Someone recently inquired about a wye at Ottawa. Yes as mentioned in that
initial post the lead into Ottawa Silica had a switch for southward and
Northward movement, thus creating a wye with the Streator-Montgomery main.
It was probably used on rare occasions. Everything coming out of Ottawa Silica
would have gone to the "North" yard near the engine house.
There were no passenger trains originating or terminating at Ottawa. The only
run I can imagine that needed to turn at Ottawa was the "Roustabout" and then
only for the time period it was based at Mendota instead of at Ottawa.
This job will be the subject of a future article someday. It was based at
either Mendota or Ottawa,depending on the time period under study. Up until the
abandonment of the
Paw Paw to Shabbona branch this job ran as follows.
Mendota-Earlville-Burgess Jct-Ottawa-Burgess Jct-Earlville-Paw Paw-Shabbona-Paw
Paw-Earlville-Mendota. Now after you review your employee timetables and maps,
try figuring out how this crew covered going over all that trackage and back to
Mendota in 16 hours !?
By the way they did switching and block swapping, setouts and pickups at
Earlville, did the way freight work at Baker,turned and exchanged cars at
Ottawa, set out and picked up at Wedron. Then went all the way to Shabbona
where there was much switching and car trading with Wayfreights to
Savanna,Rockford and Eola and then all the way back to Mendota.
You're probably asking how does Leo know all this ? The union files. The
Conductors pleaded repeatedly over the decades that this run did massive
amounts of local work,switching,etc and should be set up as a wayfreight
instead of getting through freight rate of pay. It's from that correspondence
and employee timetables that I can piece together how the job operated.
Leo
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Posted by: qutlx1@aol.com
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