Attached are a couple of photos showing the Hawkeye Express train, operated by the Iowa Northern Railway for the University of Iowa. The service is provided for home football games between Coralville and a stop adjacent to the football stadium in Iowa City. Six car trains composed of former Metra Galley cars are operated before and after the game. Although the service is operated by the Iowa Northern, they use Iowa Interstate (ex Rock Island)trackage. The photos were taken at the Coralville terminal on 9/5/09.
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Fonda native Timothy Kilbride, an engineer with the Iowa Northern Railway Company, piloted the famed Hawkeye Express passenger train Saturday to ferry fans to the Iowa-Iowa State rivalry game. When the regular crews were unavailable, he and a coworker jumped at the opportunity to volunteer. It was his first time as engineer of the express.
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"The beauty of the Hawkeye Express is that you can skip all the traffic and parking hassles and for a few bucks we take you right up to the gate. If you drive to a home game, it can take an hour just to get out of the parking lot," Tim said.
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The father of the Hawkeye Express is Mark Jennings, the Hawkeyes' associate athletic director. Faced with snarled parking and epic traffic jams on game days, he was tasked to search for answers. "We kept looking at the train track that ran right next to Kinnick and wondering whether that could somehow be utilized," he remembers.
He called on Dan Sabin of the Iowa Northern Railway Company, and asked if there was any way to get a passenger train into Kinnick, as had been done into the 1950s and '60s.
"Leave it with me," responded Sabin, another Hawkeye superfan. Within two weeks, a train was had.