More than 500 passengers spent the night aboard three Amtrak trains stranded near downstate Mendota by ice and snow that had drifted over the tracks, officials said.
The trains -- the Southwest Chief from Los Angeles, the Illinois Zephyr from Quincy and the California Zephyr from the San Francisco Bay area -- were halted around 5 p.m. Monday about 80 miles west of Chicago, according to Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari.
This morning, Amtrak began moving passengers on two of the trains onto buses bound for Chicago. The third train was backed into Princeton, where passengers were being served breakfast, Amtrak said. No injuries were reported.
'It's a fairly remote area in Bureau County where the tracks go through something like a trench,' Magliari said. 'The trench itself was full of snow and ice and we couldn't just push though it.
'So it was safer to leave passengers on the trail with full hotel systems, with light and heat and toilet systems -- all overnight -- rather than transfer people through the trench in the snow at minus 5 temperatures and transfer them to buses,' Magliari said.
He said Amtrak officials were in contact with emergency responders in case passengers encountered problems.
Posted by Unknown on Tuesday, January 7, 2014 - Rating: 4.5
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