Over on the Grand Elk Operations thread, posed this question recently when I learned NS was no longer moving overhead traffic for Battle Creek via Kalamazoo and the Grand Elk:
So, sorry to get sidetracked on the NS for a second, but basically what we have here is a similar situation to the setup from about 10 years ago, where all Wayne , Jackson and BC traffic comes from the east, right? How is this traffic being fed to the east end? Something like 38E/39E Elkhart-Wayne? Also, what job now switches Knappen Milling in Augusta?
NS8401 responded with this informative post:
The traffic rides 358 or 332 to Oakwood. The situation is only similar to the direction the traffic comes from. 10 years ago you had rack trains and coil steel trains out of Wayne. B19 handles all that traffic plus all of the Jackson-Lansing-Battle Creek traffic now Between Wayne and Oakwood. You can imagine how big of a train that could be. One day Last week they took 9+ hours to leave Wayne and had 152 cars and over 10,000’ of train. This morning when I was leaving for work around 430 they were still trying to leave. Wayne isn’t really set up for that volume of traffic to leave at once in a super efficient manner. The north pass isn’t long enough for them to fit more than about 100 cars or so. So they have to hand throw at Second street for head room and then close it before they can depart. If they are lucky they have a brakemen to do that for them but there have been times where the conductor is taking a long walk to the head end which can be as far East as Merriman Road or beyond.
So my question is, in addition to B19's move from Oakwood to Wayne and back again with caboose (via Townline, Schaefer and a shove move at the NS Rouge Bridge, I assume), does any other freight traffic travel the east end of the Michigan Line, between Wayne and Townline? I saw a recent photo of a rack train at Dearborn with a UP unit that was not B19. Does B19 also switch the last customer east of Wayne, Cul-Mac Industries? Is a different local based out of Wayne to switch the Michigan Assembly ramps and the other local customers just west of Wayne? Sorry for so many questions, just trying to figure out the latest and greatest on Michigan's newest double track mainline!