The Union Branch

The Conrail Union Branch represents the new West End of my modern day, proto-freelanced Detroit Terminal Railroad. On the map to the left, the Union Branch starts just north of Dearborn, slightly west of the Dearborn Industrial Track, which I covered in the last post.

The Union Branch runs due north before turning 90 degrees due east and, in the real world, terminates a few miles later. Conrail Union Branch jobs originate from Livernois Yard, just out of the picture to the south, and use the CSX Detroit Subdivision to access the Union Branch (just like the Dearborn Industrial Track).

Taking a closer look, satellite imagery shows the Union Branch travels along a corridor of industrial and commercial development on Detroit's west side.  There is an at-grade crossing with the Canadian National just south of I-96, but otherwise the action is purely industrial switching.

On this map, you may be able to make out the route of the now-abandoned west end of the original Detroit Terminal. From the end of the Dearborn Industrial Track near the bottom right corner of this image, the right of way continues due north through another industrial area that starts at Joy Rd. The right-of-way continued north until Schoolcraft Road, where it curved to the northeast. Near Lyndon and Livernois, the DTRR crossed and then interchanged with what is now the Conrail Union Branch. In the heyday of the DTRR, the Union Branch was owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad and was a competitor to the DTRR.

Starting at the southern end and working our way north, here is P Company Junction. This is the switch off the CSX Detroit Subdivision that provides access to the Union Branch. That rusty old signal bridge is a neat detail.

The first industry, just off the CSX mainline, is Hollingsworth Logistics. It's basically a big warehouse, and the main structure isn't rail served. The only thing I'm interested in is the small building surrounded by semi trailers.

I've rotated the view in this image to show the rail door and the truck docks. If I'm honest, I haven't the foggiest idea what goes on here, but I'd be willing to bet it involves transloading from railcar to trucks. While I'm out here on a limb, I'll jump up and down a bit and say it could be produce.

According to Hollingsworth's website, it is a certified Native American company. Otherwise, despite the lengthy text, I couldn't tell you what they actually do!

Just north of Tireman Street is this group of warehouses. All of the rail spurs look dilapidated and out of use. However, as Lance Mindheim has noted, such things can quickly change.

The trackage to these warehouses is fairly interesting, and could make for some interesting operations.

Continuing north, we cross Joy Road and immediately come to a passing siding and two spurs serving chemical plants. The first spur curves to the west and splits into two sidings serving PVS Nolwood. This plant produces a variety of chemicals for companies like Dow Chemical. Both Google and Bing maps show mostly tank cars spotted here, but there are some hoppers too.

The second spur parallels the mainline and serves Houghton International, which specializes in industrial lubricants. Tank cars are the only traffic here.

The longer spur serving PVS Nolwood would be impractical to model in its entirety on a shelf layout, but it could be respresented as an off-layout industry, with a spur disappearing behind a backdrop, hidden by the large Houghton warehouse structure.  Houghton itself would be very easy to model - even if it would require a ton of silos! Here's a trackside shot of Houghton from Bing maps:

JSP International is just north of the two chemical plants, and is a plastics manufacturing company. They serve a number of industries including the automotive industry, which is the likely reason for this plant's existence in Detroit.  Rail traffic appears to be exclusively cylindrical hoppers.


















Here's a trackside shot courtesy of Bing maps:

Best Block is just north of West Chicago Street, and has a single spur serving a simple concrete platform. Best is a masonry and landscape block supplier, and Bing maps shows product delivered by 50' boxcars.  Modeling Best Block would be simplicity itself, since the industry is basically just a flat lot with a concrete platform and stacks of blocks laying about.










Here's a trackside image from Bing maps:

J. Lewis Cooper is served by a facing-point spur that slightly overlaps the Best Block spur.  It is a wholesale distributor of wine and spirits, and this structure appears to be a warehouse and transloading facility.

There are actually two spurs serving this industry. The first goes into the J. Lewis Cooper warehouse through a roll-up door, while the other continues alongside the warehouse building.  This second spur appears to have once served the warehouse just to the south, but now the rails peter out in the weeds. This track could be used to spot extra cars or for storage.









Here's a trackside image from Bing maps:

Further north across Plymouth road is a small three-track yard. It runs alongside a Chrysler truck plant which, though it is not currently rail-served, may have been at one time.  This small yard would be a good place for a locomotive to run around its train in order to switch J. Lewis Cooper.

The primary purpose of this yard, however, used to be interchange with the CSX (formerly Chessie Sytem/Pere Marquette/etc.)  More on that in just a moment.








The interesting detail in the following Bing maps image is the Conrail caboose. Though I'm not sure when the image was actually taken, it seems likely this was long after cabooses were all but extinct!

Pictured to the left is the crossing with CSX, and you can clearly see the vestiges of a wye to permit interchange. Both legs of the wye are gone now, and the space inside the western side of the wye is now occupied by Basic Recycling.  Though not rail served, it has a lot of Detroit character and would make interesting modeling.

Next, the DTRR crosses I-96 on an overpass. There's not much to see here except 14 lanes of traffic and a secondary bridge that once carried a spur to a large warehouse on Fullerton St. This wouldn't be a priority to model, but if there was space, it would give the model a sense of place, cementing the location for Detroiters.

The DTRR continues uneventfully for several miles north of I-96, until the right-of-way begins to curve eastward.  Along this curve, a spur diverges northward to serve West Friendship Materials.  This business, similar to Best Block to the south, is typical Detroit. Since no big corporate stores are willing to risk investment within the city limits, old-fashioned, Mom & Pop style local businesses flourish to fill the need.

As you will see in the image below from Bing maps, building materials are delivered in 50' boxcars, spotted at various places along the spur.  While the spur strays relatively far from the mainline, this industry naturally lends itself to filling empty space in a corner of the layout. With the help of some selective compression, it could work very well.  For me, this scene is a priority to include in my DTRR model.




Here's the image from Bing maps, and you'll notice two boxcars - one in the bottom left corner, and another spotted at the curved building just to the left and above all the trucks.

Here is the end of the line, a relatively short passing siding and the spur serving Quaker Chemical Corporation.  Their website is somewhat vague about what actually goes on at this location, but the Bing maps image below shows four tank cars spotted here:

After this, the tracks continue east to Wyoming Ave. where they currently terminate. Before this portion of the line was abandoned, it continued east to Livernois Ave., where the old Pennsy Union Railroad crossed the original DTRR and interchanged with it.  Though I'm trying my best to avoid stretching the bounds of reality too far, I find the Wayne Bolt & Nut building that sits just north of this junction too tempting to resist.

You may be able to make out the vestiges of a rail spur running along the side of this building, and you can see the original (now abandoned) DTRR tracks to the south in the top left corner of this image.  Below is a Google Streetview screenshot showing the front of the building:

This place personifies Detroit for me.  Clearly built during the "good old days" of the Detroit auto industry and likely supplying all of the auto factories in town, the business is still alive despite the near collapse of the industry on which it depends.  Yes, the paint is chipped, the weeds are overgrown and the roof is sagging. So what. These are badges of honor, signs that the folks in charge put a higher priority on finding business to stay alive and keep the employees working.

In my next post, I'll continue moving clockwise around the theoretical modern-day Detroit Terminal Railroad and consider the Highland Park Industrial Track. Included along this right-of-way is the spot where the old DTRR Davison Street Yard once stood, the main yard and nerve center of the old railroad.  Therefore, this will also mark the transition from the West End to the East End of the DTRR.

The Dearborn Industrial Track

Let's take a look at perhaps the shortest portion of my modern day Detroit Terminal Railroad, the Dearborn Industrial Track.

On the map to the left, the Dearborn Industrial Track (DIT) is the short, curved line on the bottom left.

To the right is a closer view using Google Maps satellite imagery. The route begins with a switch off the Conrail Michigan line, called CP Lou. For reference, the wye at the northern end of the Junction Yard Secondary (covered in the last post) is a couple miles to the west of here, diverging off the same rails. The switch at CP Lou provides a connection to the CSX Detroit Subdivision which Conrail uses - via trackage rights - to access the DIT. A few miles north, another switch provides access to the DIT proper. Dearborn Steel is just after the right-of-way curves eastward, and Kenwal Steel is at the end of the line.

Everything north of the switch off the CSX Detroit Sub was once the main line of the original Detroit Terminal Railroad. North of Kenwal Steel, the line continued directly north until it reached Lyndon St./Livernois Ave., where it veered northeast toward Highland Park.

Where the DIT joins CSX rails today, there used to be crossing at grade and the DTRR continued south to Rougemere yard. In the image below, the red line represents the DTRR's abandoned right-of-way:

This rail line was torn up after Conrail purchased the DTRR, and from a modeling perspective, I can easily live without it. There aren't any industries off this portion of the DTRR, and while the interchange with CSX at Rougemere Yard would be interesting to model, it would also take a lot of space. 

This is CP Lou, the Conrail interchange with CSX. The switch near the top right of the photo is what provides access to CSX rails via the curved spur.  Twin truss bridges carry the CSX right-of-way over the Conrail Michigan Line, and immediately west of them is a plate girder bridge which used to carry the DTRR. I have seen this area firsthand driving along Southern Street, and those bridges are a favored target for graffiti taggers:

The Google camera vehicle is between the CSX bridges on the left and the abandoned DTRR bridge on the right. We're looking south here.

Here we have XCEL Steel Processing, the first industry served by the DIT. A web search produces a website, but not much info. Judging from the photos on their site and the satellite images from Bing and Google, it's pretty clear that they ship steel coils, and that's just about all we need to know.

A closeup of the rail spur reveals empty gondolas and coil cars being loaded by a traveling crane. Litter some steel coils around, throw an image of the XCEL building onto the backdrop, and I think we have a model!

Here's where the Conrail spur joins the CSX Detroit Sub on a bridge over I-94. The bridge just to the south used to carry the original DTRR.

In the picture to the right, I've rotated the image so that we're looking east along Michigan Ave. I-94 is to the south, off-picture to the right.  That's CSX running from top right to bottom left, and you can see the switch where the DIT begins in the top right corner.  You can also see the old, abandoned DTRR right-of-way and the bridge where it used to pass over Michigan Ave. before crossing the CSX line.

Here's a picture courtesy of Google Streetview, taken from between the abandoned DTRR bridge on the left and the CSX bridge on the right.

Just north of Michigan Ave. is this old tank farm. You can see the switch on the left side of the photo, and the spur that goes a full 180 degrees to serve some long-gone industry. This spur may very well have served the tank farm.

For modeling purposes, I think this could be an interesting scene to model as an abandoned industry, especially since the switch still exists in real life. It would be great backdrop fodder, if nothing else.

There's not much more of interest until the right-of-way curves 90 degrees due east and we get to Dearborn Steel on Wyoming Avenue. The company's LinkedIn profile indicates they specialize in steel coils, break bulk metals, aluminum and packaging.

What you see here is a runaround track and two storage tracks along the DIT right-of-way. The Bing Maps images show coil cars exclusively, but Google Maps shows some 50' boxcars:

Conrail crews shuffle cars here before switching the in-plant trackage which you can see in the photos above. I would only plan to model the small yard, using the tall grass just to the north to hide the spur going behind the backdrop.

This was once the Chrysler Brant Street plant. It hasn't been rail served for many, many years, but might be interesting backdrop fodder. The DIT is actually double-track past here, or more accurately, one big runaround track.

Just east of the Chrysler Brant Street plant - just across Lonyo St. as a matter of fact - is Kenwal Steel.  The plant occupies the area where the DTRR's Lonyo Yard used to be. That yard was used to serve Chrysler's West Warren Plant. That building still stands today, and in fact you can just see it in the top left corner of the image at right.

I once parked just south of the DIT track at the Lonyo Ave. crossing, hoping to get some photos of Kenwal Steel. Imagine my delight when I suddenly heard a telltale diesel thrum and then air horns!  Lo and behold, a Conrail train emerged from Kenwal Steel with a CSX and a Norfolk Southern locomotive on point. Those engines proceeded to pull an alarmingly long train out of the Kenwal Steel plant - those tracks must run the entire length of the building!

The Kenwal Steel spur diverges off the runaround track, which merges with the main line immediately after the Kenwal Steel switch. A few hundred yards north, the tracks end.

Modeling Kenwal Steel could present a challenge since it sits a relatively long way from the main right-of-way, and there's a lot of vacant real estate in between. Some selective compression could shrink that distance, however, and otherwise this is a very straightforward scene.

In the next post, we'll take a look at the Conrail Union Branch. Now that the majority of the DTRR's west end has been abandoned and pulled up, the Union Branch effectively serves as the new west end of my modern-day DTRR.