Description of Railroad
The Michigan Northern's trackage consisted of the northern half of the main line built between 1867 and 1882 by a predecessor railroad, the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad. During the 1900s, the spread of paved roads and altrernate means of transportation reduced the profitability of this line. Although the GR & I main line was consolidated into the Pennsylvania Railroad and then the Penn Central, usage continued to decline. The bankrupt Penn Central won permission from the federal government to abandon lengthy sections of trackage in northern Michigan.
An intervention by the Michigan Department of Transportation prolonged the working life of the old GR & I main line. The state acquired most of the trackage and contracted with the Michigan Northern (MN) to operate it. The MN also offered service on branch lines to Charlevoix and Traverse City during their period of service. At the railroad's northern terminus, the MN turned freight cars over to the Detroit & Mackinac Ry., which switched them onto the SS Chief Wawatam, a railroad ferry that crossed the Straits of Mackinac. This allowed the MN to offer through freight service to Michigan's Upper Peninsula. A controversial rate "flag-out" starting in 1978 resulted in a rush of overhead traffic from the ferry onto the Michigan Northern. This soon went away after nationwide railroad deregulation in 1980.
Read more about this topic: Michigan Northern Railway
Famous quotes containing the words description of, description and/or railroad:
“Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Once a child has demonstrated his capacity for independent functioning in any area, his lapses into dependent behavior, even though temporary, make the mother feel that she is being taken advantage of....What only yesterday was a description of the child’s stage in life has become an indictment, a judgment.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“... no other railroad station in the world manages so mysteriously to cloak with compassion the anguish of departure and the dubious ecstasies of return and arrival. Any waiting room in the world is filled with all this, and I have sat in many of them and accepted it, and I know from deliberate acquaintance that the whole human experience is more bearable at the Gare de Lyon in Paris than anywhere else.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)