Cable buying in Springfield's former truck plants

Truck and diesel heritage, in pieces

The city's industrial identity was built on truck and diesel manufacturing, with precision machining and metal forming feeding it. When the large plants came out of production they were divided: one bay to a warehouse tenant, one to a fabricator, one still holding the line it used to run. Cable follows those divisions badly, because a feeder that served a whole bay cannot be split three ways.

That is why so much of it is still there. A tenant who needs two hundred amps does not want a three-thousand-amp service, and nobody wants to pay to take it out. The cable sits in the tray while the building changes hands around it.

What a stripped bay yields

Busway is the signature material: long aluminum or copper runs on hangers, with plug-in boxes along the line. Below that, feeder cable from the bay substation, tray cable in the overhead, and festoon and conductor bar on the line's bridge cranes. Control cable runs to motor control centers that are usually already gone.

The condition of the busway decides the lot more than its length does. Joints that have been opened and left open take water, and a run that has been cut into sections is handled as scrap metal rather than as a fitting.

• Busway runs and plug-in boxes
• Feeder cable from bay substations
• Tray cable in overhead racks
• Festoon and conductor bar on line cranes
• Control cable to abandoned MCCs

Redevelopment access and the phase plan

A redevelopment site is a construction site, and access is governed by the demolition or abatement schedule rather than by the seller. Cable in a building under abatement cannot be touched until the abatement is signed off, and cable in a bay scheduled for demolition has to be out before the excavator arrives. Ask for the phase plan; it is more useful than a list of what is available.

I-70 and SR-41 give good road access, and CSX and Norfolk Southern still serve parts of the site. Power is the limit. A building with no live service has no lights, no hoist and no way to run a baler, so the work is done in daylight with a generator or not at all.

Salvage rights and who holds them

On sites like these the cable is often already sold. A demolition contractor may hold salvage rights, or the redeveloper may have reserved copper and aluminum as part of the purchase. Establish that before discussing quantity, because a lot promised twice costs everybody a week.

Where the seller does hold the material, the review is straightforward: feeder and busway by weight and conductor size, tray cable by footage, festoon by condition at the loops. Water damage is the usual finding in a roofless bay, and it is visible on the reel barrel before it is visible in the wrap.

One more question is worth asking early: whether the building will still be standing when a truck arrives. Demolition schedules move, and a lot that was accessible on Monday can be behind a fence by Friday.