ABOVE: After the railroad’s decision not to participate in an industry-wide rate increase in September 1977, traffic on the railroad boomed and the road went locomotive shopping. Alco RS3 No. 2037, still in Southern paint, and ex- Seaboard Coast Line Baldwin RS12 No. 215 in Michigan Northern green and white prepare to take a 20-car train of overhead lumber south from Cadillac, Mich., in October 1978. RIGHT: In about as rare a locomotive consist as could be found anywhere in 1978, ex-D&H Baldwin shark No. 1216, Michigan Northern RS2 1501, and ex-C&NW RS3 1517 lead a northbound train near Oden, Mich., with Little Traverse Bay in the background.


Rising Above the Chaos In the mid-1970s Michigan’s railroads


were an industry in turmoil. Consolidat- ed Rail Corp. (Conrail) was authorized by Congress to acquire thousands of miles of troubled rail in the Northeast and Midwest once operated by seven bankrupt Class I railroads. Set to take over on April 1, 1976, Conrail could by law elect not to retain any routes it de- termined to be unprofitable, and many of the lines in Michigan fell into that un- fortunate category. Conrail decided not to operate the 220 miles of Penn Central track from Comstock Park (just north of Grand Rapids) to Mackinaw City at the tip of the state’s lower peninsula. Also excluded was a 25-mile branch from Walton Junction to Traverse City. Thus, in December of 1975, Michigan Northern Railway was formed by a group of am- bitious young railroaders to operate the trains on track which would be leased by the State of Michigan from the trustees


46 JUNE 2015 • RAILFAN.COM


of the bankrupt Penn Central estate. Operations began at Cadillac (the ap- proximate mid-point of the main line) on a snowy April l, 1976. The MIGN loco- motive fleet initially consisted of a pair of Alco RS3s purchased from the South- ern Railway. The railroad’s office was in a rented store front furnished with card tables and folding chairs, overlooking the Cadillac city park. The office was later moved to a nicely renovated old Pennsylvania Railroad freight house next to the tracks at Cadillac. Since repainting the locomotives was not an immediate priority, the new line gained a lot of initial railfan attention by run- ning locomotives in Southern Railway paint and lettering far from their orig- inal home. Initially, freight traffic over the new Michigan Northern was mini- mal, although the company claimed to haul 25 percent more cars in its first two months than Penn Central had hauled in the same period a year before.


Michigan Northern’s first winter brought both good fortune and opera- tional challenges. The winter of 1976- 1977 (and the two winters that followed) were unusually cold, and the Great Lakes were nearly entirely frozen over. The good fortune came in the form of an Algoma Steel Company coal boat which was scheduled to be loaded from railcars at Toledo, Ohio, and sail to the Algoma steel mill at Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, but early ice blockage of Lake Erie and Lake Huron removed water transporta- tion as an option until spring. The coal was reconsigned via an all rail route to Canada, and the result was four trains (221 cars) of coal delivered by the Ches- apeake & Ohio to MIGN at Reed City in February of 1977. Michigan Northern was, of course,


glad to have the revenue during a slow time, but with only three operable loco- motives (the original ex-Southern RS3s and a recently purchased RS2 from


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