ASHTABULA – The hustle and bustle of the Ashtabula Harbor coal docks provided a myriad of sights and sounds that held sway over the area for well more than a century.

With the impending “idling” of the Norfolk Southern Railroad coal docks, in the next three to five weeks, an important part of Ashtabula history will come to a close and live on only in the memories of railroad and dock workers who helped make Ashtabula one of the busiest ports in the world.

The Kinder Morgan Pinney Dock continues to operate on the east side of the Ashtabula River, but the Norfolk Southern Railroad coal operations will be winding down over the next three to five weeks, said NSR, spokesman David Pidgeon.

“It was organized chaos,” said William Licate who worked part time at the railroad for almost 20 years while teaching in the Ashtabula Area City School system. He later became superintendent of AACS.

He said the “cacophony” of sounds coming from the docks was an amazing experience to behold.

“It is gone,” he said of the industry that helped shape the city. “The demise of the docks came about with the self loaders,” he said of the freighters that became a part of the harbor scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Licate said he started working on the New York Central Railroad, then the Penn Central and then in the 1970s it was Conrail. “It was so busy with all those coal and ore boats coming and going.

The two railroads operated hundreds of feet a part with the Ashtabula River separating them.

The west side of the river was home to the Pennsylvania Central Railroad coal and iron dock operations and the east side of the river included the New York Central Railroad coal and iron docks, according to Licate and Warren Duff, 89, who worked for the PCR before the two railroads merged.

Duff said he started May 13, 1947 and retired in 1989 and worked with veterans from World War I. He was able to keep a railroad hourly log book for Michael Ruhlin from 1913.

The book details the amount of money he made per day, ranging from $2.10 a day to $10.68 with a big day of overtime.

Duff said the rail lines wound from the yard near West 32nd Street down to the harbor and across Bridge Street to get to the docks. He said the train would take the cars to a contraption that would place them on top of a hill.

“They would throw a switch and it would come down,” Duff said. He said there would often be five trains, with more than 100 cars each, operating in the yard.

“We worked around the clock,” Duff said. He said there would be as many as 150 coal cars in a train.

Licate said he loved the job and it was his “scholarship” to college. “I wouldn’t have been able to afford to go to college,” he said.

“Some people play with electric trains. I played with the real thing and got paid for it,” he said with a laugh.

Licate started at the New York Central operation on the east side of the river.

He said a large machine would pick the car up and turn it over to load 5,000 tons of coal in one shot. He said a catapult would push the empty railroad car up a track until the brakeman was holding on for dear life before applying the brake on the way down.

“In my early years it was a seasonal employment for June, July and August. They didn’t have any coal piles back then,” Licate said.

Licate said dock workers were unemployed from December to March. He said in the 1960s there would be 25 dock workers and five people on a train with another nine or 10 people in other jobs.

With multiple trains he said there would be 75 people working with the addition of clerks, switch tenders and a yardmaster.

“Ninety-five percent of the time it was a great job,” he said of the work his father-in-law helped him get. He said the third shift in the middle of winter could be challenging.

Licate said he loved the people he worked with. “It ran the gamut. Junior high drop outs to college graduates,” he said.

Railroads started constructing track to Ashtabula Harbor in 1873, setting off an explosion that continued for decades.

“In the 1960s the Ashtabula Harbor was the third largest iron ore port in the world,” according to the Ashtabula Port Authority website.

Dillaway is a reporter for the (Ashtabula) Star Beacon.

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