The Champaign County Preservation Alliance hosted their annual train excursions on Sunday, Oct. 20 and welcomed 990 passengers to join the fun! The departure area staged on Miami Street included food trucks, registration area and train related merchandise sales. The three 90 minutes trips traveled to South Springfield and offered families and friends the opportunity to experience the rail travel of years past.

The CCPA would like to thank the local banks and businesses for their help in selling the tickets and to Cathy Harris, our webmaster for coordinating the on line sales. Also, a big thank you to the Champaign County Fair Board for use of their bleachers, and Jerry Knotts, Chad Hall and the crew of the Urbana Street Department for moving the bleachers. Chad and his crew did an awesome job of preparing the site for visitors, including mowing, removing the weed growth at the tracks, repairing the fence and supplying trash containers. We had a lot of out of town guests and we were proud of how well our area looked. Thanks so much for all your work – the City of Urbana employees are the best! Thanks to Jason Riffle for scheduling our EMTs who rode each trip. Ben Pence Jr., Zach Holbrook, Karen Briton, Kristine Shroyer, Jason Riffle and Kristi Medley: it is reassuring to know we have experienced EMTs on each trip and we appreciate you volunteering to help with our project.

A special thanks to Mary Mott for scheduling the 62 volunteers and to those volunteers a huge thank you for working on the train and the CCPA information booth, for registering the passengers, and for selling the train merchandise. We could not offer the trips without your support and participation! You did a fabulous job and we receive compliments on the helpfulness and cheerfulness of our volunteers frequently – thank you for a job well done!

To the CCPA board, congratulations on another successful event.

Dusty Hurst & Sandy Gonzalez

Committee Chairmen