City in Sound; Markham Freight Yards (ICRR)

This is Jack Angel, with city and sound. These are stories out of Chicago, city of all things, among them the railroads. One of the great railroad systems of the world never reaches beyond the Cook County line. On nearly 5 ,000 miles of railroad track, the freight, yard, and switching system operates. Operates at the heart of the nation's rail network. The Chicago switching district itself covers some 400 square miles, embracing Chicago and its immediate suburbs. In a wide 4 -mile strip from Homewood to Harvey, south of the city, the Markham Yards is the nucleus of freight traffic on the Illinois Central.

The Markham Yards are hump yards, which is to say that the freight cars are handled and switched from the crest of gently steeped humps and rolled by soft momentum to their separate places in the acres of tracks below. This is the story of that operation. The south end of these vast Markham Yards is the office of the Illinois Central operation here. Andrew McMullen is chief yard clerk. He's here with me to explain something of what happens to the paperwork when these trains come in here. What's the first thing you do, Mr. McMullen? Well, when we get the builds in from the south or from the connecting lines from the north, the builds go to the train desk where we're checked for recon signing orders. And then there's what we call our train seat is made up on the train desk. And how do they get? It's alright. Then the train seat is

taken into the teletype room where it is put out over our teletype system. Where the general yard master and the hump foreman has a copy of it so the cars can be switched from properly classified. You make that out here. Yes we do. We make out the classification of where these cars should go. They get this on the teletype that we saw over there and then they act accordingly. They know where these cars go. That's right. Actually there's an awful lot of paperwork connected with each one of these cars. Isn't there? Yes there is. Come in. And you have a vast mechanical device here that I'm told is kind of a large pneumatic tube that you can circulate these bills are lading and messages all around this operation. You know we have one that comes in from homeworld that's our receiving office from a south. It takes about four minutes to get the bills then

which is about two miles or distance of two miles. When you know I first ran across this when we were moving down the track there out on the yards and I saw one of these huge pipes running parallel to the tracks. And I asked one of the people what it was and he said well that's our tube operation. Kind of like a department store except strung out over miles and miles of track and system. Yeah I'm a larger scale. That's right. And so one of these trains comes in here. The personnel on the train can put the bills allating in one of these tubes wherever he is in the yards and send it into you. That's right. And you shuffle these things like a very scientific card game I assume. And know where the cars are where they should go and what cargo is there on and dispatched them to the yard. That's right. Well it all sounds very complicated but I can assure you that you make it look simple up here with these personnel. How many people are in the office here

about? On our day payroll which just from eight in the morning will 40 afternooners we have 52 on the day force. 52 people who determine where these cars are. How they come in, where to put them, how they go out and what are they on them. Check the rates, keep the car records and compile all the reports that goes to our car accountant's office and the service bureau. 52 man full time ports. Yeah that's right. A lot of work. That's right. And it operates 24 hours a day too. Joe Dawson is a train master here at Markham and he's certainly the master of a lot of trains. I can see looking over what is this? Yes sir. You have two big humps. Yes sir. And you call us a classification yards. That to the south of you is the classification yard yes sir. Well what are you classified? Well sir we classified

trains here for all points in the south, the southeast and the southwest. That is business originating in Chicago and points north of Chicago. In other words these cars, these freight cars come in here all mixed up and you take them and straighten them out. Either send them back to their destination or to some connecting line here in Chicago. That is correct. Well that must be a tremendous job. It is, we handle 800 cars here in eight hours with a normal day. I wouldn't presume to count all those tracks I see down there attached to switches but it certainly looks like a big, big platter of spaghetti. How many tracks do you have down there? 45 tracks Jack. Just in that one yard. That is correct. How many yards do you have? Six yards. Well that is just an awful lot of tracks particularly when you consider that each one of these cars has its own predetermined place doesn't it Joe? That is right. Well each car has its own predetermined track and E yard. I am scanning down this teletype list here that tells the switcher operator here where to put these.

The list indicates to the operator here where to put the cars and the switches are all punched automatically. Well now we are standing on one of these two big humps. The idea here is not as to roll these cars down to the switches rather than push them all away by engine and bang them up. That is the idea of a hump. They roll down by gravity. And as you can see down below that retarder towerman down below retards the movement of the cars so that they don't get away and run too fast. And these cars go down there they look like steers. No they each one headed for a different track. That group headed for a different switch. That is right. And they are kind of wandering all over the yards except you know exactly where they are and where they are going. That is right. The push button operator here knows just exactly what track he is putting them in on. Boy it must be an amazing thing to an old switchman to see the entire switching operation of this particular area of the yards as of course all these yards. Here handled completely by automatic devices. It is a far cry from the old

flat switching. It is modern ray rodent jack. That is the best way to look at it. It is modern ray rodent. Now I mentioned to you a few moments ago we handled 800 cars. Here I met 800 cars on each trick here approximately. We can handle that many. Of course it depends on condition. Someday you handle a few more. Someday a few less. But that is on each engine trick over these humps. Now say this were a flat switching operation. You couldn't switch nearly as many as that could. No definitely we couldn't. I would say we couldn't handle one third of the cars we handled here over the humps. Have a flat switching operation. Let them go why they find a place very quickly. Well you can see them rolling there yourself. There is no locomotion behind them. They just go down by gravity and when they get going too fast the retarder man slows them down. So they go in the tracks without damage to the cars or the lading. That is the purpose. And the switches are already touched. They are already pulled right here in the surface. Yes sir. That is pretty

amazing. Let's go look at some more of it. Okay. All right we have been to the Hump office and we have seen the man with a button. He fixes the switches here. He plays the codes in the machine. And you are Ralph Amberg and you are a retarder. A retarder operator. A retarder operator and we are in a large tall tower overlooking part of these vast yards. And exactly what is your operation consist of? Well the operation consists of retardant cars down to the control of the speed and to reduce the impact of the car. Okay. Let's get the picture now. They come over the hump a little bit. It is kind of like a gentle roller coaster. That is right. Cars are released down here. They don't go very fast but there is an awful lot of equipment. There are 70 tons and some with very valuable cargos. And of course you don't want to smash them up at all or even damage them the slightest. So where you get the cars coming down the hill approximately 12 to 15 mile an hour I would say. And it is your responsibility as a retarder operator to reduce the speed to about three three and

a half mile an hour. Okay. And we are kind of at the neck end of these switches and you retard them. That is correct. And then they just sort of float off on the various switches and tracks you having retarded their speeds. That is right. You are in the classification end of the yard. Then they roll down to the end of these separate tracks so it looks like about 50 looking out there. You roll them out on the end there or to the end and then what happens there? Just a minute. Just a second. You say let's 205? Yeah. We have to head into them at yesterday. Just a minute. I have to get that. Let's see if you can find that. Let's do it. Hey Bill, I have a now let's 205. All right. Okay. You all set, Rob? Okay, we're all set again. The list that just came in, that's the list of cars in the particular places that they go. Well, this is a list that was pulled on the receiving yard. It's a classification list as to how the cars are classified into these classification

tracks. Let's see. Line two is better. So basically your job is to get the cars that roll over the hump and slow them down. That's correct. Actually you're retarding the cars into the classification tracks. You have the speed of 12 to 15 mile an hour. You had to retard them to a point where they go down there with a reasonable impact like I say three and a half four mile an hour. Well, you do this by means of what looks like a vast pinball machine here. Similar to what it says. It's just like a giant vice. Two feet. No, I was talking about the panel here. Oh, yeah, yeah. The panel that controls these retarders. That's right. That's a kind of a mock -up of the whole switch system, isn't it? The whole yard? It is. That's correct. It's the way it's laid out in this panel is the way it's laid out on the ground. And you've got to switch for every retarder. Well, you have these retarder handles that operate these so -called retarders. Yeah, I should say handle and not confuse it with one of the switches down there. Now then,

a retarder looking out on a couple here. It looks like a couple of sections of track. And it has special equipment on it. What does that equipment do? Well, it squeezes to the rail. What they call shoes. The shoes are about two and a half, three foot long. And there's a series of these shoes which extend over the track approximately 40 to 50 feet. And both rails and two of the wheels. Okay, and squeezes the applied pressure to the wheel or the flange of the wheel to a point where you can bring the current to control. That's about the only way I could explain that. It's like a vice that you're applying pressure to the wheel. It doesn't work like a handbrake in the car. This is a permanent thing that's on the ground and it applies a pressure to the wheel of the wheel. Well, actually, to a layman like myself, it looks just like an adjoining track that sort of squeezes the wheel. It squeezes the

wheel of the wheel. Yeah, and slows it down a good deal. Well, having squeezed these wheels, Ralph, let's go further and see more. Thanks a lot. Okay, and it's perfectly all right. Bernie Hogan is chief clerk for the terminal agent here. And I certainly hope he can clear up one of the age old questions of railroading that has always kind of concerned me. And that is, Bernie, when you see a freight train with all these different box cars from all the different railroads and freight cars, and you get cars from railroads all over the country, knocking it straight into the ground in a yard like this. Well, when the train is received in the yard, we have a check of each car in the train as it arrives. Well, Bernie, you use these cars again, for instance, you'd have a load of Illinois grain and a Boston and main car, or you'd have some

automobile parts in a Union Pacific gondola or something. How do you railroads get together and work this out? You have a whole -of -home arrangement here? Yeah, they go back on the empty, after it's empty, it goes back to the, we have a home -road desk here, and he home -outs all the empty back to where their cars are from. Well, of course, your checkers here can determine how many other railroad cars are in your yard, but how can you tell how many Illinois central cars are clear back in Massachusetts or somewhere? Well, that they're all the railroads are the same. They should, in other words, in the east of one of our Illinois central cars are empty in the east, and they have something coming back to us this way, on the west they should. They could either send it back empty or reload it back. You follow us just to have to trust each other, right?

Well, that's more or less it. Barney, we were just down to the rip track, the repair track, and I noticed a whole string of cabooses, rightly painted, and there were some that read banana caboose. I didn't know you had cabooses for bananas. Well, yes, we do. The banana cabooses, some of the companies, the banana companies, they send their representatives, and they stay right in that caboose all the way up from New Orleans, and they have their blankets and pillows, and we take them out here when they get up here, and send them back to this car us, and they're put in a car and forward back to New Orleans. That's because the banana crop is so perishable, I guess. That's right, they stay right with the car. In fact, some of them, they go right on from here, if they're going up to Wisconsin or somewhere, the banana that man stays right with the car. Barney, actually, who rides a caboose? I've always wondered about that. Well, that's the conductor and the hind brakeman. We have a head brakeman. He rides in the

engine with the engineer and farmer. And the conductor works over those bills of lading all the way along, doesn't he? Yes, he makes a check in his whole train from the way it does. In fact, what it's called, a wheelie partner. Barney, you've seen the paperwork on, oh, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of cars in your lifetime with Illinois Central? Do you ever have any desire to go out and hump a few of them? Get on them and ride them? Well, no, I often thought, you know, lots of times that wonder just what happens to a car, how kind of connections they make and different connecting lines. Well, anyway, Barney, thank you for the ride here. We've enjoyed it very much. Thank you. It was a pleasure. Well, now if this isn't a roundhouse, it's certainly the roundest squarehouse I've ever seen. And your, what was your name, sir? N Landorf. N Landorf, Norman Landorf. And you're the general form of the roundhouse? That's right. What do you do here now that

the diesel age is upon us? We've got a lot of work maintaining these diesel locomotives, pulling piston heads and liners, making daily inspections. Is this the same roundhouse you had when you had steam locomotives? Same roundhouse that we had steam locomotives. There's been no change when we went from steam to diesel. We had no additional facilities that we had to use. I take it that those large scoops that we see from time to time overhead are places where those old locomotive funnels used to kind of tuck away and the steam would pour out through the roof. That's right. That's the smoke jacks. I see. Where the locomotive was spotted to let the exhaust gas gas out of the roundhouse. So the only difference you find here is that there's no more smoke out the roof? No more smoke out the roof. How many engines is the capacity here? Each one of these stalls will hold two locomotives, two diesel locomotives. There's 48 stalls. Mr. Landorf is the primary purpose of a roundhouse for repair, for storage, the fact that you don't want to leave the engines

out overnight or just principally are they shops? It's primarily used for inspecting the underneath part of the locomotive. Each locomotive that arrives at Markham is brought into the roundhouse and put over the pits and the underneath inspection is made. And of course the major repairs of any type are done here, are they? Major repairs are done here also. How about this engine to our left, this GP9 here? That is in here for an annual inspection. Nothing particularly wrong with it. Nothing particularly wrong with it. We're bound by ICC, ICC rules and regulations. That periodically we have to bring these locomotives in and do certain types of repairs. Monitoring the inspections, poorly inspections, semi and annual inspections. What's the designation there at GP with your lead or the general purpose can be used in either switch service in the yards or

passenger service on a road, as well as freight. So you have a lot of those around here. That's right. How about the one over there, a couple of stalls down, what's happening to that engine? That's ready to go. It's been inspected and ready for service. How many men do you have doing this sort of thing here? We have a total force including the foreman, clerks of 177 employees. There's not a lot of equipment to maintain. That's right. We have 124 locomotives that we have to maintain here, the sign to this point. Mr. Landorf, of course, the heart of our own house is the turntable which enables a single locomotive in the center to have access to all the tracks that run in the various stalls. Actually, in the diesel type of operation, do you use it much? Yes, or every engine that comes in goes on the turntable and goes to the house. However, if a serious storm hit us, put the power out to where the turntable couldn't be used, we could take the engines as they come in, switch them out over the wash

rack where we have a pit there that we can get underneath to make the underneath inspections. I see you've got one going around there now. That's right. That's going around getting ready to go out. And it sounds like one of our old trolleys except quieter. That's right. What's the power used there? You've got 250 horsepower electric motors turning that table. We've got all 91 -51 going around there. Is this make the engine here as dizzy? No, but it doesn't go fast enough for that. That's going to go fast enough. Well, actually, you've just got a kind of a vast bridge work out there that rotates in a pit and sort of stops at any track in the circle, don't you? That is correct. That's what we call a three -point suspension turntable. You have a big center casting in the center and you have two wheels on each end to balance the table. I understand these were a lot busier back when you had steam equipment because it took a lot more steam locomotives to do

the same job that fewer diesels do. That is correct. Now we're about to come out even here. 91 -51 has gone all the way around and the engineer probably wonders what we're doing here. Well, that's right. We're going to go around now to the back end of the engine and line her out because that locomotive is going to be headed out in service. You have a cab but one end of the locomotive so it's necessary to turn them when we have a cab on the proper end. Well, this is certainly the symbol of the whole roundhouse, that turntable. That turntable is a heart of our operations. This has been the story of the Markham Yards, largest of the switching systems on the Illinois Central and one of the great systems in the industry. It is part of a freight complex larger than the state of Rhode Island, shared by four dozen railroads, handling more than 45 ,000 freight cars a day, or

more of the business of railroading than anywhere else in the world. In 100 years, Chicago has come from the nation's 38th city to its number one industrial center. It has come a great share of that way on railroad tracks. This is Jack Angel with George Wilson, whose recordings here have impredited city in sound. For $15, the tip was $5. That represents a 32 % tip. Mr. Desarves, could you tell us, did one girl enjoy more than one of those tips that evening? Oh, sure. Just pick out by a girl number. Do you have your waitress numbers on there? I have waitress numbers

on here. Well, shuffle through and take a number, the first number you've come to and see how many that girl waited on. All right, let that, that's very interesting. Don't deal off the bottom. Well, here's a duplicate. Here's 31 and waitress 31. One check was $15. She received $250. Wow, here's a good one. Another check was $33 .15 and she received a $10 tip. Now, let me see if that same waitress. Here's another check for that same waitress. Here's a check for $14 .20 and she received a $10 tip. That one particular waitress, as I added up,

right there has made $22 .50 plus her salary of $42 .50 an hour per the month hour she worked that night. Emily Post is a piker with a 15%. That's one thing the Senate Racket Inquiry did establish. One other thing too, Marvin Griffith, the former organizer for local 394, supplied this in an answer to a question. What was the advantage, Mr. Griffith, for the employees for your making this arrangement? Well, frankly, I couldn't see the only advantage the employee got from the union was a $175 death benefit. After he was there a year, I think it goes up to $200. That he wouldn't get his relation would get if he died. Was there any actual benefit for the employee? Well, the only benefit

that we might, if they would come to us and needed work, send them to a different establishment. Well, as a general proposition, in the manner that you operated, and as I understand, you operated with the sanction of the union official, there was no clear benefit as far as wages are as the conditions for the employee. Well, they signed a contract, each one of these establishments, I never organized unless the owner signed a contract, but most of them is Mr. DeSantel stated it's a flexibility of wages. Well, we answered the question, was there any benefit as far as wages, hours, and conditions for the employee? Well, they're just answering all that it wasn't that I know of. The Senate restaurant inquiry and the weather forecast after this message. We let our employees, told our employees to get out the building, it looked like it might take

this building at that time. And that, the building that you're in now, is across the street? Across the street in the half -block north. And the fire was so hot that you thought it was going, it might take that one. We didn't know. We see there was an explosion. We didn't know whether it'd be another explosion. There's been small explosions every once in a while. Probably shotgun shells and cartridges and so on. Oh, I see. Things that were exploding in the hardware stock. Yes. Uh -huh. And no one has any idea down there what actually caused the blast. No, well, not that I know of. Yeah. We're busy here trying to put it out and get the thing under control. Jack Angel of our newsroom went to the scene with Bill Birch as the NBC Newsreel crew, covering both the explosion and fire at streeters and the flood conditions of the surrounding area. Angel told us by phone that many communities were having a hard time. He and Birch circling over the area in a helicopter. That's right. Land we're in the streeter

right now. The west end of town is at least partially below water. It's a real threat here as it was all through La Sal County and Bureau County when we came down here by helicopter. And of course the big excitement here in the streeter is the fire in the Williams hardware store, which is just about totally destroyed. It's a three -story building in the part of the shopping center at about 11 .45 this morning. An undetermined amount of people were in there, and suddenly the whole front blew out. It shattered the front of the building with such a force that it blew cars over in the street. The police department told me just a couple of moments ago that the three are hospitalized and at least three are missing. That told could grow either way. You said there was no idea how many people were in the streeter. No, they haven't been able to find out so far. Was that a gas explosion, Jack? Was that a gas explosion? They won't be pinned down on that as

yet lens. The official word is that this time is that it was unknown from unknown causes, but the smell of gas was detected by some of the patrons. I talked to a lab here at the airport, who's been in this morning, and in the store, that is. And he said that some of the people on the way out complained of feeling groggy and a little bit of light headed. We had a report by Beeper of Bill Warner, got it from one of the reporters down there on the local paper, who said that there was a sign in that store, prior to the explosion, that there was a gas leak and be careful about lighting matches. Do you know anything about that? I haven't heard that, but I did hear that the place was posted with no smoking signs, but that might be a kind of a corollary warning. Jack, could you tell me is there a connection of any kind between the flooded condition, or that area in this park? It's not very definitely that they were two different things.

The flash flood, of course, is inundated vast parts of the Eslasal County. That would catch Los Alps, Peru, Yudiga, what else? Well, goggles be a little bit, and we flew over the little town of Ransom, and there was one line of communication by road in there, but it appeared to be partially isolated. Bridges were almost immersed in water. Of course, they worked very big bridges. But all of those communities I've named are in trouble, is that right? Well, in some degree or another. Now, tell me, is it going to get better or going to get worse from this point on, or do you have any advice on it? Well, from what we hear down here, from the Police Department in the road.