BA-11 is hardly a crack express train worthy of such names as Cannonball, Zephyr or Falcon.
It doesn’t race across the Great Plains at 70 miles per hour or travel from coast to coast with exotic cargoes bound for ships for Japan or Europe.
BA-11 plods at 10 m.p.h. or less for only 13 miles between south suburban Blue Island and East Chicago. On this day, its name and number simply means that crew went on duty at 11 a.m. in Blue Island.
Yet it is as vital to the economy as any express. Its 56 freight cars contain such things as used oil bound from San Diego to a recycling plant in East Chicago, as well as empties from Houston headed for Bethlehem Steel Corp.’s mill at Burns Harbor, Ind.
BA-11 is run by the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad–one of the anonymous but vital industrial Belt lines that keep Chicago’s factories humming.
As the nation’s big railroads are merging into four giant systems, down from as many as 100 in 1950, the city’s four Belt railroads are not only surviving by staying small, but also prospering.
They are the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad, or Harbor; the Belt Railroad of Chicago, or Belt; the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern Railway, or EJ&E; and Baltimore & Ohio Chicago Terminal.
Placed end to end, they would stretch for only 322.9 miles–from Chicago to a cornfield 11 miles east of Des Moines–but collectively they help Chicago keep its title as the nation’s railroad capital.
In fact, the Belt lines are just one kind of specialized railroad in the metropolitan area. Besides the big mainline railroads, there are the six terminal and switching companies that, combined, are 105 miles long, a short line of 3.5 miles and a 91-mile interurban railway.
“The (big) railroads aren’t interested in running switch engines into every nook and cranny of the city any more,” said Michael W. Blaszak, an attorney representing a number of small railroads and unofficial historian of the city’s rail system.
That’s where the Belts come in. Besides shuttling freight cars to and from local factories, they transfer trains between the mainline railroads.
They also break up and reassemble trains to and from other cities. Chicago has been a railroad junction since the 1850s, and in recent years the two big Canadian railroads–Canadian national and Canadian Pacific–have turned it into their midcontinental hub.
(Chicago has become such a dominant terminal it can’t be ignored. Besides, the Canadian railroads have had a presence here since the 1800s. The transcontinental route through Chicago is 500 miles shorter than the one around the northern end of Lake Superior.
NAFTA has increased the Canadian railroads’ presence in the U.S., with the Canadian National recently buying the Illinois Central.)
According to a study now being completed, the Belts now handle a lion’s share of the nearly 3,000 freight trains pulling 200,000 cars through Chicago each week. That amounts to 15,600 trains and 10.4 million freight cars a year–more than most nations handle and almost a quarter of the U.S. rail traffic volume.
Collectively, the Belts operate 228 locomotives and more than 6,500 freight cars, though the Belt Railroad and Baltimore and Ohio don’t own any cars.
The U.S. railroad system is more than 123,000 miles long and operates almost 19,000 locomotives and 1.2 million freight cars, according to the Association of American Railroads.
The Belt Railroad’s Clearing Yard in Bedford Park, just south of Midway Airport, may be the world’s busiest. Belt officials boast it is the busiest in the U.S., handling more than a million cars a year.
Like the rest of the Belt system, Clearing is largely unknown outside the railroad industry.
“You can’t believe the number of people who tell me they didn’t even know our yard was here. We are hidden behind the (Clearing) industrial park,” said Ronald L. Batory, outgoing Belt Railroad president.
The Chicago Belt system continues to flourish because the nation’s railroads can’t avoid the Chicago bottleneck.
“The traffic patterns favor straight lines, and that means most of the (U.S.) traffic has to go through Chicago,” said John Orrison, vice president of service design for CSX Transportation, the giant eastern railroad that owns the Baltimore & Ohio. “The customer decides which gateway.”
That means most shippers pick Chicago over smaller rivals in St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans.
To keep that traffic, the Chicago Belts are scrambling to upgrade their yards, track and signals to make the system less of a bottleneck. Batory said the Belt Railroad is in an $80 million facelift that will increase train speeds to 40 m.p.h. from 10.
The Belt is owned by eight mainline railroads, which have allowed it to spend a major chunk of its profits on track upgrades rather than paying the mainlines dividends.
“We also have a program with CSX to upgrade our track in Chicago,” said Charles H. Allen, general manager of the Harbor Belt.
EJ&E officials also have been upgrading their line as part of a marketing strategy to persuade other railroads to use it to bypass the city, according to railroad industry officials. Officials of the railroad and its parent Transtar Corp. in the Pittsburgh suburb of Monroeville did not respond to requests for data or interviews.
The EJ&E has been as much a roller coaster as a railroad in recent years, according to industry insiders. Based in Joliet and once a predominantly steel carrier, its mainline circles the metropolitan area from Waukegan to Gary in a belt about 35 miles from the Loop. USX Corp.’s U.S. Steel subsidiary, once the sole owner of the EJ&E, still owns 44 percent.
As trucks and improved interchanges between the mainline railroads cut into its traffic after World War II, the EJ&E phased out most transfer traffic and tried to develop industry along its lines. The decline of the steel industry hit the EJ&E hard in the 1980s, and it was forced to downsize and abandon several lines.
Most recently it has revived the rail bypass strategy and has been receptive to proposals by Metra, the Regional Transportation Authority’s rail operation, to develop a commuter line on its tracks.
The Belt Railroad operates mainly on Chicago’s West and Southwest Sides. The Harbor runs between Bensenville and northern Indiana, and the Baltimore & Ohio connects its parent CSX with the western railroads.
The Belt Railroad’s mainstay is mainly freight being transferred between the big railroads, and the bulk of the Harbor’s traffic comes from local industries.
Both have benefited from the upswing in the local economy. Traffic on the Belt Railroad alone is up 19 percent since 1994.
The Harbor especially has ridden the coattails of the steel industry resurgence. The conversion of the former Pullman Inc. passenger car plant in Hammond to other uses is a case in point.
“Five years ago, I didn’t even have any service on that line,” said Allen.
“Today, we’re probably doing 25 carloads a day out of that complex, mainly steel-related.”
To revive the moribund Clearing yard, Batory and his predecessor streamlined the Belt Railroad’s operations, and Batory imposed a tariff on freight cars left there too long so mainline railroads would move their trains.
A freight car that three years ago took 38 hours to get through Clearing now does it in an average of 24 hours.
“People bring us their trains for the same reason they take their cars to Jiffy Lube: We’re faster and cheaper,” Batory said.
The Belt system is almost as old as railroads in Chicago. The first one was built in 1856, eight years after railroad started service here.
It is the little-known St. Charles Air Line, built just north of 16th Street to connect the Illinois Central Railroad along Lake Michigan to the Galena & Chicago Union; Aurora Branch Railroad and Chicago & Rock Island Railroad farther west. The Air line, which is less than a mile long, is still in operation as a branch of the IC.
As the city grew, rail traffic became more congested and late-comers had difficulty getting rights of way into the city, four larger belts were built progressively farther from the Loop in the 19th Century’s last two decades.
Five late-comers banded together in 1879 to build a line and passenger station (Dearborn) in downtown Chicago. The Chicago & Western Indiana, as the line was called before most of it was absorbed by the Belt Railroad, was expanded into a belt around the city to handle freight.
The C&WI was followed in 1887 by the EJ&E, in 1889 by the Baltimore & Ohio and in 1896 by the Harbor.
The future of Chicago’s Belt railroads is a little cloudy because of the megamergers that will probably reduce the number of major U.S. railroads to four– Burlington Northern Santa Fe; Union Pacific; Norfolk Southern; and CSX–by year-end.
“We’ve already had a great shrinkage in the rail yards. They have either been redeveloped or converted into intermodal facilities,” where truck trailers and containers are loaded and unloaded from trains, said Blaszak.
The number of yards in the region has declined to 49 now from 160 in 1940. But three of the six biggest surviving yards, including Clearing, are operated by the Belts. The other two “classification, or hump” yards are Blue Island on the Harbor Belt and Kirk Yard in Gary on the EJ&E.
Belt Railroad officials are concerned the mergers will result in more trains running through Chicago without stopping.
However, Blaszak doesn think many major changes will occur soon.
“The system is stable right now. We’ve lost very few railroad lines in the Chicago area compared to most cities,” Blaszak said.
Though the number of mainline railroads serving Chicago has shrunk from 27 in 1935, the remaining seven still operate 25 routes to Chicago from all points.
