A great east-west route through Michigan

Years ago, a newspaper, the Lansing Republican, dated February 5, 1884, reprinted a story from the Grand Traverse Herald pointing out that the experiment to provide all-year service across the Straits by boat had failed, and that if a great east-west route were ever to be established through Michigan a bridge or tunnel would be required. The editor considered both as practicable; the only question in his mind was that of cost. Earlier, the dedication of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883 gave Mackinac Bridge backers encouragement. A St. Ignace store owner in 1884 reprinted an artist’s conception of the famous New York structure in his advertising and captioned it “Proposed bridge across the Straits of Mackinac.”

Not lacking in enthusiasm what the early bridge proponents needed was capital - money is what make the world go round, or builds the world's infrastructure so we can traverse it. Good thing in 1:87 scale the amount of investment necessary to do so is factors below actual full-scale civil engineering, albeit with a smaller source of revenue to support it. As I noted in the previous installment the prototype crossing of the Straits of Mackinac suffered a number of false starts and setbacks over the decades prior to the bridge's construction in 1954 and opening to traffic in November of 1957. Had it not been for the interruption of World War II and the Korean conflict the crossing may have been completed years earlier.

In my miniature, 1:87-scale world (now under construction) the Roosevelt administration's W.P.A. had approved the state's request to construct a dual rail-highway crossing of the Straits, and the earlier, alternate Mackinac Bridge had been completed and opened for service just in time to support the surge of wartime rail traffic that followed Pearl Harbor. From the late 1930's into the postwar period both freight and passenger traffic surged as the Mackinac gateway route allowed trains to avoid the tangle of routes and delays inherent in traversing the Chicago terminal. Both the New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroads handed off many thousands of interchange trains to the surging DSS&A and Soo Line routes and gateways to the west.

Following the Penn Central merger of the two eastern behemoths in 1968 the challenges of maintaining an overbuilt eastern railroad network started to impact the line across the Straits. Deferred maintenance on the Penn Central as the carrier's finances continued to deteriorate lengthened running times, and derailments became increasingly common. The Soo Line Railroad - as well as its corporate parent, Canadian Pacific Railway - grew increasingly alarmed at the condition of its bankrupt southern and eastern connection, and with the USRA's blessing purchased the former Michigan Central route south to Detroit in 1974 from the Penn Central trustee.

The new line was reestablished as the Detroit, Mackinac and Marquette Railroad Company for corporate and tax reasons. Largely a "paper railroad" under CPR ownership the DM&M began a large-scale renewal project on the former Michigan Central route, replacing miles of rail, thousands of crossties and trainloads of new ballast while also upgrading a majority of the route's signaling to speed both freight and passenger traffic along the line. Since 1971 Amtrak had assumed the nation's passenger trains from the private freight railroads and the Mackinac gateway was no exception. Trains 9-10 are presently Superliner-equipped running long-distance from Toledo, Ohio's Central Union Terminal through Detroit, Marquette, the Twin Ports of Duluth-Superior and onward to the Pacific Northwest. Local trains 394-395 ply much of the same route daily from Toledo and Detroit to the tri-cities of Saginaw-Bay City and Midland.

With the Soo Line's acquisition of the post-embargo Milwaukee Road in 1985 and later - with Canadian Pacific's absorption of its U.S. operations - the Detroit to Twin Ports route of the DM&M continues to serve the two peninsulas of the Great Lakes State. Now under the CPR banner, and with diverse products and unit-train commodities continuing to flow east and west and speedily so - avoiding the knot of terminal trackage within the Chicago region - the future of the rebuilt former Michigan Central and DSS&A lines have never looked brighter in this alternate reality world located in my basement. In my next installment we'll discuss more details about the railroad, and the Saginaw Division in particular. Until then, highball!