Indiana

All South Shore train service, which carries passengers between Chicgao and South Bend, Indiana, has been cancelled for at least the remainder of today due to damage caused to the rail line by a freight train. John Parsons, spokesman for the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District, said the service might not resume until tomorrow morning.

The damage was caused when a Union Pacific freight train ran a damaged wheel for several miles along the South Shore track in East LaPorte County, Parsons said.

Great article from the Wall Street Journal's Paul Ingrassia that summarizes how and why the US auto industry fell to pieces. My favorite part was this telling excerpt:

In Detroit, amid worker alienation and the "blue-collar blues," Chevies, Fords and Plymouths rattled, rusted and rolled over -- and those were the good ones. The Ford Pinto's gas tank was prone to explode into flames when the car was hit from the rear, making the Pinto the poster product for corporate callousness.

The Arab television network Al-Jazeera has sent a documentary crew on the road in the United States to talk to voters and they visited the Northwest Indiana town of Chesterton this week. The crew, Graham Meriwether and Chris Henderson, are touring communities in the country, part of the Red Blue Road Trip project, to get a read on voters as the historic 2008 Presidential election.

D. T. Friedman of the nonprofit OxenFree in Indiana writes:

I’m the Resource Coordinator for a non-profit organization that works with homeless and indigent teenagers, as well as teens who are in bad home situations. OxenFree is a really fantastic program that engages at-risk teens through punk rock music, and provides support in a drug-free and alcohol-free environment.

The reason I’m invading blogs today?

A day after the McCain campaign released a Web ad that highlights Obama's association with William Ayers, the Republican National Committee is piling on with their own TV ad that goes one step further.

Tomorrow, the RNC's independent expenditure unit announced that it will begin airing an ad hitting Obama on Ayers, Tony Rezko, and Chicago politics, reports NBC's Mark Murray.

"But the ad will run only in the battleground states of Indiana and Wisconsin, which border Illinois."

I promised I'd share some of my web-to-print and indesign-related modules by september a while ago. By now we're october so I thought I'd elaborate a bit on what exactly I'm trying to accomplish and why you might care :-)

Last week, the U.S. Senate passed a bill, the Federal Railroad Safety Improvement Act, that President Bush says he'll sign [though the margin of yeas to nays - 74 to 24 including yeas from both Illinois Senators Obama and Durbin - made the bill veto-proof] that will send $13.1 billion in funding to Amtrak over the next five years.

Dear Mr. Geek,

Tolls will be waived on portions of the Indiana Toll Road to help move traffic more quickly through areas affected by weekend flooding, Indiana transportation officials announced today.



Affected by the waiver is the stretch of I-90 between the Portage Barrier and the Westpoint Toll Plazas.

Over 230,000 ComEd customers are still without power following last night's powerful storms that swept through the area, downing trees and power lines. The Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation had reports of 1,438 damaged trees, 158 malfunctioning traffic signals, 69 damaged street light poles, 112 downed wires, and 212 city blocks without working street lights. The first line of storms pushed through the city shortly after 8 p.m.