Plymouth Industrial park - part 1

Lets talk about the place that has fired up my creative juices. Plymouth Industrial Park. I assume that's what it's called. I've never heard any different, and no-one has corrected me when I refer to it as such. Researching the location I find that historically it's the Minneapolis Industrial Park. It was established in the 1950's by Curtis Carlson of the globally famous Carlson Companies, to draw industries to Plymouth. Particularly to the land that Carlson owned, and still do own, in the area. The area must have been quite successful in its heyday with many spurs and sidings branching off the Chicago North Western "Luce Line" west out of Minneapolis. Times change. The industries closed, or didn't want to use the railroad. The Railroads also gravitated away from small carloads towards the big long unit trains, like Cars, Oil, Grain and Coal, and now the site is a shadow of its former self. 

I don't know when traffic to the northern part of the park ceased. I moved to the USA in 1998. Our first apartment was about 2 miles away down county road 6, the road that can be said to divide the northern and southern parts, and my very first job was in a small sign factory near where the “escape rooms” are marked on the view below. The railroad tracks were still in place over Co. Rd. 6 then and the Griswold signals still had their stop boards on them. 

Now there is now just one industry that receives regular freight traffic in the area. Olympic Steel. It receives steel sheet at its building north of the railroad and Coil steel in its facility to the south. Pre-Covid it was receiving steel on a daily basis. as many as six coil cars were regularly switched in and out of the facility. Currently two trains a week visit. In my ten years working alongside the park I have only seen one other industry receive rail service. Hamon Deltak, manufacturer of heat exchangers for heavy industry. During completion of one particularly notable contract, large heat exchangers departed their premises by rail. This activity influenced the construction of one of my early APA box layouts. Further research has revealed the the line to Hamon Deltak is still in service, even though it is very overgrown, and more large heat exchangers will be leaving the site by rail sometime in the future.

I've been exploring the area ever since my company moved into one of the office buildings in the park. I would hear trains crossing Xenium Lane pretty much every day and naturally became quite curious to find out what there was to see. The explorations revealed quite a lot of interesting things. The individual locations and track arrangements can be quite inspirational for the micro layout builder. There are Inglenook and Tuning Fork track arrangements to work with. The landscaping makes the location feel quite rural in places even though it is bounded on two sides by multiple lane highways.

A Google Earth view of Plymouth Industrial Park, with the results of my explorations superimposed. Yellow is the lines and industries served by the Union Pacific. The little bit of Blue is the old Luce Line that ran westwards to Gluek, MN. The Red shows the abandoned rails. This is not exact. There are little sidings and spurs running to many of structures. There are even a couple of turnouts that don’t appear to go anywhere. Those lines must be lost under parking lots and roads. I'll show all the abandoned lines in more detail in later posts.