What types of mixed freight would have been coming out of Ogden in the early 50’s going east. I understand that besides unit reefers and stock trains this would have been the other types of trains going over the Wasatch Mtns.
Thanks
Mike
Its the transcontinental mainline of the Union Pacific.
Any car that could travel between the west coast and the upper midwest. The majority of trains would be trains other than reefer and stock trains. Probably five or ten to one manifest trains (general freight) over reefer or stock trains.
Dave H.
Reefer traffic: virtually 100% loads eastbound from the SP connection at Ogden and WP connection at Salt Lake City with northern and southern California produce. Potatoes and onions came out of Idaho and Washington and entered the Overland Route at Granger, Wyoming. Mostly seasonal but there was some movement all year. Virtually 100% PFE and Western Pacific reefers.
Livestock traffic: seasonal, virtually 100% empty eastward except for cows and calves going to summer grazing in the spring. Substantial westward movement of hogs westward and cattle in the late fall coming off summer grazing in Wyoming. Most of the sheep movement came out of Idaho and split at McCammon, some going east but most going south to Ogden for sale or slaughter. Some sheep westward from Wyoming in the fall. Virtually 100% UP cars. Ogden had a large Union Stockyard and associated slaughterhouses which collected cattle from the western Rocky Mountains and sent refrigerated meat west to California.
Lumber traffic: heavy eastward from SP at Ogden and much less from WP at Salt Lake City. Heaviest in late winter and early spring and tapering off by fall. Dressed lumber in SP and WP boxcars; timbers, poles, and rough-cut on flats and in gons. Very few bulkhead flats then.
Coal traffic: very heavy westward from Rock Springs and Superior, beginning in very late summer and building to a peak in the dead of winter, then tapering off to almost nothing by spring. Virtually 100% UP General Service gons. Lump coal for home heating (including stores, schools, office buildings), mine-run coal for smelters, sugar refineries, cement plants, railway use; slack coal for smelters and cement plants.
Merchandise traffic: virtually 100% westward from connections at Council Bluffs and Kansas City, mostly in foreign-road cars, mostly boxcars.
Ores: steady traffic of concentrates year-round, mostly in UP gons, almost 100% westward to
Thanks Railway Man! Would there have been meat products shipped east as well from the Ogden meat producing facilities?
What type of facilities would the coal loads been delivered to for distribution were there any at Evanston, Castle Rock, Unitah, etc.
What type of care would the tinplate be moved in?
Very helpful information you’ve provided.
Thanks
Mike
Not much meat shipped east – Wyoming has very thin population and pretty soon meat moving east enters into the market territory of slaughterhouses in Denver and Nebraska. Small towns in cattle country had butchers who supplied the local market and ranchers butchered their own. There’s an old truism that if your neighbor was having a barbecue, better count your cows. Other than flour, gasoline, and coal, small towns were highly self-sufficient in that day.
Coal was handled by most consignees off a team track – they’d simply shovel off the top of the gon into a truck, or out the door of a boxcar. A significant amount of lump coal in the West was moved in boxcars in the winter when gons were in short supply, and also because the high-priced lump coal was heavily pilfered from gons by trackside residents – locking it into a boxcar prevented this. Some dealers liked boxcars because it provided a lockable, free warehouse. They’d sell coal out of the boxcar until it was empty, then release it. Some dealers built covered wood coal bins of, say, 10-15 feet in depth, which were loaded also by shoveling coal off the top of the gon into the chute of the bin, where it stayed dry and didn’t vanish into the sacks of neighbors. At Evanston there might have been a dealer with coal bins but I seriously doubt it at Castle Rock or Uintah. A dealer with a raised trestle might have existed at Evanston too but without a photo to prove it, I wouldn’t bet on it. The UP main line is down at creek level at Evanston and dumping out of a gon off a trestle would require digging a hole in the ground (which fills with water) or a long trestle approach that would be rather hard to pay for given the small population of Evanston. I wouldn’t doubt that a significant percentage of the population of Evanston obtained most of their coal for free; it would be too easy to send the kids out to pick up a lot of what was needed off the ground –
How much traffic would be going to and coming from the US Steel plant at Geneva (down by Provo)?
I assume you’re asking about all UP traffic to and from Geneva in the 1950s.
Post-war, Geneva’s primary reason to exist was to supply hot-band steel to the USS cold-roll and tin-plate mill at Pittsburg, California, a role previously filled by USS’s Columbia Works at Ironton, just south of Provo, Utah. The two major consumers of steel in California at the time were the Ford and GM automobile stamping plants in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, and food canneries. Secondary markets for Geneva were welded steel pipe throughout the west, and other consumers of steel plate, hot-band, and small and medium structural shapes. Market competitors were CF&I at Minnequa, Colo., Kaiser at Fontana, Calif., and Bethlehem at Sparrows Point, Maryland, which enjoyed low-cost all-water shipping to the West Coast via the Panama Canal and in the 1920s had built rolling mills and steel service centers in Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Seattle. That severely pinched Geneva’s market. Eventually Japanese and Korean mills were able to land steel on the Pacific Coast at a lower cost, because they didn’t have an overland transportation penalty, and that was the end of Geneva.
Accordingly most of the steel output travelled to Pittsburg (as steel coils), the traffic divided between D&RGW and UP outbound from the mill, to SP at Ogden. Some steel moved down the LA&SL to Los Angeles but not much as it was competing with Kaiser at Fontana, which didn’t have to pay 800 miles of rail transportation charges.
Inbound traffic to Geneva was as follows. Natural iron ore, mostly magnetite, came from Iron Mountain, Utah (all UP route), later taconite from Atlantic City, Wyoming (also all UP) supplanted most of the natural ore. Limestone and dolomite came from Keigley, Utah, on D&RGW’s Tintic Branch. Coking coal came from the Geneva (Horse Canyon) and Columbia Mines southeast of Price, Utah, both located on USS’s Carbon County Railway, t
Slow elk???
Circa early Fall 1957 my boss sent me up to the Teton Basin in Eastern Idaho to pick up a load of sheep for delivery to the local stockyards in Idaho Falls. By a quirk a week later I got caught at a grade crossing south of Rexburg by a stock block which I am quite sure was coming out of the Teton Basin and was, most likely, carrying sheep. I would have been very surprised if this train was headed for the Idaho Falls’ stock yards - that late in the day most (local) stock movements were being made by truck - so I would venture a guess it was bound farther south. It could possibly have gone west from Pocatello but I would venture a further guess that it went east/south from there. If those cars were headed for Denver or Omaho it is likely that it went down the Soda Springs line from McCammon. Had they gone south to the Salt Lake Valley it is unlikely they would have been been routed eastbound out of Ogden.
In the Fall and Winter the proprietor of the lumber yard in Roberts almost always had a boxcar of coal on the local team track; about once a month my grandpappy would slap the panels on the flatbed pickup, throw in a couple of coal scoops, and away we would go. You had to weigh in at the lumber yard both coming and going and you were charged, of course, by the difference in
RWM, thanks for the answer. About what percentage of the steel to Pittsburg went by WP and what percentage by SP?
Also, it seems odd that the GM plant in LA (I think in the Chatsworth area) received coils from US Steel with Kaiser so much closer. I know that the NUMMI plant in Warm Springs (Fremont) used to be a GM plant. I also seem to recall hearing that there also used to be a Ford plant in Fremont. Could these have been the two large customers?
I think I misled you. GM had plants at South Gate and Fremont, and Ford at Milpitas. GM Fremont became NUMMI. I don’t know if USS supplied any steel to South Gate, but I suspect you’re correct and it was primarily a Kaiser Steel play.
I can’t recall the split between WP and SP on coil steel. My instinct is that it was 50-50 but don’t hold me to that. I’d have to dig paper out of a box, and find the right box.
As you probably call USS in 1986 cut a deal with Pohang Iron & Steel (POSCO) of South Korea to completely re-equip the Pittsburg rolling mills with the latest technology. POSCO invested most of the $450 million cash and in return got guaranteed access to the U.S. market for its hot-band steel. This also got USS out from under the Geneva Works which were by that point was still state-of-the-art WWII, almost completely obsolescent, very rundown, still using open-hearths and pouring its steel into ingots, and in need of huge investment in emissions controls – and still located in the wrong place.
Pittsburg still produces cold-roll, galvanized, and tinplate.
Here’s a nice history of Pittsburg which not surprisingly omits all mention of Geneva and Columbia Works that preceded POSCO’s investment.
http://www.ussposco.com/about/history.shtml
RWM
Thanks for the answers. I did some research and found that there may have been four automobile plants in the LA area (http://www.laalmanac.com/transport/tr05.htm), although I have not been able to verify all of them. I have been able to verify that GM had a plant at Van Nuys (http://www.gm.com/corporate/responsibility/environment/plants/brownfield_redev/study_vannuys.jsp). That must have been the one I was thinking about.
I do not know if they still do, but a few years ago USS-POSCO received coils from US Steel as well as from Korea. Unit trains would, or do, run from Gary, IN and Birmingham, AL to USS-POSCO. USS-POSCO also did, or does, send unit trains of coils to Fontana, possibly to California Steel Industries.
There’s so much more data available on the internet now than even 2-3 years ago:
Here’s the plants of the big three, predecessors, and successors, and their dates of first/last assembly as near as I can determine, and some of the minor builders:
Chevrolet, South Oakland 1915-1921
GM, Oakland 1921-1960
GM, Fremont 1960-1980 (Chevrolet)
GM, South Gate 1936-82 (Chevrolet)
GM, Van Nuys 1947-92 (Chevrolet-Pontiac)
Ford, San Francisco 1911-1930
Ford, Richmond 1931-1955
Ford, Milpitas 1955-84
Ford, Los Angeles, 1914-1930
Ford, Long Beach (Terminal Island) 1930-1959
Ford, Pico Rivera 1959-1980
Dodge, Stockton 1925-1933 (intially a Graham Bros. light truck plant)
Chrysler, Los Angeles 1932-1971 (Dodge, Plymouth, Chrysler)
Chrysler, San Leandro 1946-1954 (Dodge, Plymouth)
Studebaker, Vernon 1929-1956
Willys-Overland, Maywood, 1930-? (absorbed by Kaiser Jeep, 1953)
New United Motors, Fremont 1984-present
Chevrolet-South Oakland and Ford-San Francisco and Los Angeles at first only bolted together knocked-down cars shipped from Detroit (in order to reduce rail transportation costs), but quickly their scope of work was enlarged. By 1913 Ford-San Francisco was a true assembly plant. By 1930 it was producing 200 cars per day.
There were also assembly plants in California for knocked-down cars for automakers Durant and Nash, as well as factories for truck maker Peterbilt in Newark (purchased Faegol in 1938, closed 1986) and International (Emeryville 1945-1963, San Leandro 1963-?.)
RWM