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CN Idles Battle Creek Yard 04/03/2020

Posted: Fri Apr 03, 2020 11:14 pm
by LansingRailFan

Re: CN Idles Battle Creek Yard 04/03/2020

Posted: Fri Apr 03, 2020 11:52 pm
by bnsfben
Battle Creek is essentially a marshaling yard. It builds and sorts cars to go on proper trains to various destinations in Chicago (Kirk, Markham, IC South, Joliet, Gibson, Proviso etc). There probably isn’t enough traffic to justify all that. My “hunch” is that they’ll just send everything to Kirk to have them hump it.

Re: CN Idles Battle Creek Yard 04/03/2020

Posted: Sat Apr 04, 2020 12:11 am
by trainjunkie47
Challenging times for sure for all the railroads. What to keep going and what to idle? The silver linings in the clouds; they can get large infrastructure projects done with less disruption to existing traffic, and they do not have to worry about everything going back to normal at once. It will take the rest of the year for traffic to build back to where it was when this ends...if it happens that soon.

Re: CN Idles Battle Creek Yard 04/03/2020

Posted: Sat Apr 04, 2020 3:06 am
by Saturnalia
Battle Creek is kind of unique as a small yard really dedicated to only a small subset of traffic. I doubt the railroads will change much in the way of traffic flows, even with a 20-30% traffic drop.

Re: CN Idles Battle Creek Yard 04/03/2020

Posted: Sat Apr 04, 2020 7:00 am
by AARR
Is Battle Creek still used to originate a couple Locals to the east and west?

Re: CN Idles Battle Creek Yard 04/03/2020

Posted: Sat Apr 04, 2020 9:53 am
by dave989
They use Battle Creek to do a lot of block swapping. Wonder if this will still take place. I know one local was based from Battle Creek that went west to Pavilion (Kazoo area) but I'm not sure how far west after that.

Re: CN Idles Battle Creek Yard 04/03/2020

Posted: Sat Apr 04, 2020 1:32 pm
by GP9R
Battle Creek is not idled. Traffic is severly cut back and its down to a single yard job on days and one at night. Battle Creek does a lot of block swapping but it also builds a lot of blocks. With the auto traffic nearly stopped there isn't a lot of traffic to switch any more but they are still receiving cars for the various locals. Becuase of the slowdown in traffic and the elimination of several trains less trains are working the yard as pretty much all the westbound traffic now goes to Kirk, but BC will still block it together to relieve some stress on Kirk by sending them additional traffic. The track dept. appears to be taking advantage of this and rehabing parts of the yard that have been severely negelected

Re: CN Idles Battle Creek Yard 04/03/2020

Posted: Sat Apr 04, 2020 2:26 pm
by NS3322
dave989 wrote:They use Battle Creek to do a lot of block swapping. Wonder if this will still take place. I know one local was based from Battle Creek that went west to Pavilion (Kazoo area) but I'm not sure how far west after that.
That local goes all the way to South Bend.

I believe E. Hunter Harrison tried to shut down Battle Creek at some point during his reign of terror, but was unsuccessful. It still is the heart of the old GTW.