Quote:
Tim Cole wrote:
That rail siding sucks. When I say rail access I mean a yard with spurs. It's amazing that 100,000 cars in a year could come out of that situation. For Packard to be a serious competitor would require 250,000 cars on a consistent basis.
And as I said one story plants are cheaper to build and cheaper to tear down. I don't see much difference if materials are off loaded on an elevated dock or transported from a quarter mile away at ground level. To be sure you can't have toilets overflowing, roofs caving in, flooding, and sinking floors in a multistory building without a catastrophe.
Given the situation Packard did a pretty good job of using their plant and equipment to exhaustion. The plant was designed for building hand built cars.
I am only concerned about when the plant was in operation and nothing from today matters-be it GPS, Google maps, photos, 21st-century opinions or whatever.
I grew up in Detroit and I saw brand new Packards being loaded on trains and trucks regularly. I am not guessing or opining about this. And there was never an issue getting raw goods in or cars out via train or truck. This is a fact. None of this hindered Packard-whether it "sucks" today or not.
Most of the rail head and spurs that were in the loading area and storage lot were torn up and gone long, long, long ago. So it is senseless to argue over photos showing a decrepit line and the spur from the petroleum storage and coal storage
today and attack that! And these two facilities don't even have one block of concrete, one brick or one girder left standing anyway. This is like looking at an ingrown toe nail on a corpse and pronouncing that this is the reason the person died!
I also worked for several major car companies and there was no gargantuan rail yard to others either. Not at Hudson. Not at Mercury. Not at Dodge (which was HUGE as plants go). Not at De Soto... not at Cadillac...not at Ford Rouge... and heaven knows if anyplace deserved such a rail yard, they sure did! It was one of the few factories that literally took raw ore in one side and spit out finished automobiles on the other! There was a huge rail yard over in an area that served Chrysler and Plymouth... but it served numerous other factories too! Gargantuan rail yards would never have guaranteed success to an automobile company.
RE: single-story plants... This is academic since (contrary to modern myth) Conner Avenue was not a single-story plant. And yes... it was indeed quickly torn down and made into a shopping mall anchored by Crowley's Department Store. I saw it happen.
The thing that makes Grand Blvd. expensive to tear down is not merely that it is multi-story but the fact that it was built of poured, reinforced concrete-no matter how the cars inside were being built. Until more recent times when demo-by-implosion became popular on such structures they were nightmares to get rid of.
It took an eternity to tear down the Hudson Plant in Detroit-which was also made similar to the Packard Plant. I know... I watched them from my family's store as day after day, month after month they swung wrecking balls at the thing and it did nothing but shake a little.
Anyway, these are my absolute, final comments on the trains at Grand Blvd. and the construction of the plant... and the so-called "single-story" of the Conner Plant. So I will not be responding further on this...
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