Downfall of Plymouth

[CSXBOY]

I just was watching a video on Youtube about the city of Plymouth and the guy in the video was griping about the train traffic in Plymouth MI and I would always hear stories from friends and family about how annoying the trains are in Plymouth. I live near Plymouth on the CSX Detroit Sub and I go through there quite often going to and from work and doing errands and etc. I never get caught by trains or see something lined in forever. I think it is way down from 20 trains a day. I dont even think we top fifteen in a 24 hour period anymore. But what led to this downfall of traffic from the late 1990s? I was told it topped 48. I have a hard time believing it. 38 sounds more reasonable up until the 2008 recession. It also cannot because of CP leaving because they only ran 6-8 trains a day I think. Would anyone on here be able to tell me what happened? Did the economy just tank after 2002?

[SD80MAC]

Many things have contributed to the decline of rail traffic in the greater Detroit area. The biggest blow was the advent of NAFTA and the the closing of many, many automotive plants in Michigan as they were outsourced to other countries. When those left, so did much of the raw material, auto parts, and finished automobile traffic.

On the Plymouth Sub in particular, you had around 8-12 CP trains a day in the early to mid 2000s, plus 6 scheduled CSX road freights and several extras like coal, coke, grain, and stone. Even after CP pulled every train but X500 in December of 2005, you could still see 6-8 trains a day between GR and Plymouth on a typical day. First to leave were Q336 and Q337 to Flint. Then the coke trains, after the mills in Indiana switched suppliers and coke from Detroit was no longer consumed. Next were X500 and Q326 and Q327 to Detroit. That left Q334 and Q335 as the only scheduled road trains, but they too went bye bye in 2016. The stone trains also disappeared around that time, that traffic moving in regular trains. They tried a whole bunch of goofy operating plans after that, until finally settling on the current GR-DET local set up.

[CSXBOY]

Wow thats crazy how everything has shifted in the last 20 years or so.

[C&O Dispatcher]

I just was watching a video on Youtube about the city of Plymouth and the guy in the video was griping about the train traffic in Plymouth MI and I would always hear stories from friends and family about how annoying the trains are in Plymouth. I live near Plymouth on the CSX Detroit Sub and I go through there quite often going to and from work and doing errands and etc. I never get caught by trains or see something lined in forever. I think it is way down from 20 trains a day. I dont even think we top fifteen in a 24 hour period anymore. But what led to this downfall of traffic from the late 1990s? I was told it topped 48. I have a hard time believing it. 38 sounds more reasonable up until the 2008 recession. It also cannot because of CP leaving because they only ran 6-8 trains a day I think. Would anyone on here be able to tell me what happened? Did the economy just tank after 2002?

Although we all know that "things ain't what they used to be", and the late 70's was a long time ago (although it doesn't seem so to me!), I did a count of what we ran back then and came up with 36 manifest trains through Plymouth. To that, of course, one can add in numerous West Olive and Essexville unit coal trains (and their returning empties), as well as unit grain trains serving the 7 or 8 grain terminals located east and west of Saginaw. I'm not sure when the terminals at Webberville, Grand Ledge and Newaygo came on line which could have added to the count if they were active at that time. Also, the locals out of Lincoln (Wixom) and Wayne would sometimes make round trip runs to Oak. Also, as opposed to how "railroading" is done in our current age, we didn't try to couple 3 trains together and try to run them as one! For one reason, we would never have been able to get them around each other--congestion was always an issue, especially around Plymouth! I remember we would all be on edge if we even tried to couple two grain trains together to make a 130-car train! Imagine that! By the way, in my count I did include the six trains that ran between Detroit and Grand Rapids that didn't "turn the corner" at Plymouth. Those are the only ones we didn't have a hand in dispatching from Saginaw. The CP trains didn't really start until after my time, although I think they were running a couple before I left. I do recall in the later 80's there was a derailment at Trowbridge and they ran one all the way up to Saginaw and over the Ludington Sub to Baldwin and down to GR.