History
The Pere Marquette Railroad was incorporated on November 1, 1899 in anticipation of a merger of three Michigan-based railroad companies that had been agreed upon by all parties. It began operations on January 1, 1900, absorbing the following companies:
- Flint and Pere Marquette Railroad (F&PM)
- Detroit, Grand Rapids and Western Railroad (DGR&W)
- Chicago and West Michigan Railway (C&WM)
The company was reincorporated on March 12, 1917 as the Pere Marquette Railway.
In the 1920s the Pere Marquette came under the control of Cleveland financiers Oris and Mantis Van Sweringen. These brothers also controlled the New York, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad (Nickel Plate), the Erie Railroad and the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, and planned to merge the four companies. However, the ICC did not approve the merger and the Van Sweringens eventually sold their interest in the Pere Marquette to the C&O, with which it formally merged on June 6, 1947. The C&O has since become part of CSX Transportation.
In 1984, Amtrak named its passenger train between Grand Rapids, Michigan and Chicago the Pere Marquette.
The 2004 film "The Polar Express" featured steam locomotive Pere Marquette 1225. The train in the movie (not the same train in the popular children's book) was a model of the 1225 based on measurements and recordings of the 1225. It is the locomotive that Chris Van Allsberg claimed was the inspiration for the book, which he visited as a child when it was on the MSU campus. The locomotive was scheduled to be at the premiere in Grand Rapids, where the writer of the book, Chris Van Allsberg, was born, but canceled due to interferences with the schedule of CSX. It is housed and maintained at the Steam Railroading Institute in Owosso, Michigan
Read more about this topic: Pere Marquette Railway
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It’s nice to be a part of history but people should get it right. I may not be perfect, but I’m bloody close.”
—John Lydon (formerly Johnny Rotten)
“The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother—both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child’s history is never finished.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)