This is something new to me. Studying a railroad whose entirety fits onto two 7.5" USGS quadrangles. So here's a virtual tour of the Minnesota Commercial, courtesy of the fine folks at Wildflower Productions, maker of the Topo! series of online maps.
We'll be moving south to north, even though it makes the pictures jump somewhat oddly, since that's the order of importance to the railroad. Starting in Saint Paul, just a little bit north of Interstate 94, just east of the Vandalia exit, we find the Commercial's roundhouse on Cleveland Avenue.
Today you may see parts of the Midwest's largest collection of Alco's sitting on the ready tracks. There are also several SW's and a GP-9. Off to the east are several storage tracks, where the Minnesota Transportation Museum and the Gopher State Railway Museum are storing equipment.
Moving north, we cross University Avenue and we're now on Transfer Road. Just to our left and right are a variety of light industrial and office buildings, where once part of the Transfer's yards once stood. To our right is also the new Amtrak station, a 4 track structure built in the 1970's to provide a single, central station for the Cities, which had always had two sets of stations, Saint Paul Union Depot serving all railroads, and a variety of stations in Minneapolis. At one time this Amtrak station saw 6 or 8 trains a day, but now all that remains is the Empire Builder, one eastbound early in the morning and the westbound late at night.
There first of the yard areas, the smaller one, is known as the F Yard. It's smaller than shown in this map, and is mostly car storage, for both the Commercial and with parts leased out to other roads (mainly the CP).
The second yard, running east to west, is about 30 tracks, and is where most of the classification takes place. Six tracks, in two sets of three (11-13 and 15-17) are very definitely storage for the CP Rail. They keep LNG and Propane cars here for the Ashland refinery in the southern suburbs. Each day the CP calls for a certain number of cars and the Commercial switches them into the CP transfer. There are also a couple of tracks used to store potash cars. The CP brings in a lot of potash, as "rolling storage", and the shippers consign these cars en route. Lists of cars to switch out come in each day, and these cars get pulled and added to one of the transfer trains.
Tracks 10, 14, and 18 are kept clear if at all possible, because these propane cars are loaded, and they'd like to minimize the chance of a mishap. A leak in one of these cars would be very disruptive to the western part of Saint Paul, and an explosion would destroy half of the city. The Commercial is much better at keeping the weeds down than they used to be, now that these cars are kept here.
Running parallel to this yard just to the north is the BNSF ex-GN mainline through town. A couple of storage sidings are here too, for the Midway Intermodal Yard to the east. If we continued north/east on Transfer Road, we'd see the entrance for this yard in about a half-mile.
The Commercial has a junction with the BNSF here, called Saint Anthony. Heading west onto the main, a train can proceed past or into Union Yard (the former GN freight yard, now mostly grain car storage), into East Minneapolis (a part of Union Yard rented to the C&NW), or onto the Commercial's line to the north.
This line curves sharply after switching off to the right from Saint Anthony. A few hundred yards later, after crossing Kasota Avenue, it then crosses the BNSF ex-Northern Pacific main line at grade. There is also an interchange allowing a train heading north on the Commercial to head west on the NP lines.
Both of these junctions are controlled by the BNSF dispatchers in Fort Worth, Texas. As almost every train will block both junctions, the dispatcher will often hold a train on the Commercial for a long time until a window appears on both BNSF lines.
Continuing on, we find a set of run-around tracks that are used when switching the south end of the Commercial. Trains switching the Hennepin District will often uses these tracks as working space. Cars are occasionally stored here as well, waiting their turn to get "on spot".
Okay, so we're not on Hennepin Avenue, but we've crossed over it now, after branching off from the Commercial's main line. We're in an area of street side running and many short spurs for the various industries in the area. It's clear that the amount of traffic today isn't close to what there used to be, as many of the spurs lead to empty blocks or to buildings that have no rail loading capabilities at all.
With all of these very tight curves, small switchers are the order of the day, and make sure you've got those rerailing frogs and a stack of 4x6's available too.
Some of the industries within the Hennepin area include
Part of my railroad research come springtime will be to document each existing industry, their car spots, and what sort of lading would be shipped to/from each on what sort of car. Working from that base, I'll begin to move backwards in time to document what used to be there.
Moving north on the main again, we'll come to Broadway, the first grade crossing since just north of Park Junction. As this is one of the longest stretches without a grade crossing, UP coal trains are often parked here waiting to go either north or south (north for loads, south for empties). Northbound trains will usually have 3 six-axle units on the head end, and another 2 or 3 at the tail, as the grades up from the river are steep, plus the grade on the Commercial isn't none too flat either.
Just north of Broadway on the east side of the tracks is Pacal Steel. This is the site of a coil steel reload facility, receiving a large number of coil steel gons, with many from the Wisconsin Central and the Indiana Harbor Belt. There is also an unloading facility for lumber, so many center beam flatcars are found here. There are a set of run-around tracks here, which often hold a handful of the coil gons.
Continue on to Part II of this tour.
Questions, comments, or kudos? Please let me know, as I'd love to hear from you.
Copyright © 1998, 1999 by david d `zoo' zuhn.