Continuing the tour we started in the Midway district, we're up in the Roseville area now.
Just north of Pacal Steel, the tracks pass underneath I-35 and start to curve around in Roseville. The grade here is fairly steep, around 2% I think. The spur heading due north is a significantly higher grade, possibky as much as 4%. I've never seen an SW with more than 4 cars head up or down this hill. Dedicated Logistics and Willamette Industries are up here, with a three track spur between their two buildings. Mostly it's paper products coming in here in boxcars.
Not shown on this map, but just to the north is a spur for Old Home bakery, where they produce chips of various sorts. Lots of tank cars full of vegetable oil into this place. Also on this spur is MinSolv (Minnesota Solvents) with two unloading racks for tank cars (and a plethora of "No Smoking" signs).
There's another siding here, which often contains more coil gons and other cars which I think are to or from the WC, as many WC boxcars can be seen here.
Moving on, we come to a crossing with the BN Mulberry Line, formerly part of the NP freight route to Duluth, now a long spur into White Bear Lake and Hugo. The Commercial does switch this line, but infrequently (usually on Sunday mornings). The junction shown between these two lines is wrong. It's on the south-east corner instead, and is a VERY tight curve. This is Belt Line Junction. Crossing control is done via a swing gate across the tracks. I don't know if there's a lock on it at all, or if there's anything more protective than first come first serve.
Across County Road C is Williams Pipeline, a tank farm holding mainly gasoline for various service station chains. The small holding yard here usually contains many tank cars (hey, imagine that!). These are inbound loads of methanol and a couple of other additives, which is mixed into the "raw" gasoline to make the various grades that you find at the pump.
I have to say there's not a lot of excitement here, just one short spur in this area. But this was added sometime between 1977 and 1993, so there's room for expansion at the Commercial.
The major user is Stone Container, and they also receive loads of kraft paper to make corrugated cardboard. There are also unloading facilities for up to 3 covered hoppers. There are two spurs on the backside of the building for about 8 cars total. Further down, Murphy Warehouse still receives cars, but not frequently. In between these two is another small facility, but the size of the weeds around the car on it show there's been no movement here for several years.
"NW Reload" is the label on the timetable map for a spur on the east side of the road, and there are occasionally covered hoppers spotted here, but I don't know what's being reloaded (or for that matter, how, since I can't see any useful access to this track except by rail).
There's another spur off of this spur, but it doesn't appear to have seen any service lately.
But please note that this is the first section we've looked at that isn't terribly interesting. To offer a sense of scale, the track distance from the bottom to the top of this map is a smidge over 1.5 miles.
Since there's not much else of interest here, I'd like to point out that the entire "main line" (sic) of the Commercial is continuous welded rail. This was done by the C&NW as payment to the Commercial for their part in the coal train movements. I believe this is rail that was pulled up somewhere in the Powder River Basin. It wasn't strong enough to stand up to 100 coal trains a day, but 4 or 5 a week won't task it too much. The roadbed is also in very nice shape.
Now we come to some interesting stuff. This is Bulwer Junction, a connection with the Soo Line (okay, CP Rail), which is operated by the Wisconsin Central today.
The small yard is just to the west of a telephone pole yard (yes, the sign says "Bell Pole Yard"), which does some shipping via the Commercial.
Of course, the junction tracks face the wrong way for the normal flow of traffic. Ideally, the south-east corner would be joined, allowing northbound traffic on the Commercial to move right onto the eastbound WC, but alas, it isn't so. Which makes for an interesting place to be. Watching the moves used to swap a coal train from the MNNR to the WC, which also involves a power swap from UP to WC, is fascinating.
The station that used to live in the corner (I don't know which one) is now a little further north of here in Long Lake Park, and houses the New Brighton Historical Society. The WC has built a crew facility here recently, reversing a trend in depots.
WC trains will occasionally cross the Commercial and head through the Soo's Shoreham yard and into the BN Northtown Yard. The WC trains that interchange with any road but the BN will move south on the Commercial, usually with 2 or 3 SD-45's and maybe one of the F45 units.
NEWS: as of July 1998, WC trains usually leave their non-BN interchance in New Brighton Yard for the Commercial to haul down to Midway. The days of WC runthroughs have come to and end, for now.
The bridge across Interstate 694 is at the very top of this map, and because of the nature of the freeway profile and the style of bridge, is the site of the steepest grade on the line. It's very short, to the top of the bridge, but strong enough that occasionally a train will stall out on the bridge and will need to call for a helper. It's a very embarrased UP engineer who needs a SW-1200 to bail out 3 C44-9W's.
Another set of run-around tracks here, and then a switch to the Butcher's Spur. There's Midwest Asphalt and Tex-Gas on the west side of Long Lake Road, and then Mengelkoch on the east. Mengelkoch is not a place I recommend visiting in the summer, as it's a rendering plant and the arome, is, well, special. Continuing across I-35W is ATS Steel. The two sidings at ATS house a locomotive and several passenger cars in various states of disrepair. Most of these are in storage for the Gopher State Railway Museum.
Back onto the main, the line splits, the westerly side heading a couple of miles into Fridley to serve some warehouses and another coil steel transloading facility.
Again, I wish I knew more about this area. I do know that there isn't much going on here anymore. There used to be a large fleet of old Metro Transit buses stored here, and more equipment from the MTM is here as well.
I love all the loops in the track plan here.
That's all there is, except that I didn't show the line to Fridley. It's 11.5 miles from the yard in the Arsenal to the roundhouse in Midway. You've now seen everything.
I will be adding to these pages, as I get more information about the industries served by the Commercial, and as I begin to get more photographs of various places. I'll be noting the location of each picture on the maps.
If you have information regarding the Commercial, or any of its predecessors, I'd love to include it in this site. Please contact me if you have something to contribute, or comments to make. Thank you.
Copyright © 1998, 1999 by david d zuhn. All rights reserved.