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June, 2011
Hot Times on the High Iron for June 2011
This time Ford Has a Better Idea, part 1.
In 1956 the Ford Motor Company built a parts stamping plant in the southern Chicago suburb of Chicago Heights. It was built on property acquired from the Chicago & Eastern Illinois Railroad (C&EI) and its subsidiary Chicago Heights Terminal Transfer (CHTT). It is located on the far east side of "the Heights." If you are from there it is "da Heights." As part of the deal to sell Ford the property, Ford had agreed to contract with the CHTT to switch and service the plant.
The CHTT built a yard behind the new plant to support the operations there." On rare occasion I heard it called the Ford Yard but don't know if that was ever the formal name because once upon a time there was a yard office there that was painted white and known as the "White House." When you worked a job that switched Ford it was referred to as a white house job. While I was there it was a metal building that wasn't remotely close to white but alas, on the railroad old names tend to last forever. The original white house had burned down several years prior to my starting to work there and replaced with the metal building.
For example, the Conrail line that we connected with there while once was the Michigan Central, hadn't been the MC since the early 50's. Yet everybody on the CHTT still referred to it as "the Michigan."
Ford had two tracks inside the building where boxcars were spotted and loaded with auto parts like fenders, quarter panels, hood, doors and the like. These parts were then shipped to various Ford assembly plants including the one located on Chicago's south side on Torrence Avenue. I'm not sure where they all go these days having been away from there for so long, but at one time parts were also shipped to plants in Dearborn, San Jose, Atlanta, Louisville, Kansas City, St Paul and other points.
There was also the steel track inside the east side of the plant where loads of steel coils were spotted for unloading. These coils were unrolled and fed into the machines that stamp the parts. A track on the outside of the east side of the plant was known as the baler. The leftover scraps of steel were compressed into bales and loaded into empty gons then shipped back to steel mills for recycling into fresh new steel.
Behind the CHTT yard was a Michigan Central/New York Central line known as the Joliet Branch. This was the old Joliet & Northern Indiana that opened for business in 1854. It had been truncated in Penn Central and more so In Conrail days, but still existed for service out to Ford by 1978. The Central built an interchange yard here that connected to the CHTT yard. They received loads of auto parts out of the plant and brought in loads of steel for the plant from plants in Indiana and Michigan. They also interchanged other business with the CHTT there as well. The Central also had a freight depot with an agent at the east end of there yard.
Normally Ford would request specific types of box cars for loading, some with bulkheads and some without. I never did find out what types of parts were shipped in what cars. A large inventory of auto parts box cars were stored in the yard behind Ford as well as the "Terra Cotta" tracks located to the west of the plant and just north of the Ford yard. Normally the Ford job would go on duty and switch out the settings, the cars Ford requested in for loading. In those early years up into the early 1960's it was 50 or 60 foot box cars used. Then Thrall introduced the 86 foot high cube box car for auto parts loading. Soon thereafter, the "high cubes," as they were dubbed, became the standard for hauling stamped auto parts for the auto industry in North America.
When Ford was ready for a switch they would call the White House and inform them of such. The job would then go and pull the first track that was ready and bring it back to the yard. It would then be switched out with the cars classified into the tracks for proper blocking based on where they were heading. The cut of cars Ford requested for that track would be coupled onto, pulled out of the track in the yard and shoved back into the plant for respotting. The next track would then be pulled and the cycle of switching and classifying and then would be respotted. When I first started, it was tracks 700 and 701. In 1979 or 80 Ford expanded the Chicago Heights Stamping Plant adding track 702 for parts loading and shortening track 700 to hold just two cars. If I recall correctly 700 (before it got shortened) 701 and 702 each held 12 high cubes.
There was a design flaw in track 702. Pillars that supported the roof were situated in such a way that you had to make a cut between every other car so as to allow the ramps used by the forklifts that loaded the cars could be put in place. This meant cuts of 2 cars in 6 different spots on the track. Otherwise I believe it was cuts of 6 and 6 cars in 700 and 701.
Normally the afternoon job that switched the plant normally worked the steel track pulling the empties and respotting the loads. The night job usually worked the baler track, pulling the loads and respotting empties under the chute where the bales were discharged. Ford had a car puller on the bailer that allowed them to move the gons for loading. When one was loaded and leveled, the car puller, a cable and pulley device connected to a motor moved the cars to spot the next empty gondola. Being that the bales were worth a decent amount of money, there was a camera located there to make sure the bales made it into the gons and not the back of somebody's pick up truck.
There used to be die cars to be moved and spotted at times. These were short yellow flatcars owned by Ford and used within the plant only. Sometimes you would have to spot one or more of them into the steel track where dies from the machines that stamp the parts would be loaded and moved out. Over time the dies would wear and have to be repaired or replaced. I just cannot recall where we put them when we pulled them out of the plant. I only made this move a couple of times when I was still a trainman and never as an engineer. These moves did not occur too frequently from what I was told. When we did make this move it was on the night job.
There were three jobs that switched the plant every day. The day job went to work at 7, the afternoon job at 3 and the night job at 11. Normally the plant would get two switches per shift. But they didn't always get 24 loads pulled and 24 empties spotted each time. Sometimes it was a partial switch. You usually knew this when you went to work what was going on, usually.
In getting back to switching out the pulls from the plant; we used to classify them right away. We had cars going to several locations across North America so we had several blocks. We used to make a block of cars en route to the Norfolk & Western, a block for the Chesapeake & Ohio and a block for Conrail. Conrail was the successor to the Central (Michigan/New York and later Penn). We used to kick the cars for Conrail right into their yard as the connection track to their yard came right off the lead in our yard.
There were also cars moving via the MoPac to points west and cars to be interchanged to the Louisville & Nashville. Those cars weren't blocked pure but kicked into the track or tracks of cars en route to Yard Center via the Ford Run which came in and out overnight. There were also cars en route to St Paul via the Milwaukee Road interchanged at the North Yard on the other side of town, usually accomplished by one of the day jobs on the CHTT.
The bales of scrap rotated to which connection they were headed to. They changed every three months between Conrail, the Baltimore & Ohio Chicago Terminal (B&OCT) and Elgin, Joliet & Eastern (EJ&E). Whichever railroads turn it was would interchange empty gons for scrap loading to the CHTT and those gons would be used for the bale loading.
If I recall correctly, most of the steel seemed to come from Conrail or the B&OCT.
Normally the jobs switched with Geeps or MP15 switchers. When I started we used GP7s or 9s and the occasional new GP15 series. GP 38 series units and the GP15s were mainstays by the early 80's. Towards the mid 80's the MP15s returned to the CHTT. These days it is normally the GP or MP15s equipped for remote control operation.
When we kicked the cars destined for Conrail into their yard, it was a bit of an ascending grade heading into their yard. This meant you had to give the cars a pretty good start to make sure they made it into their yard. Well one evening they must've given them a little too much oomph. I was working at Yard Center and listened to the following saga unfold. God bless wireless radio.
The operator at Jay tower, where we crossed and connected with the EJ&E in Chicago Heights, called the afternoon job working at Ford. He told them he just received a report from an EJ&E westbound that there were three high cubes rolling on their own eastward on the Conrail main. The J main paralleled the Conrail main between Chicago Heights and Schererville, IN. The cars were rolling free towards Dyer, IN. Between here and there was also five very busy road crossings.
The CHTT yardmaster also got involved. He jumped into the truck and headed after the cars. Now the road that paralleled the Conrail main was not right along side the tracks, so he was trying to intercept these cars at one of the crossings. He wasn't successful. The cars rolled across all the crossings but managed to stop short of the automatic interlocking at Dyer with the L&N. The signal was probably a stop signal and I'm guessing the cars didn't want to violate the rules. So he caught up with them there and applied handbrakes to secure them. When a call was made to Conrail to see if they should send the Ford job out after them, a firm "No" was told the CHTT. Conrail would not accept interchange at that point either so they sent their job out from Hartsdale Yard in Schererville and shoved those cars all the way back to Chicago Heights.
It must've been a pretty good kick on those cars. The little hill at the yard usually slowed the cars down and the tracks in the Conrail yard weren't too good and should have slowed them down even more. There was also a derail at the east end of the Conrail yard that should have stopped them but didn't. Instead the cars knocked the derail out of the rotten old ties and out of the way.
Ford continues to stamp parts in the Heights and they still receive rail service. These days though, it is crews from Union Pacific using remote control locomotives. UP of course took over MoPac in December 1982. And of course MoPac took over the C&EI in latter 1967 gaining full control and eliminating the C&EI name forever in October 1976.
Other changes include an all new yard office replacing the metal building white house. It sits in a slightly different location and is fresh and modern, unlike the old rundown and mouse infested place we had to work from. The old place had nasty water from an on site well that you couldn't drink either. The new place even has city water.
The other change out there is Norfolk Southern took over that Conrail line with their acquisition of the portion of Conrail in 1999. They continued to operate a job out to Chicago Heights until a few years ago. Now the UP handles the cars destined to the NS and interchanges them to the NS via Yard Center and the NS's Calumet Yard in Chicago.
In part 2 we'll look at the Ford Run, the transfer job that operates between Yard Center and the Ford Yard every night. Down the road I want to do an overview on the CHTT proper, it is quite the interesting operation.
I've been trying to get the word out about the new server set up now that will carry Hot Times in addition to the Railroad.net website that also carries it. The old subscription list is effectively going away. I don't have most of the addresses from the old mailing list so I am probably missing most of the people on that list.
If you are getting this forwarded to you from somebody you can subscribe to the new server at http://lists.sjvrr.com/listinfo.cgi/htothi-sjvrr.com to subscribe.
And so it goes.
Tuch
Hot Times on the High Iron and the HTOTHI initials are both copyright 2011 by JD "Tuch" Santucci