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The Pride of Grand Haven: Pere Marquette No. 1223
Sister to the well-known fantrip engine Pere Marquette 1225, PM Berkshire No. 1223 is displayed at Grand Haven, Mich., along with a PM boxcar and caboose and a Grand Trunk Western caboose on the site of the former GTW engine terminal. In January 2012, Grand Haven officials were considering whether to raze the deteriorating coaling tower.
FROM ITS INCEPTION IN 1900 until its absorption by the Chesapeake & Ohio in 1947, the Pere Marquette Railway existed to serve the lower Great Lakes region and chiefly, the state of Michigan. PM was known for fast freight service between Chicago and Detroit, an extensive car ferry service across Lake Michigan, and, in its fi- nal years, for its fleet of 1200-series Berk- shires. PM also had a well-deserved reputa- tion for frugality and for having been in receivership numerous times. While not much from Pere Marquette has survived — it has, after all, been over 60 years since the road’s unique identity disap- peared under a coat of C&O Enchantment Blue and Federal Yellow — two of its 2-8-4s have escaped the torch. You’re probably fa- miliar with No. 1225, which returned to steam in 1988 and is now being overhauled by the Steam Railroading Institute at Owos- so, Mich. However, you may not be aware of 1223, an identical sister that’s preserved at Grand Haven. The subject of a decades-long cosmetic restoration, No. 1223 is cared for by a dedicated group of volunteers and is one of the nicest park display locomotives in the United States. The Pere Marquette was as important to Michiganders as the Spokane, Portland & Seattle was to the Pacific Northwest and the Southern was to the South. It took many years to turn the fledgling Pere Marquette Railroad of 1900 into the lean, productive rail line that it had become by 1940. The original Pere Marquette was a con- solidation of three smaller lumber/agricul- tural roads: the Chicago & West Michigan, Flint & Pere Marquette, and Detroit, Grand Rapids & Western. Combining them created a main line that stretched from Detroit to
Grand Rapids (and into Chicago via Porter, Ind., and trackage rights over New York Central, Baltimore & Ohio, and the Belt Railway of Chicago), and from Toledo to Saginaw via Flint. Additionally, PM had trackage rights over the Michigan Central from St. Thomas, Ontario, to Buffalo, N.Y., and secondary lines served many other com- munities, including Grand Haven. Pere Marquette positioned itself as a high-speed Buffalo-Chicago bridge route, of- fering cross-lake carferry service to Wiscon- sin for customers wishing to bypass the bot- tlenecks of the Windy City. The railroad also played a vital role in the development of the automobile industry, hauling raw materials and finished products to and from the plants of General Motors, Ford, REO, and Nash. But the early PM made some bad decisions and twice ended up in bankruptcy. In the first decade of the 20th century, the “Poor Marquette” was controlled, briefly, by both the Erie and Baltimore & Ohio. Stabilization came in 1917 when the road reorganized itself as the Pere Marquette Railway, and seven years later it came un- der the control of Oris and Mantis Van Sweringen of Cleveland, Ohio, who already had the C&O, Erie, and Nickel Plate under their belts. Pere Marquette was a good fit in the Van Sweringen railroad family and gave C&O another outlet for its coal business. Under Van Sweringen control the road pros- pered, acquiring the short line Manistee & Northeastern in 1931 and so expanding its reach into Northern Michigan. The PM was under the thumb of C&O management after 1928, but was allowed to maintain its own identity. In 1929 the Van Sweringens established the Advisory Mechanical Committee to de-
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JEFF TERRY
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