Rail maker Atlantic Track expands in South Memphis
Record may not show it but team and coach are getting better.
In an old part of the city laced by railroad tracks running to every cardinal point on the compass, a bearded man in a work-soiled jacket steps from his office into the cold.
“In 1982, there were easily several thousand people employed on this street.’’ This is Jeff Grissom talking. He stands in South Memphis, just north of Interstate 55’s Third Street exit, on a gray December afternoon. Paying for college? U of M implements tuition rate guarantee for new students.
He points out the rusted hulk of what had been the Chicago Bridge & Iron plant.
Next to it stood Southern Wire Mesh. Down the street was Standard Brake Shoe & Forge. Over there was Davis furniture, Nylon Net, Trojan luggage, War-Brooks metal making. A faded sign still reads Conley Frog & Switch.
Conley Frog opened the same year inventor Henry Ford launched the Model R, predecessor to the Ford Model T, but Conley Frog is gone now. All these names are gone from this barren stretch of East Bodley Street.
Jeff Grissom remains. Weather High 45° Low 37° Some sun. Forecast, Daily
Atlantic Track
Every business that lived and died in South Memphis has a story — managers’ mistakes, worker negligence, rising costs, shifting tastes, low-cost imports. Each has its own reason for decline.
So how do you explain Grissom still works on East Bodley just as he did a third of a century ago?
Follow him across a yard of hardpacked dirt to a building clad in yellowish aluminum. It looks like a long shed on a big Delta farm storing tons of fertilizer.
He’s an engineer by training, Memphis State class of 1989, and heads company-wide operations and engineering from East Bodley for Atlantic Track and Turnout Co. of Bloomfield, New Jersey.
Within a rifle shot of Atlantic’s 14.3 acres on Bodley are stacks of decrepit rubber tires, home trash, industrial refuse of unknown origin. People who never would tolerate this rubbish in front of their homes dumped it on neglected sites in South Memphis.
Seeing it makes this section of the city look like a picture of despair.
And it sets me up for surprise when Grissom opens the door into the long yellow building.
Inside are welders, cutting blades, heavy steel bars as long as a house. Lording over all is a computer-controlled cutting machine so unusual only 20 are in use throughout the world.
This machine is a large reason Atlantic Track remains today on East Bodley.
Memphis railroad
“If you think about who we are, where we are, we should be bigger here,” Grissom said.
He means the railroad industry. And he means Memphis. For him they are intertwined.
Memphis holds a special place in rail lore. Eastern railroads into the 20th century handed off long-haul freight at the Mississippi River to the western railroads. Even today, Memphis and Chicago are the only cities crossed by all five major railroads.
You can’t see this driving along I-55 at Third, but near to the southwest is the Canadian National Railway’s 433-acre Harrison Yard, named for Hunter Harrison, the Memphian who once headed the CN. The yard is the legacy of an era when tracks converged on this part of the city, extended five miles to Downtown’s South Bluffs, now acres of upmarket apartments and condos, but once a network of tracks and sidings.
Back then, fabricating shops, foundries and forges thrived in Memphis. Some supplied the rail industry with components including frogs, a mechanism on the track where the train wheel can cross from one rail to another.
Almost all that rail-related industry is gone from Memphis. Atlantic Track, successor to Conley Frog, remains. On Wednesday, the company marked its latest phase.
Atlantic Track purchased a former Conley Frog building across Bodley three years ago and has put it to use fashioning curved rails used by urban commuter railways snaking around buildings.
Officials from Memphis Light Gas and Water division, Tennessee Valley Authority, the city-county EDGE board and other agencies commemorated the expansion Wednesday afternoon.
Grissom talked about Atlantic Track a couple of days ago. He emphasized this: He went in to negotiate electric rates and MLGW and TVA helped Atlantic Track figure out how to save money and expand.
Bodley expansion
Notable as the expansion is for the company, the idea of an old-school manufacturer surviving in a left-behind industrial corner of the city is hard to let loose.
Old school? Look, Memphis has grown weary of $10-an-hour temp jobs that go nowhere. Not too long ago, before the deindustrialization of America, manufacturers offered hard work and middle-class wages. Grissom still does.
Hire on at Atlantic Track and welder pay starts at about $15 per hour. Have a knack for supervision? Shift leaders are promoted out of the ranks. Want to attend college? The company will pay tuition.
Here’s the thing: You own the company, or at least own part of it. Every employee receives shares of ownership in Atlantic Track through an employee stock ownership plan. Atlantic Track, founded in 1924, buys the shares back when you retire.
You might not get rich. But at least you feel you have a stake in something that can last.
“We don’t think of this as just a job,” Grissom said. “It can be a career if you want it to be.”
Steel tariffs
Grissom himself worked for Conley Frog. He bought part of the Memphis complex before it went out of business in 2000. He sold his portion, named Mid-South Rail, to Atlantic Track in 2009.
Back then, the business employed nine workers on Bodley. Today, Atlantic Rail employs 57 people on the site, including 25 already hired for the new curved rail work.
This isn’t the trade war with China spurring Atlantic Track.
In an effort to support U.S. steel makers, White House tariffs lifted prices this year on most steel imports. Atlantic Track buys 45-foot-long rails, but the trade action hasn’t undercut the company, in part due to earlier rules requiring railroads try to use U.S.-made steel.
“Even the so-called tariffs haven’t had that much effect,’’ Grissom said, noting 10-percent tariffs on steel rail are not high enough to counter China’s basement-low prices.
Atlantic prices finished products at about $7 per pound. This covers the cost of processing raw steel obtained from U.S. mills at about $4.60 per pound, Grissom said, while steel imported from China comes in as low as $2.75 per pound.
Atlantic Track’s business has been bolstered by the Federal Rail Administration’s Buy America provision and similar state and local rules. And the company has a technical edge.
Renaissance
Housed in the yellow building is a $3.5 million computer-controlled machine that cost another $1 million to install in 2015. Imported from machine tool maker Fives in Canada, the machine can saw, mill, drill and shape special alloy steels in almost hair-width tolerances for rails, switches, gears, joints and other products. On this day the machine refines rails destined for mass transit systems in Boston and Tacoma, Washington.
“It probably would have taken six work stations in 1982 to do what one person can do today’’ with computercontrolled machines, said Grissom, who figures the machine creates new jobs for engineers, designers, programmers and other workers.
“At one time,” Grissom said, “they really thought Memphis was just going to be a logistics and distribution hub, but manufacturing has made a pretty good comeback in Memphis.”
Ted Evanoff, business columnist of The Commercial Appeal, can be reached at evanoff@commercialappeal.com and (901) 529-2292.