GRID wrote:
yea, why would you put produce on a train for 10 blocks and then offload it to trucks for another ten blocks?
But it's funny what people will tell you on the streets.
That train also ran in the middle of the day and it was always amusing to watch it cross busy 20th Street and freak people out.
They offloaded the paper rolls to the printing press with fork lifts.
The new press uses smaller rolls that are trucked in, I guess. Beermo would probably know all about that stuff.
Holidays were good, have not been on the computer much. Went to St Louis and hung out with the family and just hung out in KC. Nothing special.
You?
the train never went farther than the star warehouse which is now a rental storage place on grand next to valero. the owner of the cashew had a beef with these trains to the star and vowed and promised that when the trains stopped he would build a full kitchen for his bar. has he done it yet? every time an article mentioned the cashew and it's lack of a full kitchen the owner always made a point to bash the star and the trains they used for the reason he couldn't get one in.
they offloaded the paper to the warehouse using clamp trucks. the paper then sat in the warehouse until needed then was loaded on the conveyor chains for the trip under grand at the sub-basement level to the dock at the sub-basement level of the main star building across the street. the rolls were then stripped of their cardboard wrapper on the dock, pushed onto dolly's and then pushed to the press it was needed at by the guys who worked in the white paper department. the paper would then be loaded by hand by the pressman that was working that reel stand and when the arms came around the pressman would make a flying paster on the roll using brown tape and glue to ready it to fire for the next paster cycle.
at the new building on mcgee the paper is trucked in from the metro warehouse caves to the north dock (btw, the star desperately wanted a site with a spur, but had to abandon the idea and go with 52' semi's because of knight-ridder corporate wanting to build downtown), unloaded using clamps trucks, sent into the hi-bay storage, (which you can see for yourself if you go to the windows on the northeast end of the building) when a certain roll size along with the mill and the type of paper is needed for press runs the paper is automatically retrieved from the hi-bay and sent to the roll prep stations where 1 or 2 guys are working and they strip off the cardboard wrappers, lay down a single strip of very expensive metallic backed 2 sided paster tape (which alleviates the need for timing marks) and then it's sent into the intermediate storage were it is retrieved automatically by the 2 cranes when needed, dropped at the correct reelstand and then loaded automatically in the reel when the time comes.
the rolls used in the new presses are actually larger in circumference than the ones used in the old presses, by at least a quarter. the real difference is that the rolls are not as long due to the size of the new version of the newspaper. we often use paper butts and balances that are just sitting around on the floor next to the reels and sometimes it's hard to tell exactly what size they are without a tape measure. we use 1/2 rolls, 5/8's, 3/4's, 7/8's and fulls and we can measure the roll just by using today's paper by laying it out page to page, side by side without a tape measure. if you lay out your paper like this, 4 pages across is the width of a full roll. a brand new roll, sitting on the floor will come to up the middle of my chest. so i am guessing that they are about 4 feet tall laying on their side, give or take.
the paper conveyor system in the old buildings tunnel.
the main dock in the sub basement of the old building.
rolls lined up to be used on a run on press 5 in the old building.
the paper roll dolly's sitting on a bridge on press 5 in the old building.
reelstand 15 on press 1 with no paper in it. old bldg.
looking thru an empty reelstand to one that has paper in it. notice the belts on top that spin the roll and the glue paster on the roll. you can also see red smears on the roll. those red smears are ink drips from the press unit that's above your head. ink drips were always an occupational hazard in the old building. i've scrubbed ink off every part of my body at one time or another.
conveyor chain going back up to ground level at the warehouse on west side of grand.
one of the many roll storage rooms in the warehouse west side of grand. ceiling is over 30 feet high.
another paper storage room in the sub basement.
you can see pics of the new pressroom here.
http://newpressroom.com/