Author: Graydon M. Meints
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781611863659
Category : Railroads
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
The Pere Marquette Railroad has not one but two histories--one for the twentieth century and one for the nineteenth. While the twentieth-century record of the Pere Marquette Railroad has been well studied and preserved, the nineteenth century has not been so well served. This volume aims to correct that oversight by focusing on the nineteenth-century part of the company's past, including the men who formed and directed these early roads, and the development of the system. The Pere Marquette Railroad was formed in 1900 by a merger of three Michigan railroad companies and lasted forty-seven years, disappearing in June 1947 by merger into the maw of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad. Prior to the 1900 merger, the Pere Marquette Railroad's predecessors made up a motley collection of disconnected and unaffiliated short, local rail lines. After the financial panic of 1893, and with some commonality of ownership, the companies worked together more closely. Before the end of the decade, the three main railroads--the Flint & Pere Marquette; the Detroit, Lansing & Northern; and the Chicago & West Michigan--had decided that the only way to maintain solvency was to merge. Using a plethora of primary sources including railway timetables and maps, this work lends insight into the little-known corporate business history of the Pere Marquette Railroad.
Author: Nicholas A. Marsh
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 406
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Book Description
In pioneer America, the Michigan Central Railroad (MCRR) became the major route between east and west, linking older states and their restless populations to young cities like Detroit and Chicago, and to the wide open spaces beyond. Now, for the first time in book form, historian Nick Marsh systematically relates the colourful story of this legendary enterprise, drawing on numerous archival records, photographs, and artefacts. The MCRR story is a story of toil, triumph, and tragedy. Marsh includes chapters on the railroad's construction, its conversion from a state-owned to a private enterprise, the sad ending to a Michigan farmers' rebellion, the involvement of William H. Vanderbilt, and the empire building of the visionary James F. Joy. Eagerly anticipated by many, the appearance of Marsh's comprehensive account will bring joy to legions of rail fans, history buffs, and connoisseurs of Americana.
Author: Norman L. Krentel
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1609177673
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
Michigan Railway Company: The Northern and Southern Divisions, the first comprehensive history of the Michigan United Railway Company, traces the rise and fall of Michigan’s most significant electric railway. This volume covers the company’s founding in local rail-based public transportation systems in Lansing, Jackson, Battle Creek, Kalamazoo, and Owosso-Corunna and ends with its eventual demise, abandoned prior to the stock market crash of 1929. Norman L. Krentel follows the fragments of lines in lower Michigan, which came together to form the MUR. He examines the interurban lines, which were broken down into five divisions, each with a separate superintendent. These divisions were Northern and Southern, which had formerly been Michigan United Railways; Northwestern, which had been Grand Rapids, Holland, and Chicago Railway; Western; and Northeastern. This also explores how electric railway history is intertwined with the state of Michigan. The interurban electric rail system supported automobile manufacturing, allowing for the shipment of parts supplies, and finished automobiles through Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. Major auto plants like REO and Oldsmobile had rail sidetracks served by Michigan Railway’s interurban freight trains. Electric railway history is thus an essential, previously overlooked factor in Michigan’s industrial development.
Author: Clarence J. Monette
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 124
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Book Description
Author: David McLellan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
Author: Kenneth Schramm
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 9780738540276
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 134
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Book Description
Detroit's Street Railways tells the story of public transportation in the Motor City. Dating back to 1863, when horse-drawn streetcars serviced the citizenry, public transportation in Detroit has a proud and colorful history. Early on, a host of streetcar companies carried Detroiters about their daily business. This period was followed by consolidation into one company, the Detroit United Railway, and later the establishment of the municipally owned Department of Street Railways. The Department of Street Railways, established May 15, 1922, inherited a vast system of streetcar lines throughout Detroit, the first city in the United States to establish municipally owned transit system. It was a leader and innovator in the transit industry, with continued streetcar service until April 8, 1956, when the last streetcars on Woodward Avenue were replaced by buses. When the Department of Street Railways began coach operations in 1925, the intent was to provide feeder service to the established streetcar lines, as expansion costs were prohibitive. Sadly, the program implemented to complement the city's streetcar operations led to the demise of the streetcar as the principal mode of transportation in the Motor City.
Author: Donald L. Mills
Publisher: Mid-Atlantic Highlands Publishing
ISBN: 9780984075751
Category : Railroads
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Bitsy's family is moving again, this time to Alabama, far from her beloved mountains, far from home in West Virginia. Bitsy soon discovers that the landscape is not the only thing different about the deep south. There are rules. Rules that everyone seems to understand but her.
Author: George W. Hilton
Publisher: Montevallo Historical Press
ISBN: 0965862453
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 471
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Book Description
In the United States and Canada, there was a time when railroad tunnels and bridges were only dreams in the minds of designers, when the best way to move railroad cars across rivers and lakes was to load them on specialized ships customized for this purpose. With this functional principle in mind, shipbuilders around the Great Lakes and elsewhere built an amazing variety of vessels to do the job quickly, efficiently, and safely. George W. Hilton’s book tells the story of these boats and of the hardworking, heroic men who day after day, year after year, battled mechanical problems, ice, and bad weather, to get the cars safely across the water.
Author: Graydon M. Meints
Publisher: Trains and Railroads
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
Michigan Railroads and Railroad Companies is an invaluable reference manual for everyone interested in regional transportation history, the history of railroading, and Michigan history in general. It contains complete, cross-referenced listings for every company formed to operate a railroad in the state of Michigan. In addition to the comprehensive entries for major lines, Graydon Meints has included details about the many small, common-carrier steam and electric companies, logging roads, and numerous other primitive and contemporary rail systems. This encyclopedic reference guide also contains information on the so-called "paper railroads," companies that were projected but which never laid a foot of track. Michigan Railroads is divided into three parts. One includes alphabetical entries for the actual and intended railroad companies themselves, the date and purpose for their organization, and a brief history from their origins to their dispositions. Included in this portion of the work are a number of railroad "family trees" showing the corporate antecedents of the largest of the rail lines operating in the state today. Another contains a chronology of significant corporate events; it works as a useful finding aid for accessing source data contained in the first section. A third contains a statewide county-by-county listing of railroads, both paper and real.
Author: H. Roger Grant
Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
ISBN: 1501747797
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
"Follow the Flag" offers the first authoritative history of the Wabash Railroad Company, a once vital interregional carrier. The corporate saga of the Wabash involved the efforts of strong-willed and creative leaders, but this book provides more than traditional business history. Noted transportation historian H. Roger Grant captures the human side of the Wabash, ranging from the medical doctors who created an effective hospital department to the worker-sponsored social events. And Grant has not ignored the impact the Wabash had on businesses and communities in the "Heart of America." Like most major American carriers, the Wabash grew out of an assortment of small firms, including the first railroad to operate in Illinois, the Northern Cross. Thanks in part to the genius of financier Jay Gould, by the early 1880s what was then known as the Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railway reached the principal gateways of Chicago, Des Moines, Detroit, Kansas City, and St. Louis. In the 1890s, the Wabash gained access to Buffalo and direct connections to Boston and New York City. One extension, spearheaded by Gould's eldest son, George, fizzled. In 1904 entry into Pittsburgh caused financial turmoil, ultimately throwing the Wabash into receivership. A subsequent reorganization allowed the Wabash to become an important carrier during the go-go years of the 1920s and permitted the company to take control of a strategic "bridge" property, the Ann Arbor Railroad. The Great Depression forced the company into another receivership, but an effective reorganization during the early days of World War II gave rise to a generally robust road. Its famed Blue Bird streamliner, introduced in 1950 between Chicago and St. Louis, became a widely recognized symbol of the "New Wabash." When "merger madness" swept the railroad industry in the 1960s, the Wabash, along with the Nickel Plate Road, joined the prosperous Norfolk & Western Railway, a merger that worked well for all three carriers. Immortalized in the popular folk song "Wabash Cannonball," the midwestern railroad has left important legacies. Today, forty years after becoming a "fallen flag" carrier, key components of the former Wabash remain busy rail arteries and terminals, attesting to its historic value to American transportation.
