NS Lansing local

[jwilliam33]

Last Friday, I caught a southbound NS local at the US 127 overpass north of Mason. Is the steel traffic still going to Holt? This was a fairly short train, maybe 10 cars. Do they run a separate coil train for Holt or is the local Lansing traffic usually combined with the coils?

[Hogger1225]

The coils are combined with the regular train out of Jackson, or the northbound trip for B-28. Business is just extremely slow. B-28 drops off any loads for RSDC and the B-30 will pick up any empties on their southbound trip. B-30 starts out of Lansing in the morning and the B-28 picks up where they leave off and finishes the trip to Jackson and then comes back north to Lansing. B-30 operates Mon-Fri, B-28 operates Sun-Thur.

[AARR]

I think some auto plants are still shut down until march. So steel to holt will be slow to non existent until plants get going again. Closing of Grand Rapids GM stamping will also hurt business to Holt

[Bentrail]

Much as i hate to say the Lansing to Jackson line is next on the short line minds.

[jwilliam33]

Other than Holt, what does NS serve in the Lansing area yet? I was by the big GM plant on Saginaw last weekend and there isn't much left of it, just a few walls and they had been pulling up the rail there. There was a black and yellow GP sitting there too. Times change and maybe overcapacity is part of GM's problem but, having watched them switch there in the early 90's when I was at MSU, its sad to see.

[AARR]

Gregg P and Hogger have posted some great info about Lansing area operations. Off the top of my head I think all NS has left in Lansing proper is Padnos and ??? nad Dairy somethingorother where they make plastic bottles for milk. Oh, there's a place on the southside that gets an occasional piece of machinery. I don't think Frietz ships anymore (outbound scrap paper).

Now south of Lansing NS has a fair number of regular to occasional shippers. Cardboard plant, chemical plant, grain elevator that ships units, couple of drywall yards, a lumber yard or two, and Capital Excavator that gets coal for the MSU plant and I'm not sure what else.

[RailCanon]

Not too much left in Lansing anymore. Here's the present list:
Padnos
Quality Dairy Co. (QDC) Plastics
Reid Machinery (rarely ships or receives anything)
Interchange with CSX
Interchange with CN
And the GM plants (outbound debris from the demolition).

[JDavis21835]

You wouldnt happen to have any pictures of that black and yellow GP? If memory serves me right, the engine is a GP7 with a low hood, engine #4197, owned by the demo contractor, MCM Management. I worked for MCM on Fischer body plant, or GM plant 6. Most of the time I was there, she was sitting inside, as NS owns the tracks in the plant, and would not give us permission to switch out the gondolas. I would imagine this is the same for craft center and metal stamping plants.

As for "Debris" shipped from the plant, the only thing we really shipped by rail was prepared iron. We shipped anywhere from 10-100 gondolas a month, depending on the order, and the foundry it was being shipped to. Towards the end we were also shipping baled sheet iron. All non ferrous metals were shipped by truck, all the debris from site was hauled out by truck. Finally, most of the machinery salvaged from the plant was shipped about by truck

[cnw8835]

You wouldnt happen to have any pictures of that black and yellow GP? If memory serves me right, the engine is a GP7 with a low hood, engine #4197, owned by the demo contractor, MCM Management.

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/locoPi ... x?id=63682

[JDavis21835]

Thanks for the quick response.

Since we were not able to use 4197, We reverted to old school demo guys method of moving cars around. Actually, most of the time we let NS switch them out, but the siding we were loading on tended to get flooded, and we actually had a group of cars get frozen in. NS would not switch them, so we moved em, our way.



The owner of MCM has a soft spot for his GP. So much so, it got its own mural painted on the side of one of the service trucks.

[AARR]

We shipped anywhere from 10-100 gondolas a month

Great info JDavis21835. Unfortunately, it's hard for railroads to provide railroad owned cars for moves like this. They prefer to assign their cars to steady shippers. So unless the owner had their own pool of scrap cars a lot of potential rail business probably went by truck

[JDavis21835]

True enough Don Simon, I understand the want to supply steady shippers. At the time we were a steady shipper for two years solid. But then again, we always had to fight omnisource Jackson and Padnos Lansing for Gons. Product was shipped via road and rail. 100% of our "shred" material was shipped by truck to Omnisource in Jackson. Some prepared iron went by truck to Defiance Ohio, a mini mill in Jackson, and Detroit. Some Sheet iron was hauled by truck to Holland.

It was certainly an interesting project. Sad for the folks of Lansing. We were not well liked in town, as everyone saw us as the ones taking away their jobs. In fact we found a sign in the Olds plant that stated "No MCM Management Trespassing, Violators Will Be Shot." The Folks of Lansing should be happy that they still have plants. In fact the rumor was that the old Olds plant was going to have a new stamping plant built there. This of course depends on GM surviving now. Saginaw is not going to fare as well. The foundry on the south end of town is up for Demolition bids right now. Rumor has it that the remaining plant Saginaw Metal Casting Operations, AKA Grey Iron may not be far behind. I know this spring their furnaces were torn down, along with a few other buildings.