Taconite loads in general sucked. They were the all time champ for
the hardest (impossible) to handle trains we had. In the 70's we
began with 85 car trains of GN, NP, DM&IR and, finally, PC ore jimmies
(jennies, depending on you gender preference) The DM&IR cars seemed
to have the best brakes of the lot and the PC cars HAD NO BRAKES !!
The 24' cars allowed a lot of tonnage to be put into a very short
piece of railroad.
The 85 car trains were nasty to handle but, with a little patience
and luck, you could get 'em over the road in one piece. Now the
marketing dept. shows up and determines that, with the same number of
crew members, we can put 110 to 115 cars on the train and save "X"
number of the dreaded Crew Starts. What an absolutely splendid idea
for everybody except those that had to run and repair these things.
I believe there's a couple of "lister's" that can remember the West
end of Milledgeville and its implications for 115 car ore trains.
Regardless of the train "handling" method employed at this location
the rear 15 to 20 cars of the train always forgot the "team" concept
and wanted to stay behind. In all but .0001% of the cases - - they
did. I made a suggestion to the Mechanical Dept. that, since sense
was not to be part of the operation of these trains, they park a
truck full of knuckles at the West sw. at Milledgeville and assign a
Carman to the location. It would have saved a lot of time.
There are many accounts of strange and wild trips made on "tac
trains" while they were with us. It was with no sadness on my part
when sanity overcame this operation and they quit running 'em.
The Granite City ore trains were a little before my time in the C&I
pool but I worked with a few Engineer's that caught these trains out
of Savanna. Savanna to Mendota and return, lite engine. Ray Moore
told me that he caught the job as Fireman and an O5 was the power out
of Savanna. They took the train to Mendota and left it there and
headed back to Savanna (16 hr. days). About the time you were rested
another ore train would show up and you'd get called for it again.
He said this happened about five times in a row. At that time there
were no work rules that limited the number of "short turn arounds" a
crew could make out of the away-from-home terminal. Ray said the
same O5 was waiting for them each time thay got called so he
instructed the RH forces at Savanna to not touch the stoker valves
since he had found just the right settings for this engine. He also
said the he and his Engineer were running out of money and clean
shorts and really needed to get back to Aurora - - bad.
Karl
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