Operation
Revenue service in the tunnels officially began on August 15, 1906, with a 2-mile 16-minute run. By that time, 45 miles (72 km) of track were in place, with connections to 4 railroads and a total of 40 customer connections. 67 locomotives and 400 freight cars were on hand. In fact, coal delivery by subway began on October 13, 1905, when several carloads of coal were delivered from the Chicago and Alton Railroad coal chutes.
In 1915, most tunnel operation occurred between 7 am and 5 pm, with limited night operation primarily serving excavation spoil removal and coal and ash service. In a typical 10 hour work day, there were 500 to 600 train movements, all conducted under the authority of a telephone-based dispatching system. Dial telephones were installed at every street intersection so that engineers could easily remain in contact with the dispatcher. In 1914, the tunnel employed 568 people, including 116 motormen, 57 elevator men, 59 truckers, 74 clerks and 3 dispatchers. A 1916 survey showed that the tunnel carried 18 percent of the freight traffic in the Chicago loop.
In 1929, it was estimated that the tunnels handled between 200 and 300 train movements a day, with 10 to 15 cars per train. At the time, the tunnel had 150 locomotives, 2693 merchandise cars, 151 coal cars and 400 excavation and ash cars.
In 1954, the tunnel was carrying 500 carloads of freight and 400 carloads of cinders and debris daily. There were 83 locomotives, 1,609 freight cars, 55 trucks and 272 semi trailers on hand. Surface trucking was an important part of the business, required to reach customers located outside the loop. The workforce had declined considerably from the tunnel's heyday, with just 30 motormen operating the trains. The tunnel workforce was so dominated by attrition that someone with 25 years of experience in the tunnel was viewed as a newcomer.
Read more about this topic: Chicago Tunnel Company
Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“Waiting for the race to become official, he began to feel as if he had as much effect on the final outcome of the operation as a single piece of a jumbo jigsaw puzzle has to its predetermined final design. Only the addition of the missing fragments of the puzzle would reveal if the picture was as he guessed it would be.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)
“You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don’t have, at the back of your minds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)