Friday, July 24, 2015

Alton's Halsted Street Yard

Brid's Eye View
pdf copy from 1915 Smoke Abatement Report,
p. 348
This 1915 map refers to the yard as the Chicago & Alton' Halsted St. Yd. A more modern map refers to this yard as IC Bridgeport Yard. But this would be after GM&O/Chicago&Alton merged with IC to form ICG and after ICG changed their name back to IC.
Satellite
It is not surprising that many of the tracks that were in this yard have been removed. What is surprising is how recently they were removed. The Bird's Eye View below shows that, not only are the tracks still present, there are some cars setting on some of them. Note that this was another relatively expensive yard because all of the tracks are elevated. There are two long road underpasses under this yard.



Satellite


The reason why I was studying this yard is the industrial lead that leaves the yard on the east side. I added a red line to this image to highlight where the track used to be. If you follow the link and zoom into the upper-right corner, you can see the shadow of a retaining wall and the lead disappearing because it is going down to ground level.

Bird's Eye View
Rotating a Bird's Eye View so that South is at the top, you see that a building is blocking most of the view of the descending lead. But you can see a portion between the building and I-94. The track on top is one of the CN/IC/GM&O/C&A elevated mainline tracks. The track in the middle is the descending industrial lead. The track on the bottom is an industrial spur servicing the building on the right. In fact, looking back at the Google satellite image, that spur went into the building.

Update: according to HotTimes, the CN called this the Bridgeport Yard. One of the uses of this yard is transfers between the Hawthorne and Glenn Yards.


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