Thursday, October 22, 2020

Atlanta, Ga: NS/Southern Inman Yard

(Satellite)

Jeff Boring posted
Atlanta from Inman Yard
Wes Partin: And that sorry, dried up, rail-less patch of dirt to the left is what was once CSX Tilford Yard. They ripped up every inch of steel in that yard and now just swap crews there. I actually derailed a train there the first time I had to yard a train there.

Chris Nicholson Jr. shared

I Love Trains posted
photo courtesy of Timothy Taylor · Inman yard Atlanta Georgia
Peter Tully: This view looks South. CSX yard L.
Debbie Newsom Hampton shared
Jeff Holbrook: Any tracks left there now or is it all condos, parks, and rail trails? What year was this?
Bryan Russell: Jeff Holbrook Inman Yard is still there, basically in its entirety. It’s used for intermodal now. The yard the left of it in the picture was Tilford yard, that is gone now but nothing has been built there yet (and the CSX line still is there, just not the yard).

The foreground was the hump yard and the background is the intermodal yard. Some comments confirm that the container and autorack cars setting on the hump yard leads indicate that it is now used for flat switching block swaps.
Greg Ropp posted
Atlanta, Ga. 9/10/2014
Norfolk Southern's Inman Yard.
Benny Ledford: We had 65 class tracks, 16 forwarding,16 receiving tracks,9 local yard tacks, 2 cab tracks, 2 pull backs, 20 pig tracks, 3 though fares, 5 Carmen to work all this at times crazy.
Greg Ropp shared

Street View

It still has a turntable and a couple of yard towers.
3D Satellite

I fired up Google Earth to try to determine when the retarders were removed from the hump. To my surprise, they don't show up very well. I did find them in a 1993 image. I put a red arc through what I believe are the secondary retarders. The master retarder is probably the wide black line to the left of the two cars going down the hump.
Google Earth, Feb 1993

I was surprised how small the yards (Inman and Tilford) were in 1948. Note that the turntable was north of the tracks instead of the current location near the hump's throat.
1948 Bolton Quadrangle @ 1:24,000

This 1968 map shows that Inman and Tilford have been expanded. I'm surprised that the USGS did not update the topo lines to show how the dirt in large hills was hauled away to make room for the expansions. I could not find any differences, including buildings, between the 1968 and 1973 maps.
1968 Northwest Atlanta Quadrangle @ 1:24,000

The roundhouse has been removed by 1983.
1983 Northwest Atlanta Quadrangle @ 1:24,000
 

Tim Gill posted
Here's another aerial shot of Inman yard Atlanta. I know about every inch of that place.
Shawn Reedy: That's Tilford Hump Yard on the left. Part of CSX Atlanta terminal. Tiny compared to Inman, but that was my home yard when I was with CSX starting in 2000 up until 2017. It's all gone now thanks to PSR. As am I and a few thousand other dedicated employees.
In fact, my last office with CSX was in that long building with the blue roof on the left toward the top of the yards.
 
Trainbook posted
Inman Railroad Yard, Atlanta Georgia.
Photography: Google maps

A circa 1917 photo that is supposedly protected by copyright law. I thought photos taken before 1924 are in the public domain. The note is "Inman Yard in Atlanta, Georgia was built by the Southern Railway Company in 1957 and is the largest of the company's 33 intermodal yards." Perhaps the major expansion we see between the 1948 and 1968 maps was done in 1957. Conversion to an intermodal yard would have happened significantly later.
This yard had special facilities to create quarter-mile long welded rails and track panels. [AtlantasUpperWestside, written in June 1982.] It sounds like these facilities were part of the 1957 expansion plan. An advertisement at the end of this article says that 6,000,000 cubic yards of earth and rock were moved to make way for the yard. So they did "scrape off" some big hills to make room for the yard.


Satellite

At 26:36, the video mentions a bridge over the Chattahoochee River that is north of the yard. I saved a satellite image of the bridge because it appears it caught a military mobilization train. Even with a poor satellite image, the round turrets on top of the vehicles are rather distinctive.
Satellite



 
safe_image for No Tanks; Northeast Railroads Move Refurbished Mobile Howitzers
[I didn't call the vehicles in the satellite images tanks because they struck me as too long and skinny for a tank. Now I know that they must have been self-propelled guns.]


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