Re: Saginaw West Belt
I can't speak to the "way back" history of the belt, but during my time the part remaining was from the switch off Mershon siding and running south through the west side neighborhoods down to the area of S. Michigan and Center St where Malleable Iron was located. At one time long ago it did cross the river down there and meander over to Hoyt. Besides the main customer (Malleable Iron), there was Delta Truss just north of Weiss St, a place that got coal near Bates St, and Gratiot Lumber. It crossed the MC/NYC/PC (later GTW) Paines line at a junction called Fordney. (During PM days, I believe all PM trains used the belt as far as Fordney and then ran over the MC to Paines and then on west toward Alma. At some point they got trackage rights all the way to Paines over the MC from Mershon tower instead of using the belt -- that's how our road trains got to Paines and our own trackage west of there). During my time, the only train to use the belt was a yard job that made a round trip to Malleable Mon-Fri. It usually had one small yard engine. It was kind of slow-go because they had to stop and flag a lot of the street crossings. Around 1985, the belt was abandoned from Weiss St all the way to Fordney, and access to Malleable was via the former MC/NYC/PC (by then owned by GTW) to Fordney and then south on what was left of the belt at that point. Now, except for the former MC out to Paines, the rest is all gone including Malleable.
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