My vacation starts next week--guess where we'll be going!
Anyway, this city has distinctions that merit a title like I gave this thread. In mid-century it was served by three Class I railroads and a switching/terminal line. This number dropped to two railroads in 1976, and it's now served by one regional railroad.
Black diamonds--as recently as the late 1950s, some of the passenger service to this town was steam-powered!
Steel diamonds: there were about a dozen railroad crossings in the area, and not one of them was interlocked! Most were protected by swinging gates, at least one by a horizontal/vertical signal, and one other by a hand-controlled semaphore. I don't think more than two of these crossings are still there, complete with gates. The last passenger trains to serve the town (right up until the coming of Amtrak) went through at least four of these crossings.
The town had one other unusual railroading aspect to it, but if I were to mention it here, things would become 'way too easy.
Carl
Railroader Emeritus (practiced railroading for 46 years--and in 2010 I finally got it right!)
CAACSCOCOM--I don't want to behave improperly, so I just won't behave at all. (SM)
Is LS&I one of the three class 1s ?
And does the city start with one of those three letters ?
No, and no, Dale.
Lower Peninsula again.
1976 ?
Was this City on a Penn Central line that Conrail did not pick up ?
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
CNW 8835 is the winner!
The SPV Great Lakes East atlas shows how complex the rail system in Muskegon was. The CSX line is now Michigan Shore.
The Penn Central line was of PRR ancestry. Grand Trunk Western obtained it on Conrail Day. (It was GTW's passenger trains into Muskegon that were steam powered nearly until the end of their service. C&O served the city with a daily round trip up until 4/30/71; a second round trip, mostly for mail, lasted until about 1970--that one had also had Pullman cars that ran to Muskegon until sometime in the 50s. At one time the C&O even operated a 10-6 Pullman named City of Muskegon.
The "terminal line" was the Muskegon Railway & Navigation Company, which was, for all intents and purposes, a GTW subsidiary. It had a little autonomy--there was an "MR&N Job" working out of GTW's yard as recently as 1970. Muskegon, with a big lake to turn the ships around in, got GTW's ferry line to Milwaukee (in Grand Haven, the slip had been just up the river).
(I wondered if that deliberate typo would attract attention.)
Car Manufacturer--saw on an old map a reference to the Hovey & McCracken Car Company. Don't know what happened to them or if they were succeeded by anyone.
I'll take a break for a while--maybe come back with some fresh locations to figure out.
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.