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Station: Niles Terminal (MCRR), Michigan |
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Michigan's Internet Railroad History Museum |
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The Michigan Central Railroad Niles Terminal Ben Higdon shares information below which describes the Michigan Central's Niles, Michigan Terminal, which was covered in a book by William Taylor Jr., called "An American Colossus":
Niles had a five stall roundhouse and turntable located downtown, which was taken out of service in or shortly before May, 1920. In 1919, plans were released for the new Niles Yards on the east side of the city, including a thirty stall roundhouse and a 100' turntable (which Ben notes is still there, as is the huge diesel shop), a 600 ton link-built coal station serving four tracks, a three story office building for dispatchers between twin humps (Ben: concrete hump overpasses still there), 75 miles of rail in a repair yard with about ten tracks, and a balloon track that actually passed under the humps (this was called the "subway").
The westbound facilities were built first, designed to also temporarily accomodate eastbound traffic. Westbound consisted of an eight track receiving yard, 28 track classification yard, and four track departure yard. This was placed in service on December 10,1919. The several mile long M.C.R.R. Airline cutoff was also built, branching westward off the air line at Barron Lake and coming into the yard at the east end of the eastbound classification yard. After the west end of the Airline was removed in 1937 (from Niles to Three Rivers), the Airline lead was used for switching the yard.
The eastbound had an eight track receiving yard, 24 track classification yard, a four track departure yard on the cut-off, but no departure yard on the main due to a grade. The eastbound portion was put in service on December 1, 1923. The yard replaced operations previously done at Michigan City, for reasons of equalizing the distance crews traveled between Chicago and Jackson. Back then crew territory went from Chicago to Niles, Niles to Jackson, and Jackson to Detroit. In ten years, a third of the yard was out of service as it was inefficient. They found it easier to pull trains directly into the classification yards, build the trains, and have them leave directly from there.
Work at the yard was moved to the upgraded Robert Young Yard in Elkhart in the 1950's. I don't know much about exactly how and when operations were phased out, but there was a train between Kalamazoo and Niles as late as the 1960's, with the symbols NK- and KN-. There is a film of this train pulling into Botsford Yard in Kalamazoo in the 50s, on Emery Gulash's NYC video.
A small portion of the westbound classification yard (even a track still going over the westbound hump) was still in place around 1980 or so. Just a small group of stubs left towards the west end now, which are used for Amtrak ballast cars and a lumber company. Before the double track in Niles was moved back about a mile to its current location, the east end of the double track ended right by the humps, and the control point was called CP-Hump! There's a small museum in Niles, where right inside the doorway is a big aerial shot of the yard, showing the diesel shop and part of the yards. There were lots of cars in the rip yard! |
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