ABOVE: A Sunday evening extra with 22 hoppers for the local grain elevator in Auburn rolls down former Michigan Central tracks on May 13, 2012. Some units assigned to the HESR wore RailAmerica’s striking red-white-and-blue scheme. OPPOSITE: Former Canadian National GP40-2LW 9712 and CORP 3826 are laying over in Reese during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend on November 28, 2010.
The trip to Durand will normally
take around three hours with the train returning to Bay City soon after. A yard crew is also based in Durand that han- dles cars interchanged from the Cana- dian National and Great Lakes Cen- tral, and will also travel to Owosso to serve customers there.
Another local crew will depart from Wenona Yard and head for Saginaw in the late morning hours to handle switching duties at Genesee Yard; they may also interchange cars to the Lake State Railway. This local generally spends most of their day at Genesee Yard before returning to Bay City a few hours later.
Huron & Eastern also has a line that extends from Bay City to Midland, which serves a pair of large grain eleva- tors in Auburn. A night crew is called from Wenona Yard to bring traffic into Midland for Dow Chemical, which is one of the railroads largest customers. The crew will bring cars back to Bay City later that same night and arrive just before dawn.
Grain trains heading for Auburn are often the only daylight trains along the Midland Line; they are interchanged from the Lake State Railway at Sagi-
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naw Yard and often operate in the af- ternoon hours with an extra board crew. U.S. Route 10 and Midland Road parallel the line westward from Bay City, which provides easy access to those railfanning in the area. Coal extras will run from Durand de- pending on the season, bound for Con- sumers Energy's Karn/Weadock facili- ty
in Essexville. These trains are
interchanged from the Canadian Na- tional at Durand with the current con- tract for these trains having the Huron & Eastern operating them primarily during the summer months, with the Lake State Railway handling move- ments interchanged from CSX in Flint for the remainder of the year. Operations in the Saginaw area are
largely based around the former CSX Saginaw Yard, now under the control of the Lake State Railway. CSX and pred- ecessor railroads had the largest pres- ence in the city until 2005 when they leased their remaining trackage north of Flint to LSRC. Both railroads oper- ate on the same trackage throughout the Saginaw area as a result. HESR interchanges blocks of mani-
fest traffic and unit grain trains at Sag- inaw Yard, bound for points along the
CSX. Another recent source of traffic for the Huron & Eastern is wind turbine trains, also interchanged in Saginaw. The railroad has operated these trains as needed since 2007, when construc- tion of wind farms began throughout the thumb region.
There is a Saginaw area based local, which goes on duty in the mid-morning hours at Towerline Road in Buena Vista Township. They will handle the inter- change traffic to the Lake State and ex- change cars with the Bay City local at Genesee Yard. Once the work is com- plete in Saginaw the crew will take the train toward Reese, where an overnight crew takes over and continues the east- ward trip toward Sebewaing. Operations in the northern thumb area are centered around Bad Axe, the county seat of Huron County and home to nearly 3500 residents. A number of branch lines extend out of Bad Axe, serving
mainly agricultural related
customers in Huron and Sanilac coun- ties. A daytime crew based in Bad Axe will spot customers along these branch lines, with an upswing in traffic occur- ring during the fall harvest season, when grain and sugar beet loads reach their peak. A night crew will come on
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