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Blocking to and from the Chicago and the Twin Cities was not very sophisticated until the BN merger. I don't know if there even was a CBQ block on GN82. If not, it was GN Union Yard's job to make up a delivery to the Q at Dayton's Bluff and the Bluff would sort out the Chicago's from the Eolas, IHB's (usually Perishables for NYC/PC), Galesburg, La Crosse, Savanna and local cars. Empty CBQ ownership cars not assigned to a shipper (common cars like plain box, gons, hoppers, etc.) were handled by a local car distributor. Empty assigned cars were returned to their location by, hopefully, using a non-revenue waybill. A Q97 from Cicero in this time frame was blocked: 1. GN, 2. NP, 3. All others, with loads having preference. Dayton's Bluff ran a transfer off of 97 to the GN, another to the NP, and the rest were further sorted the other deliveries such as the Minnesota Transfer. Q97's hot move was to GN97 followed by the NP's to Northtown for NP 601 or 603 GN82's hot move was to Q82. I do not think Q and GN/NP road power ran through although I think I heard that Q97s road power was used on the 97 GN transfer. There were other trains to/from Dayton's Bluff including 80, 81, 83 88. If I remember correctly there were additional interchange transfers to both the GN and NP. Cicero would switch inbound 82 to make the proper interchange or local switch. Charlie Able told me one time when he was a trainmaster at Cicero they ran an extra train to the Bluff with over 100 mty 40ft box cars in two blocks (GN and NP sorted by ownership, that's almost like switching by car color :>)) via Mendota and Denrock with one SD24. I know that this is pretty general and might be a little off but this almost 50 years ago. The thing that amazes me now that all of this was done with paper and pencil and it worked. That's because of a bunch of good people working together. On Sunday, November 1, 2015 12:19 PM, "Bill Scott wscott@optonline.net [CBQ]" <CBQ@yahoogroups.com> wrote: I was looking at the wheel report from GN train 82, April 19, 1968, and wondered, why weren’t the cars bound for the same destination all grouped together? For example, there were a dozen cars bound for Chicago, but only a few pairs can be found, and never more than pair together. Was it the receiving yard’s problem to sort the cars, and the sending yard didn’t bother to do that all? So, I guess my question is, how were outbound train composed? Randomly, or was there a method to their apparent randomness? Bill Scott
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