Editor Pick
Henry Ford Museum
- March 20, 2008
- Rated 4 of 5 by
RoBoNC from Indianapolis, Indiana
The River Rouge Plant, or commonly referred to as The Rouge, is Ford's largest automobile factor as well as the largest integrated factory in the world. The Rouge was built in 1928 and is 1.5 miles wide by 1 mile long. The complex includes the Rouge Plant along with 93 other buildings for a total of 16 million square feet of factory floor space. The factory has its own docks on the Rouge River, 100 miles of interior railroad tracks, as well as its own electricty plant and ore processing facility. The Rouge was instrumental in building the Ford Model A, the first vehicle built in the facility. It later went on to produce the Mercury, Thunderbird, and four decades of the Mustang. Today the Rouge produces the Ford F-150 and the Lincoln Mark LT pickup trucks.
Dearborn, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, located a few miles south, is the world headquarters for Ford and the hometown of its most famous citizen, Henry Ford. In conjunction with the Henry Ford Museum, visitors are allowed to tour the Rouge plant. The tour departs from the Henry Ford Museum where visitors board a bus that will take them to the plant. Tours are offered Monday thru Saturday from 9:30 to 5:00 with the last tour departing at 3:00. The tours have been known to sell out, so reservations are recommended. Tickets can be bought online or at the museum. If you want to see the production line in action, it is recommended that you go during the week. Non-production times are usually on the weekends, holidays, and the first two weeks in July.
The tour actually consists of five parts. It is about a fifteen minute bus ride from the museum to the Rouge plant. The first stop is Legacy Theater where visitors are treated to a thirteen minute presentation on the history of Ford and the Rouge facility. From there is the Art of Manufacturing Theater which is a multisensory presentation on how vehicles are made. After taking your seats, a mutimedia presentation is shown documenting how vehicles go from a coil of steel to the final product. What is amazing about this presentation is you literally feel like you are there. Depending on where you are in the film, your body will go from hot to cold tempeature changes, the smell of paint, glue, and other products used in the production is pumped into the room, giving you a glimpse of what it is like to be on the production line.
After exiting the video, visitors are taken to the observation deck 80 feet above the visitor's center to view one of Ford's greatest innovations, their living roof. The roof above the Rouge plant is 10.4 acres, but through science and technology, it has been converted into a living garden. The roof's primary function is to collect and filter rainwater which reduces the amount of storm water flowing into the River Rouge. The roof is layered with a sedum which is a drought resistent periennal groundcover. The purpose is to reduce the heat that is given off by paved surfaces, but more importantly is insulates the building reducing their heating and cooling costs by five percent. The roof is expected to last longer than conventional roofs thereby saving millions of dollars.
The major part of the tour is the elevated walkway which looks down on the production floor below. The walkway is a 1/3 of a mile long with interactive displays along the way. Although I went when on a non-production day, it was still amazing to see the different areas and the partially assembled F-150's on the line. As you walked along the walkway, the vehicles went from a chassis to the windshield department, then dash installation, door attachment, and the many other areas that it takes to build a vehicle. The walkway takes you by the paint department and then onto quality control. It is here after the vehicle is assembled, that it is put through a series of tests to see that everything has been assembled correctly as well as put through a major car wash to make sure that the vehicle has no leaks. The vehicle is then taken outside for a road test before loaded onto railroad cars to be shipped around the country. This section of the tour is self-guided and lasts between 30-45 minutes. There is no time limit though and when you are finished just head back to the bus stop for the ride back over to the museum.
The last part of the tour is the Legacy Gallery displaying historic Ford models such as the Mustang, Model T, and numerous others. This is a great place to browse and kill some time while waiting for the bus to arrive.
From journal Father & Son Trip to the Northeast Part 2