ABOVE: Elmira Hill was the ruling grade southbound between Mackinaw City and Cadillac. Huntworth was a long passing siding just south of Elmira where southbound cars could be set out by trains doubling the hill.
In steam days an enginehouse and turntable serviced helper engines here. A
southbound Michigan Northern train headed by leased C&O GP9 6088 and dead Alco RS3 1517 set out the first half of an 18-car train at Huntworth before going back north for the remaining cars. Crewmen are seen shoveling out the switch at the south end of the siding, and taking the opportunity to clear snow off the walkway of the C&O locomotive on February 20, 1978.
to tie everything together, so one Alco was left inoperable. The train headed up Gilbert Hill toward Cadillac with seven operating units, probably an all-time MIGN record. Three of the Alcos later shut down after being throttled back at the crest of the grade. This was a com- mon early problem which engine crews later learned to handle, allowing the engines to keep running and cool down slowly as the train coasted into Cadillac. The temporary addition of the well-maintained C&O EMD power light- ened the job of the tired railroaders at Michigan Northern, but not all were fans. When engineer Stan Bogen was asked in early 1978, he replied, “They’re alright, I guess, but they’ll pull only so much and then they lay down. The Alcos will keep lugging until the pistons come flying out through the stack.” The Alcos, of course, were the drama
queens of any railroad. Engineer Greg Bunce recalls coming south from Mack- inaw City with all five Alcos and 50- plus cars. It was, he says, “One of the very rare times when all five Alcos were functional, although [ex-C&NW] 1617
had partially plugged radiators and was limited. I remember going across the crossing in Petoskey in front of the J.C. Penney store and shaking the store win- dows. It was a pretty impressive show of noise and smoke through the middle of town.”
North to the Chief But the phenomenon that was Mich-
igan Northern went beyond the rolling locomotive museum centered at North Cadillac. The MIGN’s northern connec- tion was not a railroad at all, but a 1911 hand-fired, coal-burning carferry named Chief Wawatam. The Chief operated nine miles across the Straits of Macki- nac connecting with the Soo Line at St. Ignace, the southern tip of Michigan’s upper peninsula. Before MIGN’s traffic boom the boat
made one round trip a week, generally leaving St. Ignace at 9:00 a.m. on Thurs- day. In 1976 it hauled 420 cars. By early 1978, it was sailing four or more days a week, delivering over 400 cars a month to MIGN. The Chief was the last hand- fired coal-burning boat in the United
States commercial registry. “Much of the history of the Great
Lakes carferries,” wrote George Hilton, “is concerned with their continual bat- tle with the ice.” Ice covers the Straits of Mackinac approximately four months every year. The Chief’s owner, Mackinac Transportation Co., was a consortium of railroads that converged at the Straits. The owners included Detroit, Macki- nac & Marquette (later Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic, then Soo Line); Grand Rapids & Indiana (later Pennsylvania Railroad, Penn Central, and Michigan Northern); and Michigan Central (later New York Central, Penn Central, and Detroit & Mackinac). Chief Wawatam was the largest boat
owned by Mackinac Transportation and also the longest-lived. It arrived at St. Ignace on October 18, 1911, and would steam between the two peninsulas for slightly more than 73 years. The Chief, with four tracks and a 26-
car capacity, was the company’s primary boat, relegating her sister ships to stand- by service much of the time. But with the advantage of the bow propeller, all the
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