Along the Rail Line

The CSX (originally Pere Marquette) Michigan mainline at Mulliken, Michigan.

"Sunday, August 13, 1939 Train on turntable ready to go in roundhouse Detroit, Mich Taken off from Ambassador Bridge" A little something for the railfans, today. In the near foreground is a bit of the Pere Marquette's enormous roundhouse, and off beyond the turntable is just a wee piece of PM's also-enormous riverfront yard. I rather like the bridge shadow on the roof and tracks. The bridge was about a decade old when this photo was taken. The roundhouse, which predated the bridge, is long gone, now. The still-large yard is just a shadow of its former self. Borucki's Lakers

Down the end of our street, in 1995, from when the town still made some pretense of supporting the neighboring farmers. No longer. Much of this complex has long-since been dismantled; what remains has been repurposed.

The tracks are still here, but the trains no longer stop, and much of the elevator complex has been demolished. Mulliken was a farm town for about a century. There was a grocery store, a lumberyard, a hardware store. A church, a school, a barber, a library, a beauty shop, a couple bars, a restaurant that served breakfast. A gas station. A post office. And this grain elevator. The lumberyard was already gone when I moved here in 1991. This feed, grain, & seed operation closed two or three years after I took these photos. The hardware failed around 2000. The school's been gone for years, as have the hair cutters. Boyer's no longer serves gasoline, though John can still fix your pickup. The grocery's evolved into a party store, and Farmers Tavern's been a full-service restaurant since the 80s. In many ways, now, we've become a rather distant Lansing suburb. We aren't entirely commuters--a surprising number of my neighbors work as plumbers, and these days our biggest local business is a general contractor. But the farmers ship grain, and buy seed, at Sunfield , or Grand Ledge, or Woodbury. I miss 'em.

The LS&I Railroad (a Cleveland-Cliffs subsidiary) built this iron ore dock in Marquette's upper harbor 99 years ago. It's still in use, though the cargo's evolved from raw ore to taconite pellets. This is one of the best places on the Great Lakes to view ore carriers up close. The not-quite-visible ship in this photo is Kaye E. Barker.

Between Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, from cruise ship Nokomis.

With a train overhead. I just love the long stair up to this dock.

A ghost of the past, from the past. Taken at Champion Mine, Painesdale, in September of 1990, with the Soo Line Historical & Technical Society's DSS&A Special Interest Group. Scanned from a negative.