Established in 1889 as a division of the Fort Street Union Depot Company, the Union Belt Railroad controlled a portion of freight operations in Detroit for its three main owners, the Wabash, Pere Marquette, and Pennsylvania Railroads. In addition to controlling this trackage, the company had established its own branch line running from P-Company Junction on the PM up through Fullerton Junction and around to a connection with the Detroit Terminal. Control and operation of the railroad was rotated between its owners often, resulting in a lack of physical assets other than its property. For all pratical reasons, the UBDR was a railroad only in legal terms. For more than three quarters of a century, the company would continue in this state of anonymity, moving freight for its owners using their equipment and their employees. This all changed with the formation of Penn Central in 1968. The Pennsylvania Railroad had been one third of the Union Belt’s ownership but with its recent merger with the New York Central, the company now had far too many Detroit connections to be profitable, especially when considering the region’s declining traffic levels. This caused the PC to bow out of the program, leaving the Pere Marquette and Wabash as the sole beneficiaries of the Union Belt. These railroads were able to come to more amicable agreements involving the movement of freight outside of the UBDR, rendering its trackage rights and transfer agreements useless. These operations were soon dissolved, leaving the Union Belt Of Detroit Railway as a lone, five-mile industrial branch within the city. Operations continued as before although now split 50/50 between the PM and WAB.
Coming into the 1980s, traffic had declined to a point that neither of the railroad’s parents wanted anything to do with complicated operating and revenue sharing contracts upon which the railroad was built. Instead of merging it into one of the companies, which would have given that railroad complete control over traffic from the site, the larger railroads decided to sell the line to a new operator, competing for the traffic as with any other customer. This new operator came in the form of the Itel Corporation and their Detroit Belt Railroad. Itel supplied the company with a pair of former Detroit Toledo & Ironton GP9s along with a caboose, all painted in a sharp new green and white scheme. The GP9s had been purchased in poor condition from the DT&I’s new owner, the Grand Trunk Western, in late 1984 and were sent to Chrome Crankshaft in Silvis, IL where they were stripped down and rebuilt. To avoid sinking too much money into the project, upgrades were kept to a minimum. The refreshed units found themselves a home at the newly rebuild Strathmoor Yard and began running weekday trains across the line. Itel worked hard to drum up business and was somewhat successful. By 1995 the company was handling fifteen-car trains each week day, a pretty good amount for such a small line.
Itel sold the Detroit Belt to a local trucking company in 2002, who soon built a transload site at Strathmoor Yard. With this, the company was able to increase business for itself as well as the railroad. The addition of this new site, known as DB Transload, added around 150 cars per year to the railroad’s operation, a considerable sum. Apart from the transload however, little money was invested in the operation and the Detroit Belt quickly fell into disrepair. With its GP9s pushing twenty years since their last rebuild, the DB was also running into mechanical problems as well. The 2008 Financial Crisis eliminated many of the railroad’s remaining customers for good and while still profitable, the line faced considerable capital investments such as new motive power and track work, causing the trucking company to sell the Detroit Belt.
This time, road’s assets were picked up by a development company looking to jumpstart its work in the region with the DB’s well-placed mainline. Having weathered the Financial Crisis without too much trouble, the development firm began putting a considerable amount of time and money into the tracks, upgrading the whole route to handle the bigger 286,000 LBS railcars that have now become standard across the national rail network. This upgrade allowed the company to begin accepting heavy bulk products at its transload site, increasing carloads significantly. Utilizing a previously abandoned spur, the railroad gained a new customer in C&D firm Detroit Recycled Concrete. The DB began operating the spur in late 2012, spotting cars full of concrete debris for DRC to unload. The business brought new life to the northern half of the railroad, increasing its traffic twofold. 2015 saw the railroad lease CSX’s West Detroit Branch. The first major growth for the railroad in many years, the new branch added three additional customers and more than doubled the railroad’s total length. Though the West Detroit Branch and the Detroit Belt cross each other at Fullerton Junction, the connecting tracks had long since been pulled out by previous owners. While plans were in place to rebuild the connection, an interim solution saw GP9 #986 shipped via CSX to the new branch. This not only isolated each locomotive on its own branch but marked the first time in over thirty years that one of the railroad’s units had left the five mile branch. When not running trains, the railroad’s crew was dispatched to help reinstall the east leg of Fullerton Junction’s Wye. Using a rented excavator and wheeloader, the crew was able to salvage two switches from unused industrial spurs and installed them before laying down the connecting track. Upon completion the GP9s were reunited and all West Detroit Branch traffic was routed to the DB’s regular P-Company interchange. The stretch of track spanning from Fullerton Junction to CSX’s Oak Yard now sits dormant, unused by both CSX and the Detroit Belt. The pandemic hit the railroad’s bottom line hard as it shuttered for many months while customers and their employees were in lock down. Upon reopening, the Detroit Belt had lost yet another customer in the Coca-Cola plant near the end of the West Detroit Branch. This both cut a major amount of car loads from the railroad in addition to ending service south of Joy Road. Despite these challenges, the railroad was able to trade in both GP9s to Western Rail Inc, who supplied a freshly repainted GP40 in their place. The big new unit represented a major upgrade over the GP9s both in terms of reliability and efficiency. Currently, the railroad operates tri-weekly with occasional Saturday runs.
- Current Units
#971 GP40 Ex-SW #9710
- Former Units
#986, #989 GP9 Ex-GTW #986, #989
