"Connor's Point Job" at Superior Union Depot July 1976
The Lake Superior Terminal & Transfer Railway's "Connor's Point Job" went on duty at 4:01PM. The Terminal actually called it the Soo Job but it did quite a bit more work than just interchanging freight cars with the Soo Line at the Soo's Belknap Street yard. After making the run to the Soo, this pair of switch engines (two were always assigned to this job account heavy tonnage and steep grades to the harbor front, usually the 103-104 but also the 105 when one of the others was in the shop) moved on to handle the industries located on Connor's Point. This included switching of Continental Grain Company, Marine Fueling, Cutler-Laliberte-McDougal Corporation, Huron Cement, Superior Fibre Products, the sewage plant, and Great Lakes Storage Company. The Soo Job's crew did all they could handle in a 12 hour shift and that all started right here at Superior Union Depot.
The Terminal actually owned this building. During this era Amtrak used the ticket office and lobby located center building on the first floor, and the baggage room on this end too. The rest of it was used by the LST&T Railway. Their general offices were located on the second floor. The yardmaster's office and crew lunch and locker room were on the first floor behind the locomotives. Which is why you'll always see engines parked near the north end of the depot as the crews stopped here briefly to pick up their instructions before departing with cars, to take a break and grab lunch, and to drop off the conductor and his paperwork at the end of the day.
But here's the real story that I want to share with this image. You see, under those black, pitched roofs on both ends of the building were the Terminal's file storage. All of the paperwork for every penny of wage EVER paid, every car EVER switched and accounted for, and EVERY asset bought, maintained and retired, was neatly filed away inside those hot attics.
Much of the information was kept inside steel file cabinets but there were row upon row of ledger books too. Luckily, at least one of the car movement ledger books was rescued from the dumpster after the Terminal was shut down at the end of 1985. I got it from Andy Sharp after he became frustrated with the "hieroglyphics" used by the line long before the advert of computers. The Terminal never had a computer. The Terminal did it all in pencil on paper and they abbreviated everything including car numbers. And I don't mean basic number and initial. Even the car number itself was abbreviated and without showing you how that was done it would be difficult to explain.
Fortunately, I had one ledger book from Andy, all of the maps for the entire railroad, and a numbered industry list that explained which numbered codes went with which location on the railroad. Only by comparing the codes in the ledger book with the codes on the industry list and maps were we finally able to unravel the mystery of car movements on the whole of the LST&T. Of course, an LST&T Railway yardmaster could have easily explained it to any of us, but we didn't have one of them handy here in Chicago, so we figured it out from scratch. Basically we reverse-engineered the different data sets until it made sense.
The work of spread-sheeting all of the raw data was dished off to Dan Holbrook who "computerized" all of the data contained within my June 1955 ledger. Dan was a yardmaster with BN so he understood what the codes could mean. His work on this book was the only thing that was ever computerized about the LST&T. A small sampling of his final work on the DSS&A and Soo tranfers ended up on page 11 of "The Soo" (quarterly publication of the Soo Line Historical and Technical Society) Winter 2007, Vol. 29, No. 1 edition. Those breakouts would have been impossible to determine without the ledger book, the maps and industry list, and a basic understanding of railroad accounting.
Much of the data that has been saved on the history of equipment used by the Terminal came from these files too, partially as a result of meetings I had with Ass't. Superintendent Dennis J. MacKay. Dennis was very helpful to me and when the Terminal was shut down he became a track inspector with the BN. But before that happened, hundreds of pages of material and all of the Terminals standard forms were copied and saved in order to preserve the history of this little railroad. None of that would have happened without sharing of information and caring to take the time to do the work in the first place.
Andy Roth did a fine series of stories on the Terminal in the SLH&TS magazines (mentioned above) and those stories benefited from his meeting with Lew C. Michael and others from the Terminal plus the ground work we did from Chicagoland. All of this labor to interview people who worked here and to unravel the mystery of the files sitting inside the cabinets stored under those black, pitched roofs was a collective win for saving and sharing history of this little railroad. As is often the case, pictures can be worth even more than a thousands words when we know the whole story.
Job well done, everyone. Long live The Terminal!
"Connor's Point Job" at Superior Union Depot July 1976
The Lake Superior Terminal & Transfer Railway's "Connor's Point Job" went on duty at 4:01PM. The Terminal actually called it the Soo Job but it did quite a bit more work than just interchanging freight cars with the Soo Line at the Soo's Belknap Street yard. After making the run to the Soo, this pair of switch engines (two were always assigned to this job account heavy tonnage and steep grades to the harbor front, usually the 103-104 but also the 105 when one of the others was in the shop) moved on to handle the industries located on Connor's Point. This included switching of Continental Grain Company, Marine Fueling, Cutler-Laliberte-McDougal Corporation, Huron Cement, Superior Fibre Products, the sewage plant, and Great Lakes Storage Company. The Soo Job's crew did all they could handle in a 12 hour shift and that all started right here at Superior Union Depot.
The Terminal actually owned this building. During this era Amtrak used the ticket office and lobby located center building on the first floor, and the baggage room on this end too. The rest of it was used by the LST&T Railway. Their general offices were located on the second floor. The yardmaster's office and crew lunch and locker room were on the first floor behind the locomotives. Which is why you'll always see engines parked near the north end of the depot as the crews stopped here briefly to pick up their instructions before departing with cars, to take a break and grab lunch, and to drop off the conductor and his paperwork at the end of the day.
But here's the real story that I want to share with this image. You see, under those black, pitched roofs on both ends of the building were the Terminal's file storage. All of the paperwork for every penny of wage EVER paid, every car EVER switched and accounted for, and EVERY asset bought, maintained and retired, was neatly filed away inside those hot attics.
Much of the information was kept inside steel file cabinets but there were row upon row of ledger books too. Luckily, at least one of the car movement ledger books was rescued from the dumpster after the Terminal was shut down at the end of 1985. I got it from Andy Sharp after he became frustrated with the "hieroglyphics" used by the line long before the advert of computers. The Terminal never had a computer. The Terminal did it all in pencil on paper and they abbreviated everything including car numbers. And I don't mean basic number and initial. Even the car number itself was abbreviated and without showing you how that was done it would be difficult to explain.
Fortunately, I had one ledger book from Andy, all of the maps for the entire railroad, and a numbered industry list that explained which numbered codes went with which location on the railroad. Only by comparing the codes in the ledger book with the codes on the industry list and maps were we finally able to unravel the mystery of car movements on the whole of the LST&T. Of course, an LST&T Railway yardmaster could have easily explained it to any of us, but we didn't have one of them handy here in Chicago, so we figured it out from scratch. Basically we reverse-engineered the different data sets until it made sense.
The work of spread-sheeting all of the raw data was dished off to Dan Holbrook who "computerized" all of the data contained within my June 1955 ledger. Dan was a yardmaster with BN so he understood what the codes could mean. His work on this book was the only thing that was ever computerized about the LST&T. A small sampling of his final work on the DSS&A and Soo tranfers ended up on page 11 of "The Soo" (quarterly publication of the Soo Line Historical and Technical Society) Winter 2007, Vol. 29, No. 1 edition. Those breakouts would have been impossible to determine without the ledger book, the maps and industry list, and a basic understanding of railroad accounting.
Much of the data that has been saved on the history of equipment used by the Terminal came from these files too, partially as a result of meetings I had with Ass't. Superintendent Dennis J. MacKay. Dennis was very helpful to me and when the Terminal was shut down he became a track inspector with the BN. But before that happened, hundreds of pages of material and all of the Terminals standard forms were copied and saved in order to preserve the history of this little railroad. None of that would have happened without sharing of information and caring to take the time to do the work in the first place.
Andy Roth did a fine series of stories on the Terminal in the SLH&TS magazines (mentioned above) and those stories benefited from his meeting with Lew C. Michael and others from the Terminal plus the ground work we did from Chicagoland. All of this labor to interview people who worked here and to unravel the mystery of the files sitting inside the cabinets stored under those black, pitched roofs was a collective win for saving and sharing history of this little railroad. As is often the case, pictures can be worth even more than a thousands words when we know the whole story.
Job well done, everyone. Long live The Terminal!