Another UP coal train bound for the Metropolis/Paducah area, so we raced down to Goreville. While deciding on spots because the goal was to hear this train scream up the grade at Goreville, we picked an S curve just south of town, only to realize we were past the summit once the train flew by and was in full dynamics.
Bummed that we didn't hear this thing get down on its knees at the hill, we raced south to get it again. We met up with it at Vienna Jct, or known otherwise as East Cypress by the BN, where the UP Marion sub ends and the BNSF regains its territory of the Beardstown Subdivision, and caught up with the train slowing down at Sill. Upon discovering a crew van on site at the west end of the siding, me and Brandon headed on down to EEI Joppa to get one last and final look of the plant in operation before it would cease operations at the first of September.
During this drive to/from the power plant, we had realized the BNSF was at the time working Joppa. After coming back and seeing the crew finishing up their work, we decided to hang out at West Sill and chat with the Van driver that was going to take the conductor of UP CBTIM to Cook terminal. After the BNSF local rolled by, the conductor got out, went into the van, and they took off as the engineer led the train the rest of the way to its final destination.
We decided from this point on to split, as nothing was planned out of Centralia on BN, and nothing was showing on UP's side, so we headed over to the Edgewood Cutoff. An idea was to check out 1 of 3 tunnels on the line, but due to time getting short and daylight was starting to deplete, we decided to find the nearest grade crossing to us, but also where the old coaling towers still stood. Sure enough, CN A406 showed up at the right time with a BNSF Warbonnet leader, and we got to watch them fly by.
After catching A406, we headed down to Metropolis for food, and then hit the road back to Salem. At this moment we saw that UP had another CBTIM planned to run, but we would know it wouldn't reach Goreville until midnight, so we called it a day, but decided to stop by Centralia on the way home to see if anything else was running. After getting what we saw there, then we headed to Salem to call it a night.
While we did not see much, it was well worth the road trip. It is definitely planned in the books to make another trip down to the Marion Subdivision at a time when both the BNSF and UP are running at a good time frame, hopefully sometime soon.