Ford Richmond Assembly Plant - Production during the 1940s & 1950s
Once Ford got its civilian production system operating again after the war, the Richmond plant was one of the Ford division's fifteen branch assembly plants in the U.S. Counting Lincoln, Mercury, and Ford truck divisions, the Ford Motor Company had seventeen assembly plants total in the U.S. In 1950, the Richmond plant was assembling about 325 cars and trucks each day. The previous year, it had produced about 60,000 vehicles. In 1950, the Richmond plant had about 1,600 production workers and salaried employees on the payroll. The company no longer used ships to transport parts from Dearborn to Richmond, relying entirely on railroad cars. One change in the company's parts policy was that plants like Richmond acquired some of their parts from local suppliers. Richmond bought about 25 percent of the parts it needed from manufacturers in northern California. Each day, the plant received about thirty carloads of parts from Dearborn and other suppliers. Outgoing shipments totaled about forty carloads daily (because cars could not be loaded as densely as parts). Each year, the Richmond used about $50,000,000 in materials transportation charges.