The Hersey High School Huskies beat the Prospect Knights 55-49 Thursday, December 6.

The Buffalo Grove High School Bison beat the Wheeling High School Wildcats 62-51.

Commuting Info: Arlingtoncards.com/commute | Arlingtoncards.com/trains
Trainspotting: Arlingtoncardinal.net/trains from the Chicago area & around the world …

Union Pacific 3985 just west of O’Hare International Airport.

A train column for kids and kids at heart. Check Arlingtoncardinal.net/trains for pictures and video of trains from the Chicago area and around the world. Photos and videos about trains, train engines, freight trains, passenger cars and railroads from around the world. A delight for kids and trainspotters, everywhere.

Rail transport is the transport of passengers and goods by means of wheeled train cars specially designed to run along railways or railroads. Rail transport is part of a country’s logistics chain, which facilitates international trading and economic growth in most countries.

Typical railway/railroad tracks consist of two parallel rails made of steel, secured to cross-beams (railroad ties made of wood, which are called sleepers in the United Kingdom). The ties maintain a constant distance between the two rails; a measurement known as the ‘gauge’ of the track. To maintain the alignment of the track, it is either laid on a bed of ballast (large gravel-like rocks) or else secured to a solid concrete foundation. The whole is referred to as permanent way (UK usage) or right-of-way (North American usage).

Railway rolling stock, which is fitted with metal wheels, moves with low frictional resistance when compared to road vehicles. On the other hand, locomotives and powered cars normally rely on the point of contact of the wheel with the rail for traction and adhesion (the part of the transmitted axle load that makes the wheel “adhere” to the smooth rail). While the wheel-to-rail friction is usually sufficient under normal dry rail conditions, friction and adhesion can be reduced or even lost when the rails are contaminated with moisture, grease, ice or dead leaves.

Do you have a favorite railway or a favorite railroad? Commuters, freights, switchers, coal cars, locomotives and steam engines. They will all be right here. View/Refresh for an updated list of trains below …

Metra 657 arrives westbound at 8:16 p.m., December 4, 2007. Metra 660 arrives eastbound at 9:32 p.m.

A pretty, snowy night in December with holiday decorations displayed at the Arlington Heights downtown train station near Vail and Northwest Highway in downtown Arlington Heights.

Crossing grade bells and train bell clearly heard …

The westbound 657 is pulled by Engine 178 “The City of Prospect Heights.”

Keywords: Metra passenger train, locomotive, Metra F40PH

Arlington Heights Police arrested a DUI driver in the 1900 block of East

Avon about 9:00 p.m. Thursday. Road conditions were hazardous with light

powdery snow.

– mb

Some news services are incorrectly reporting that hackers are getting into 9-1-1 call centers. The actual 9-1-1 centers are not being hacked, but some phone companies have been hacked to find out the phone numbers of certain customers. Then a process called ’spoofing’ is used to attempt to fool the 9-1-1 center into reading that a phone call is coming from a false address, often a customer’s number that was obtained by hacking the phone company. The term “swatting” comes from use of “spoofing” to falsely report an emergency that brings out the SWAT team on a false alarm.

Criminals are using Caller I.D. spoofing services, such as phonegangster.com, telespoof.com, and spoofcard.com to masquerade as the phone number of their intended victim, and phone non-emergency police lines with threats that cause a SWAT or other major police response at the victim’s house. It is unclear which phone spoofing service was used, or whether another similar product was used (special hardware can also be used to spoof the ANI — Automatic Number Identification — caller identification system used by some telephone systems).  FLASHBACK: Fooled by Fake Caller ID! Any Phone Can Spoof Your Caller ID with New Websites …

Also, it is not clear if the criminals are actually calling 9-1-1 or an inside line of the 9-1-1 call center. Calls from a certain geographic area are re-directed to the specific 9-1-1 center that corresponds to the geographic region. There is question whether the spoofing service would be able to direct the call to the correct 9-1-1 center, since 9-1-1 is almost nationwide.

About sixty incidents of the fake emergencies were carried out. In one case in September 2006, co-conspirator Guadalupe Santana Martinez targeted the father of a female party line participant. The swatter called the police in Alvarado, Texas while spoofing the father’s number, identified himself as the father and told the police dispatcher that “he had shot and killed members of the … family, that he was holding hostages, that he was using hallucinogenic drugs, and that he was armed with an AK47.” He went on to demand $50,000 and transportation across the border to Mexico, “and threatened to kill the remaining hostages if his demands were not met.”

But how did he get the father’s number? Martinez called an internal AT&T number claiming to be a service representative working in the field in order to get information on victims to “carry out” an AT&T business procedure, such as terminating their phone service. He was part of a group of conspirators known as the Rosoff group.

Stuart Rosoff is facing as much as five years in prison and a USD $250,000 fine after pleading guilty to charges of harassing people by tricking 9-1-1 operators into dispatching police SWAT (Special Weapons And Tactics) teams to the homes of unsuspecting victims. The Ohio man has pleaded guilty to a federal conspiracy charge for being part of a gang of “swatters” — one of them blind — who used Caller ID spoofing to phone the police with fake hostage crises, sending armed police teams into the homes of innocent people.

Stuart Rosoff of Cleveland, Ohio pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy Friday, November 15, 2007, in federal court in the Northern District of Texas.

The case seems to confirm that swatters are using simple Caller ID spoofing to pull these unfunny hoaxes — and not “hacking into 911″ after all.  Rosoff was part of a  sophisticated gang of phone geeks with serious access to at least one phone company’s computers, which they used to get information on their targets.

A mastermind of much of the phone hacking was a blind minor in Boston (identity withheld), who was identified in three separate guilty pleas from Rosoff group members as “M.W.”  He had enough access to phone company systems to actually listen in on calls.

Another unrelated offense involved Randall Ellis, 19, who was arrested after allegedly causing the dispatch of a SWAT team to the home of an unsuspecting couple in Orange County, California on March 29, 2007. Cost to Orange County: About $20,000. On Friday, November 16, 2007 Randall Ellis plead not-guilty to charges for this offense.