Rust Belt 1966 to 1976

Maybe I missed the tag, but I did not see Youngstown Sheet & Tube.  They had steel mills in Youngstown Ohio and East Chicago Indiana on the shore of Lake Michigan.  I worked at the East Chicago Plant in the 1970’s which had about 12 to 13 thousand employees at the time and I  witnessed the downfall of the industries.  YS&T also had a plant called Campbell works in Ohio. The shuttering of the Youngstown Ohio plant in I believe 1977 or 1978 was the beginning of the big retraction in the steel industry. When I quit in 1981 the plant was down to around 4500 employees. The plant finally closed a couple of years ago.

Our facility was primarily serviced by the Indiana Harbor Belt Line.  If I recall correctly the Penn Central tracks ran through our plant.  I will need to do some real digging to find some photos of that period. EJ&E also was a local railroad in our area.  Railroads?  Boy we had them here in Northwest Indiana which was the prominent gateway from the east into Chicago.  I now ride my bike on the Erie Lackawanna, C&O, Monon, CS&T, and Pennsylvania, trails.

What you see in the 60’s in 70’s are blast furnaces, coal piles, ingots, slag, steel ladles, hot ladle cars, conveyors, smoke stacks with plenty of black smoke, draw bridges, ore boats, traffic jams, oil tanks, cat crackers, cooling towers, ore docks, viaducts, soot, plenty of TRAINS,  red haze in the sky. Intense light from the forge.  Many taverns, illegal basement bars that were quite busy when alcohol sales were prohibitive on Sundays. More TRAINS, Go Go joints, (a blue collar gentleman’s club).  Packed bowling alleys. No McMansions.  Thousands of 900 square foot ranch houses with unattached garages.  Cigarette machines everywhere. Home exteriors stained from pollution.  Junky cars specifically used for transportation to work. Plenty of TRAINS.

Coming this summer from RMT as a custom run for Pat's trains...3-rail O gauge...as available 300 different roadnumbers for each car.

Pre-order now from Pat's.

Walter/RMT

@JimFMB posted:

Maybe I missed the tag, but I did not see Youngstown Sheet & Tube.  They had steel mills in Youngstown Ohio and East Chicago Indiana on the shore of Lake Michigan.  I worked at the East Chicago Plant in the 1970’s which had about 12 to 13 thousand employees at the time and I  witnessed the downfall of the industries.  YS&T also had a plant called Campbell works in Ohio. The shuttering of the Youngstown Ohio plant in I believe 1977 or 1978 was the beginning of the big retraction in the steel industry. When I quit in 1981 the plant was down to around 4500 employees. The plant finally closed a couple of years ago.

Our facility was primarily serviced by the Indiana Harbor Belt Line.  If I recall correctly the Penn Central tracks ran through our plant.  I will need to do some real digging to find some photos of that period. EJ&E also was a local railroad in our area.  Railroads?  Boy we had them here in Northwest Indiana which was the prominent gateway from the east into Chicago.  I now ride my bike on the Erie Lackawanna, C&O, Monon, CS&T, and Pennsylvania, trails.

What you see in the 60’s in 70’s are blast furnaces, coal piles, ingots, slag, steel ladles, hot ladle cars, conveyors, smoke stacks with plenty of black smoke, draw bridges, ore boats, traffic jams, oil tanks, cat crackers, cooling towers, ore docks, viaducts, soot, plenty of TRAINS,  red haze in the sky. Intense light from the forge.  Many taverns, illegal basement bars that were quite busy when alcohol sales were prohibitive on Sundays. More TRAINS, Go Go joints, (a blue collar gentleman’s club).  Packed bowling alleys. No McMansions.  Thousands of 900 square foot ranch houses with unattached garages.  Cigarette machines everywhere. Home exteriors stained from pollution.  Junky cars specifically used for transportation to work. Plenty of TRAINS.

LOVE it YES, any / all industries from that region and period great additions.  Thank You!

Here are a few THEN and NOW shots from the Rust Belt that I shot myself.

This is the P&LE Gateway Yard Hump Tower in Struthers, Ohio. In both of the "Then" shots  from 1975 a Detroit Edison Unit Train is coming through the Tunnel under the hump from the River Track to #4 Main.

THEN...from 1975

NOW...from May 2023.
Mother Nature has reclaimed the entire area, and the P&LE Hump building has been severely vandalized.

This is the ex-LE&E (Lake Erie & Eastern/P&LE) bridge over the Mahoning River in downtown Struthers, Ohio. In the background is the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Campbell Works as mentioned by JimFMB in the second post in this thread.

Then...January 1975. YS&T Campbell Works and the P&LE Receiving Yard on the right.

NOW...April 2023. Same bridge. The steel mill and the P&LE Receiving Yard are gone.

Awesome pictures, I'm trying to learn so much more about the DE unit trains.  Do you know what year they started using the aluminum coal porters?  Did the unit trains only end up at the Monroe generation plant or did they take the cars to others?  If you have any pictures of the cabooses they ran, please post.  Thank You!!!

Detroit, I'm sorry but I can't help you with your questions. I'm not a historian, just a mediocre photographer. The trains ran through Struthers (my home town at the time) on the P&LE and the ex-PRR, and that's all I know. I don't know where they went, and I have no shots of any cabooses.

Detroit Terminal - Belt Line (sort of) stopped by the Detroit River on both ends.  Terminated at the Ford Rouge Plant in the south and if I'm not mistaken the Detroit Edison Conner Creek power station at the north end.  Lot's of auto plants in the middle.

Great photos Rich.  I may need to take a drive up to the old YS&T plant area in Indiana Harbor and take some photos of what is left there.  The Harbor was an interesting and cultural melting pot, but you needed to be aware of your surroundings too.

A Penn Central freight train passes through an industrial area of a dying city:

Tom

I live in the Youngstown area now and I'm an amateur historian for the area.

My layout is based in Youngstown. Specifically, it's an alternative history of the area that @Rich Melvin posted. Prior to being the Gateway Yard, it was the small village of Newport. We only have one or two sources documenting the existence of Newport but it was a canal town. My layout is the alternative timeline where the village remained and the Gateway Yard was never built. I've included one photo each of my blast furnaces and my first version of the ingots and their buggy:

I'll have three blast furnaces, an open hearth, and an ingot stripping building when I'm done (I hope). The blast furnace is a 1900-ish design based on the Anna and Mary furnaces. I found the photos and articles with details about the furnaces and extrapolated from there. These furnaces still stood in Struthers (Anna) and Lowellville (Mary) into the 1950s and 1960s. The Hubbard Furnaces were similar and stood into the 1960s too. I decided to model these furnaces because they're smaller than the typical blast furnace of that area so they fit on my layout. I got those pesky low basement ceilings from the 1960s haha I also am fascinated by them because I'm from Struthers, my family is from Lowellville, and I worked at the sight of the Hubbard furnaces.

Anyway, I have a few questions:

Are you interested in steel mills?

Are you located in Detroit?

Are you interested in doing any research in museum archives?

I'll have to get some stuff together. I don't have a ton of photos that I have permission to post but I do have quite a collection of the steel industry. Most of my own personal photos are of the Carrie Furnaces in Pittsburgh and some are of abandoned industrial areas around Youngstown.

@OGR CEO-PUBLISHER What are the rules are in regards to posting scans of old post cards/slides that I purchased and own now? I buy them when I find them but I didn't take the photo originally. How does this work?

@BillYo414 posted:

@OGR CEO-PUBLISHER What are the rules are in regards to posting scans of old post cards/slides that I purchased and own now? I buy them when I find them but I didn't take the photo originally. How does this work?

You need to contact me directly about this.  Generally speaking, you may "own" old post cards/slides but it is another matter when you post those pictures on a forum like ours.  There COULD be copyright issues depending on certain factors.  Review our TOS and check out the featured topics where we discuss our policy about copyright.

Hey Rich - Thank you for posting - GREAT pics - really love the P&LE Gateway hump yard photos - just like the Howard Fogg painting from his NYC work

When did the expression "Rust Belt" come into common use.  I was hearing it by the end of the 1970s.  My (admittedly limited) memory of the 1960s was that many of the heavy industries there were still going concerns.

@OGR CEO-PUBLISHER posted:

Generally speaking, you may "own" old post cards/slides but it is another matter when you post those pictures on a forum like ours.  There COULD be copyright issues depending on certain factors.

Hats off to you Alan.  Copyright law is a mess.  It is possible to have two identical copies of a work, one protected by copyright and one that isn't.  It has got to be difficult for a third party publisher when the use goes beyond fair use.

@Rich Melvin I wish I was old enough to see the Gateway Yard in operation. I've been past it so many times without knowing the history. On the upside, it looks like the current owners have installed new tracks or perhaps fixed tracks that were buried, to store cars. Car storage isn't quite as exciting as an active yard but it's definitely a step up from empty or abandoned tracks. I just know there are dozens and dozens of cars stretching from Lowellville to the Center Street Bridge. I usually get back handed with negativity for saying this but I'm excited to see the tracks getting used!

@OGR CEO-PUBLISHER Noted.

@DETROIT Here's a collection of short bits in case any of it seems interesting to you.

The Renner Brewing Company was situated in Youngstown. They closed in 1962. They sat along former B&O lines on Pike Street. Another sat of tracks also went passed the brewery but I don't know who the tracks belonged to. I suspect it may have been a local railroad that carried product for the mills.

GM Lordstown was a massive plant off Interstate 80 near Youngstown. They had/have rail service. I believe that plant was actually built in the 60s.

Packard had a wire plant in Warren that was enormous. I do not know a lot about it even though I worked there in the 90s. We had rail service to bring in pellets to make the PVC coating. Rail service would have made sense to move the miles of wire to Lordstown or Detroit for final assembly into the automobiles.

Hubbard, OH is north of Youngstown. Youngstown Sheet & Tube had two blast furnaces out there. I believe they were demolished in the 60s but the ingot mold foundry out there is still running. It was built in the 20s. They would have been cranking out thousands of tons of ingot molds back then and they were consuming thousands of tons of liquid iron, purchased from various blast furnaces around the area. I always thought this would be an interesting thing to model.

That's all I have time for now.

If you've got anything rail related to Lordstown during that period 66-76 (ANYONE) please share, pictures or diagrams would be amazing.  As well as the other industries you touched on That period was really the last hurrah for far reaching, broad-base heavy-duty manufacturing and industry particularly in the Midwestern / Rust Belt states.  By 1976 offshoring, modernization and consolidation were devastating so many of the industries that had shipped by rail and rail relied on for revenue.

WOULD LOVE pictures of real railroad or any of the amazing layouts that depict what we are looking at

THANKS!!!

@DETROIT posted:

If you've got anything rail related to Lordstown during that period 66-76 (ANYONE) please share, pictures or diagrams would be amazing.  As well as the other industries you touched on That period was really the last hurrah for far reaching, broad-base heavy-duty manufacturing and industry particularly in the Midwestern / Rust Belt states.  By 1976 offshoring, modernization and consolidation were devastating so many of the industries that had shipped by rail and rail relied on for revenue.

WOULD LOVE pictures of real railroad or any of the amazing layouts that depict what we are looking at

THANKS!!!

ONLY if you follow the TOS copyright policy guys.  Otherwise, IF YOU DID NOT TAKE THE PICTURES, then either get permission from the owner/website/etc. to use them here OR you can post a link to where they are online.   Make sure you post that fact so that when we possibly receive contact from the owner's "representative(s)", we can point them in your direction.

@DETROIT I don't have much on Lordstown. I would recommend trying to get your hands on some books by a guy named Wayne Cole. He has studied the railroads in Ohio and PA extensively and he has books on them. I bet Lordstown is mentioned.

I don't have much in the way of non-copyrighted material that I can share here. I can tell you the Youngstown Museum of Industry and Labor would be a great place to stop by if you can travel. The archives are free there and there are many photos, blueprints, maps, etc. The Tyler Museum (also in Youngstown) has archives with an $8 admission fee. Beyond that, I highly recommend searching the online portions of The Library of Congress and Ohiohistory.org. Libraries are another great resource. They often have archives that you can access. I started researching this stuff in 2016 but really got oodles of research done during the pandemic. It's like treasure hunting! I can get lost for hours looking stuff up on an area or industry.

Like I said, I'll have to go through and collect my own personal photos and make some posts.

@BillYo414 posted:

...Anyway, I have a few questions:

Are you interested in steel mills?

Are you located in Detroit?

Are you interested in doing any research in museum archives?

I think your questions were for me.  My interest is heavy industry that is the focal point of what most of us try to create/replicate in our layouts.

The steel industry is a big part of that particularly in the Rust Belt (Midwest) Chicago Eastward.  I am fascinated by the steel industry specifically the different parts we can model and how best to do that. Specifically in O scale because the real world facilities were MASSIVE.

I am not located in Detroit but grew up there and dragged my Dad around the railyards of Detroit/Windsor/Toledo in the early 1970s.  I am now located in the bastion of heavy industry Charleston, SC (joking).  I will always be a Detroiter in spirit no matter where I am.

I think/hope we can learn and explore that period in rail history (1966-1976) in that region to support and enhance what we do on our layouts and in the hobby.

Finally, while I love history and research we have to respect and abide by the rules of OGR especially as related to copyright infringement.  So please know and follow the site rules regarding 3rd party materials.  The safest approach is to post your own materials, photos and personal descriptions.

I'm excited to see how this develops and where it goes.  I have already learned a lot which is a huge part of my appreciation and enjoyment of the hobby.  THANKS, Jim

@Tom Densel posted:

A Penn Central freight train passes through an industrial area of a dying city:

Tom

Tom - as always, your layout perfectly captures all aspects of that period.  Thanks for sharing and it would be awesome if when you have time to post, can share some background and history of some of the unique amazing things you created on you layout.  Specifically the two cabooses you made, they are incredible.

Not sure if there are any left but the Train Loft did an amazing special run of these Stroh / DT&I TOFC.  Strohs was the nectar of working class Detroit and a good part of the rust belt.

The questions were intended for you @DETROIT. I have mostly collected steel industry items focusing on Youngstown and Pittsburgh. I don't have a ton of automotive. I've been studying Ford's Rouge Steel lately and that is a deep ocean to discover. What a facility! What always blows my mind in the case of places like the Rouge Plant is that some people just dreamt it up on paper. Right out of their brain and right onto the drafting board. I can't even explain how much I admire that.

Anyway, I think posting links to archive sites will be most helpful as far as the copyright stuff goes. I don't have a good library of links.

Here is a great link of the former ingot mold foundry called Valley Mould, now Ellwood Engineered Castings in Hubbard: http://www.stahlseite.de/eec.htm

And here is the link to the rest of the site: http://www.stahlseite.de/index.htm

The open hearth has largely gone away in steel making. You'll find pictures of an open hearth in Ukraine on that sight. As far as I know, it's the last of its kind on Earth and it was destroyed during a bombing. The open hearth as a process was replaced by the basic oxygen furnace. Besides that, the mills haven't changed dramatically since the 1970s. The equipment design is more efficient and automated, the size of things may be different, but overall...you're still putting coke, limestone, and iron ore into a blast furnace to make iron. Then you're putting that iron into a basic oxygen furnace to make steel. I'm saying this because it means modern photos on that website I linked to will still be somewhat relevant. You'll be able to learn a lot of good info for modelling.

I think what makes the photos great and the industries interesting is the visual interest. You have small screws, to the locomotives, to the massive buildings. There's so much to look at and that's what I am trying to capture with my models. I think that's what makes a scene interesting. It grabs our eyes when there is a broad array of detail on a layout and you see more as you keep looking.

@DETROIT posted:

I will always be a Detroiter in spirit no matter where I am.

As a Youngstowner, I identify deeply with your feeling in this sentence.

Hi JimFMB,

You sure hit the nail on the head with your post above.

"What you see in the 60’s in 70’s are blast furnaces, coal piles, ingots, slag, steel ladles, hot ladle cars, conveyors, smoke stacks with plenty of black smoke, draw bridges, ore boats, traffic jams, oil tanks, cat crackers, cooling towers, ore docks, viaducts, soot, plenty of TRAINS, red haze in the sky. Intense light from the forge.  Many taverns, .....

I grew up in the Downriver area of Detroit and left in 1974 after college.  I worked summer jobs in the automotive industry while going to school.  First in a Ford Stamping Plant in Woodhaven, Michigan and then in Detroit at the Clark Street plant for the Cadillac Motor Car Division of General Motors.  After I graduated with an Engineering degree I interviewed at Great Lakes Steel in Ecorse, Michigan.  Even though it was the highest salary offer I received, I headed west to California and a career in the Aerospace and Defense industry.  I must have instinctively known that a career in the steel industry was not a good move at that time.  Your description of the environment in the Rust Belt brings back vivid memories of growing up amidst all that you described. 

John

Detroit,

Excellent thread!!!  I will be continuing coming back to this topic!  Great Info!!

@BillYo414  I think posting the links is a great idea and people that are interested can explore.

Yes, the Ford Rouge was/is out of this world.  I never did a tour (wish I had) but the old news reels give you some sense of it's enormity.  First, you could not imagine the rail capacity around and near the Rouge.  NYC/PC largest yard huge (Junction Yard) plus major trackage on a couple sides of facility.  C&O Rougemere Yard directly across the street on one side.  DT&I had a large amounts of trackage/yards on one or two sides.  N&W had their Oakwood yard, (massive) adjacent to the south.  Detroit Terminal had trackage right up and along the C&O right into the plant.  I believe all the other roads had trackage or trackage rights to the plant.  Canadian Pacific diesels were often sitting in the C&O Rougemere engine terminal.  It was difficult, I never found a great vantage point to see and photograph the Ford switchers, it was something else back then.

The kicker as I'm sure you know is Henry Ford had a channel dredged off the Detroit River on one side of Zug Island (as apocalyptic as it sounds) directly into the Rouge, so lake freighters (500 to 1000+ feet) could bring iron ore, sand, coal, other directly into the center of the facility.  Not sure if those commodities are still brought in by ship.

On top of all the automotive assembly capacity, I believe they produced steel and glass on site, probably stamping and who knows what else.  I will re-post this picture with my original that I took in the early 1970s of the real No. 5001 that I shot at Rougemere.  At that time Ford still had either a massive water tower or coal gasification tower with the Ford emblem which was also in the picture.  I believe CP only ever had two GP30s.

@FIREMANCHRIS Thanks and please post something that is interesting or important to you.

@CA John  Thanks for your post.  I want to know as much as you feel like sharing about Clark Street / Cadillac Motor Car Division of General Motors.  I believe it was located at the east/north end of NYC/PC Junction Yard?  Just off of (near) Livernois?  What years were you there, which roads served that plant?  Which models did they produce there, anything else you feel like sharing when you have time?  THANKS! Jim

@DETROIT posted:

...... about the DE unit trains.  .....  If you have any pictures of the cabooses they ran, please post. .....

Here's a photo of one of the blue PC ones trailing a wb [ loaded ] DE,  taken on a gloomy November day in 1975 at the south end of the P&LE's yard  in McKees Rocks, PA.  There were two or three, supposedly painted with the same shade of blue paint [ = EMD Demo blue ] as the locomotives, although it always looked darker to me, though that may be from exclusively trailing coal trains.  [ The DE's would roll right along*, but I don't recall much of a dust trail with them;  the high sides of the gons may have helped, and/or the coal spec may have been a higher quality.]  The locos probably got cleaned from time to time -- they were maintained as I recall by Peaker Services, not a railroad, whereas the cabin cars, well.....Even so, that seems like a pretty dark blue under there.  It wouldn't be a problem to create one of these in 0, since the decal set would be the same as a standard PC one, less any herald.

(*  Because nobody wanted to stop, and hence restart, that train.  If it was a weekday, the P&LE would often -- but not always ! -- run the loads right behind the outbound commuter train.)

Of course, the problem is the cars -- I don't recall these being made in 0 by anybody.  The closest was those high side gons in kit form by Ambroid/Quality Craft;  I think [ from memory ] DEEX had some of those.  That's a shame, because they ran behind some interesting power at times, such as PC 6 axle Alcos [ with an all-PC routing ] or the P&LE's U25B's [ Yeah, I know....];  right after that blue cabin cleared the empty eb blasted out of town -- obviously not a radio train [ second photo ].  I've also posted for color comparison the midtrain power on the wb;  the GE would have been about 6 months old at that time.

Best regards, SZ

Hi Jim,

I’m glad to share anything you’d like to know about the Clark Street plant. I’ll need some time to collect my thoughts because it’s been over 50 years since I worked there!  
I’ll be back.

John

@Steinzeit SZ - WOW - Thank You for the post, information and pictures.  I started trying to find more information on the DE unit trains pre-Conrail. I found a only a little bit regarding the cabooses just a few pictures of green N10s that were supposedly used on/by DE.  In my research supposedly Penn Central built (50) N10 caboose in 1969 at Altoona. Most, 40ish? were painted PC green, 5 were supposedly painted dark green and a few (5?) were painted a metallic blue for DE service.  I had never seen a picture of the metallic blue ones so this is really awesome, thank you!!!

I purchased the three DE coal porters (different road numbers) produced by MTH and the six (coal porter / rotary gondola) produced by Lionel.  I'm not sure if these were PRE or POST 1976 or if they are non-specific.  In pictures of the real unit trains it's hard for me to tell  Maybe someone knows if MTH/Lionel models would have existed before in 1976??? 

Below are some pictures of the first one MTH produced #6105 compared to one of the Lionel.

@BillYo414

As promised (terrible quality, picture of a picture I took 48 years ago when I was 12 I think).  Canadian Pacific #5001 GP30 across from the Rouge in the C&O Rougemere Yard.  In my hunt, I also found C&O #8205 a GE U23B with the Rouge in the background.  I'll try to get a good scan (or negative scan) and color correct at some point.  I also have a super 8 of a cab ride I took on the DT&I from Flat Rock yard that dumped me off on the other side of the plant.  I'll have to get that converted and try to post a clip if I captured anything of interest.  Looking at my pictures this morning, I had no idea what I was taking photos of.  I always focused on the Diesels but in the background I have bits and pieces of so much amazing rolling stock and facilities.  I had no clue.  I always focused on Alcos, then U-Boats because they were less common for me to see.  So, much EMD that doesn't exist anymore (and railroads) were just afterthoughts.

Photoshop...it's a wonderful thing. They aren't perfect, but they're a little better than the originals.

@detroit, are the originals color negatives or transparencies? And what type of film? I've done thousands of color negative and 35mm slide scans over the years for myself and various clients. I've scanned Kodachrome, Ektachrome, Anscochrome, and Fujichrome transparencies, and Kodacolor and Ektacolor color negatives. I use an Epson V850 Pro scanner. If I can help you with these, I'll be glad to do so.

@Rich Melvin Thanks Rich, minimum of 100% better!

Don't get lost down the rabbit holes:

American Iron and Steel Institute photographs at the Hagley Digital Archives. The link takes 1960-1970. You can adjust it accordingly.

Ohio Memory Digital Archives, specifically the Youngstown Museum of Industry and Labor in this link but you can access the other collections by adjusting things on the left side of the page. This one doesn't organize by year really but it's still a great resource for photos and learning.

There's some photos from the Carrie Furnace in Pittsburgh. I went through the photos I have and none of them are really a photo of the whole scene. They're photos of pipe details and stuff like that. I can post them but they have no context of what they actually are.

Here are some photos of Weirton Steel prior to a lot of demolition:

Coal Camp USA is another great site. This link specifically links to a section on The Rust Belt but the entire site is worth exploring.

@BILLYo414  Pictures are awesome, one can not get a sense of the scale unless you have actually seen some of that stuff in person.  My first job after college was as an outside sales rep selling data processing stuff to industry.  I think it was a Pontiac plant that was one of the customers give to me at the start.  I will never forget the first time being in the GMs office looking out over the floor of the million plus sq ft plant and on the far side there were a string of 86' autoparts box cars that looked like toy box cars.  The facility was so enormous.  These photos are super cool, can't wait to spend some time exploring the links you shared.  Thank You! Jim

Hi Jim,

Here's a summary of things I recall while working at the Cadillac plant in Detroit.

I grew up in Wyandotte, Michigan which is in the Downriver community south of Detroit.  In the summer of 1973, I was between my Junior and Senior years at Lake Superior State University in Sault Saint Marie, Michigan studying Mechanical Engineering.  I was hired as a Student Engineer (today we call them interns) at the Clark Street plant of The Cadillac Motor Car Division of General Motors.  I was assigned to the Final Assembly team.   To be honest, at that stage in my life I wasn’t very interested in trains, model or real.  School and a girlfriend occupied most of my time.  So, I really don’t remember much about which rail lines served the factory.  I do remember that some cars were shipped out in covered auto transport rail cars.  The rail cars were brought into the factory and the cars were driven on board.

If you look on Google Maps today, you will see that the entire Clark Street plant is gone, mostly replaced by a large shipping container facility.  The original plant was huge. It occupied all of the property on both sides of Clark and Scotten Streets with Michigan Avenue on the north and railroad tracks on the south.  From Google it appears that the railroad tracks completely surround the property forming a wye.  There were enclosed pedestrian bridges accessible from the second floor that allowed employees to cross both Clark and Scotten.  IIRC, parts of the plant were five stories tall.  Sub-Assemblies (like dashboards, doors, seats, even V8 engines) were built on each level and transported via overhead conveyor down to the ground floor where the final assembly operations were completed.  The car bodies (from the firewall back to the area where the bumpers were attached but with no doors or trunk lid) came from the Fisher Body plant in another part of the city.  The most exciting part of final assembly was called Body Drop.  The car body would literally be lowered from the second floor down to the assembly line through a large hole in the ceiling.  The assemblers had less than a minute to get the body positioned on the frame.  BTW, all this happened while the assembly line kept moving!

We shut down operations for two weeks to transition from the 1973 models to the 1974 models.  That was exciting!  It was probably another two weeks before we got the bugs worked out and the production line was running smoothly again.  We literally had a green car with red doors and a white hood come off the line.  The plant produced almost all of the Cadillac cars.  There was another production line somewhere in New Jersey.  At the Clark Street plant, there were two assembly lines.  One called the C/D line which produced two models: the Coupe DeVille and the Sedan DeVille.  The C/D line produced 55 cars per hour.  Yes, almost one a minute.  The E line produced the Eldorado model at the rate of 12½ cars per hour.   Occasionally, a limousine would come down the line.   

That’s probably enough for now.

John

I worked at NS Oakwood yard in Melvindale (Detroit), Mi for 3 years in the early 1990's and while it's later than the era discussed, I felt like I was on the front lines moving automotive and industrial traffic with NS/Triple Crown.  Looking back, it was a great experience.  My regret was I didn't take a lot of pictures, but as I recall my days were pretty busy. That said, I found this AAR promo film from 1966 on youtube.  While shows railroading in much of the country, it highlights shipping coal, steel, car parts and cars on open autoracks..Piggyback too!  I've watch it several times and got a lot of modeling ideas. 

Picture quality is so so and I apologize for the pop up adds--just skip them over if you can.

https://youtu.be/0gWD3ehkods

@Jon Stachowicz

Jon - please share anything you would like to even if it falls outside the primary focus.  Oakwood was/is something else. I have a ton of photos from 1974,5,6 that I shot at the engine terminal.  I wish I had explored more of the yard but I was dragging my Dad along and Oakwood never appeared very easy to find one's way around at that time.  The N&W was really interesting.  It was this wonderful mix of old and new at that time.  I have photos of a beat to Sh.t RS11, ex NKP as well as a high nose GP30 with the NW paint, new at that time.  Also tons of run-through diesels.  Almost always Union Pacific U-Boats and tons of Western Maryland.  I never understood the WM.  I would have thought that would have been seen at C&O/Chessie Rougemere a stones throw away.  Maybe someone out there knows why the WM was at the N&W Oakwood???  Contribute what you feel like, when you have time.  Jim