On 11/9/2014 8:44 PM, thommack@yahoo.com [CBQ] wrote:
I
always knew that the Q ran unit ore trains down from Mpls-StP to
Granite City,
IL and Chicago, especially during the winter when the Great
Lakes were frozen
over (although frequent photos appear of even summer ore
trains), but the wheel
reports that Bill Hirt posted back in July (original source by
Russ Strodtz in
the Rail Freight Group) were very interesting and I did some
major slicing and
dicing of those reports that I will post more info on shortly.
Tom,
It's too bad you could not attend the spring meet as Bob Hanmer from
the GN society did a presentation on ore trains on the CB&Q, BN
and BNSF. I saw Bob last month and he told me has gathered some
additional pictures and material on ore trains on both the CB&Q
and BN. Maybe he can do the presentation again at a future meet.
I think John Mitchell addressed the issue of NP cars mixed into a
regular freight.
You also need to be careful about assumptions based on one consist.
For example, the consist for Train 61 from Galesburg to Hannibal in
the 1965-66 time frame shows 15-20 cars of ore heading to Cadet Mo
and Meramac Mining in regular hoppers and gondolas. When I saw this
I thought it rather unusual as a new iron ore mining facility had
opened there about the same time at Pea Ridge MO on the MP and why
would iron ore be going to a mining facility. The iron ore mined
there had an unusually high iron content, but had to be deep mined.
I was able to contact some friends who work at UP headquarters in
Omaha and they had access to some old head MP folks. It turns out
these cars were part of moves to calibrate the iron ore production
process at the Pea Ridge facility at start up and were not a regular
move after the calibration was complete.
There was also iron ore mining in southeastern Minnesota in the
1950s and 1960s. The CGW served this area and grabbed whatever
hopper cars they could (preferably 3 bay type) to move ore. This ore
was moved to East Dubuque on any available CGW train (including
passenger) for destination movement on the Q and IC based on
information a CGW modeler friend of mine has received from former
CGW employees. The ore in that area played out in the mid-late
1960s. Bob Hanmer presented some this at the spring meet.
What would be better after now seeing some other work by others in a
similar vein is a month or two of actual waybills from several
locations that would give you a truer scope of movements,
commodities, shippers and receivers. However unless someone has had
a box stuffed away for the past 50 years, that is unlikely to
surface. But you never know...
I also have plans to add more car information and make corrections
to the consists I posted (I've done some additional work, but want
to add more before posting updates), but several other projects have
moved ahead of it at the moment. I hope to get them all updated this
winter.
Bill Hirt
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Posted by: Bill Hirt <whirt@sbcglobal.net>
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