Update, January 18: The Little Rock Express beat out the Tuscola Turn, 76,217 votes to 73,175. Daily RFT apologizes to Tuscolans who cannot take a little trash-talking in the name of friendly competition.
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The nineteenth century was definitely a dandy one, so who can blame twenty-first-century St. Louisans from embracing it? First there was last weekend's honest-to-goodness slave auction. Now we're on a campaign to get a steam-powered train to pay us a visit. Yep, you read that right. Steam-powered. Just like the Hogwarts Express.
The Union Pacific Railroad, it develops, still keeps two steam-powered locomotives in its barn in Cheyenne, Wyoming. One of them, number 844, was the last steam-powered locomotive ever built for the railroad back in the early 1940's. The other, old number 3985, was merely the biggest. Sometime this year, one of them will go on a tour through this great country of ours. Whether it will go through St. Louis depends on if you, gentle reader, vote for the Little Rock Express on UP's Great Excursion Adventure website before midnight tonight.
Currently, the Little Rock Express, which connects Kansas City and Little Rock via St. Louis, is running neck-and-neck with the Tuscola Turn, which starts out in Boone, Iowa, and takes a right turn just south of Chicago and ends in picturesque Tuscola, Illinois. You have the power to save these poor engineers from a trip to Tuscola by voting early and often.
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