Grand Trunk Memories

A Grand Trunk Western train crosses the Conrail Chicago line at Vickers in Toledo on April 29, 1984

With the recent debut of the Canadian National Heritage schemes, I looked back in my photo collection knowing I had examples from years ago.

I found from several photographs of Grand Trunk Western motive power that I made while railfanning with Marty Surdyk in Toledo and Durand, Michigan.

There are, of course several locomotives still wearing Grand Trunk and Illinois Central liveries that are in pretty good condition. 

In this post are some photographs from 1984 and 1985, including images made during a railfan outing on April 29, 1984, to Toledo.

Also shown are excursions sponsored by the Bluewater Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society from Toledo to Durand for the May 5, 1985, Durand Railroad Days.

During that event a caboose train offered train rides.

In addition to Toledo and Durand, some photographs were made in Michigan at Luna, Monroe, Wyandotte and Corunna.

Photographs by Edward Ribinskas

The caboose of the GTW train at Vickers

A Bluewater Michigan NRHS chapter excursion at Toledo on May 5, 1985.

At Luna, Michigan

At Monroe, Michigan

At Wyandotte, Michigan

At Durand, Michigan

The caboose train at Durand

At Corunna, Michigan

Durand Railroad Festival Canceled

The annual railroad festival in Durand, Michigan, has been canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The event was to have been held May 14-17 by Durand Railroad Days, Inc.

The announcement was made on the group’s Facebook page and it would have been the 44^th festival.

The event is held in part at the restored Durand Union Station, which houses the Michigan Railroad History Museum and serves as an Amtrak station for the Chicago-Port Huron Blue Water.

The museum is also closed through at least April 30 due to the pandemic.

Durand sees trains of Canadian National, Huron & Eastern and Great Lakes Central.

That 70s Look in Durand

Amtrak’s Blue Water has ground to a stop in Durand, Michigan, right on the money. Actually, Train 365 arrived a little early.

The daily boarding ritual that plays out countless times every day in cities and towns or all sizes is underway.

This image was made in July 2019, but there are two throwbacks to the 1970s.

The station sign in the foreground was hung in the 1970s and Amfleet coaches were built in that era.

Amtrak is undertaking a process of replacing its Amfleet fleet and maybe someday it will hang a new sign in Durand.

But for now that 70s look continues on Amtrak if you pay attention to it.

Looking For the Dead in Durand

A westbound Canadian National auto rack train takes the Chicago connection in Durand, Michigan. This line once hosted Grand Trunk Western Steam into 1960 among other ghosts.

Author Roland Barthes wrote in Camera Lucida a short book of essays published in 1980 about the essence of photography that making photographs “is a kind of primitive theatre, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.”

Photographs are a way of freezing people and moments in time and keeping them alive long after they have passed away.

Writing in The New Yorker, author Louis Menand expounded on that thought by saying that as we look at photographs, “we imagine one day looking at them when the people in them are no longer alive. Even when you look at a photo of some random person, anyone, taken years ago, somewhere in your mind the thought creeps in: ‘And that person is probably now dead.’ ”

Menand was writing about a photo exhibit of an event that occurred 50 years ago and many of those who were there probably are deceased.

I thought about that as I stood around in Durand, Michigan, early last month on a warm afternoon waiting for Canadian National to come back to life.

I was spending time at the restored Durand Union Station, which once served passenger trains of the Grand Trunk Western and the Ann Arbor.

It was not difficult to imagine people standing on these platforms waiting for a train to take them far away.

Given that the last Grand Trunk passenger train halted here 47 years ago, it is easy to conclude that many who boarded those trains from these concrete platforms are now deceased.

But my thoughts went beyond long-ago passengers. Much railroad history has been made in Durand.

The Grand Trunk was the last railroad in Chicago to assign steam locomotives to intercity passenger trains and those would have served Durand through 1957.

But steam powered-varnish through Durand lasted even longer.

The last daily steam-powered passenger trains ran between Durand and Detroit’s Brush Street station until steam bowed out after pulling Nos. 21/56 on March 27, 1960.

That event was celebrated in the Spring 2018 issue of Classic Trains magazine.

As I studied the photographs on Page 28 of that issue I thought about how many of those with cameras or just the merely curious who lined the tracks to witness the last of steam in revenue service must now be just as gone as the trains they watched and rode.

What happened to their photographs? Do people still tell stories about how grandpa used to talk about the last GTW steam trip?

In the late 1960s, the GTW sought to fight back against the decline of intercity rail passenger service by launching a fast Chicago-Detroit passenger train named the Mohawk.

Durand was the first stop westbound and last stop eastbound of Nos. 164 and 165, stopping at 5:06 p.m. en route to Chicago and 8:24 p.m. en route to Detroit.

Durand also saw the Maple Leaf, a Chicago-Toronto train jointly operated by the GTW and parent Canadian National. What was it like in Durand when these trains still ran?

Durand had no passenger trains between May 1971 and September 1974. With the help of the State of Michigan Amtrak started the Chicago-Port Huron Blue Water, a train that still runs.

But I have enough of a history of being at Durand to remember when this train was known as the Chicago-Toronto International and had VIA Rail Canada F40 locomotives on the point.

I liked the International because it arrived in Durand in mid-afternoon in both directions.

But I wasn’t around in the early years of the International when it operated with VIA LRC coaches.

Nor was I around in the early years of the Blue Water when Amtrak’s Midwest corridor trains had a variety of equipment and E units to pull it.

Because Durand can be dead for long periods of time, you have plenty of time to imagine the past and what used to look like here.

It was late afternoon by the time the Holly Subdivision to Pontiac and Detroit came back to life.

The headlight coming westward wasn’t a steam-powered commuter train or the Mohawk or even a hot GTW freight train.

It was a CN auto rack train with a cut of general merchandise cars.

I photographed it and watched it go around the Chicago connection to the Flint Sub. What would who stood on this platform 50 years ago, 60 years or 70 years ago think about what they would see today?

Will someone 40 years from now be just as interested in Durand in 2018 as I was of Durand in 1960 or 1970?

Train Time in Durand

We recently made a trip to Flint, Michigan, to visit Mary Ann’s cousins. That gave me an opportunity to get over to Durand for some railfanning, something I had not done there in nearly two years.

I scheduled my visit to coincide with the arrival of Amtrak’s Blue Water, a state-funded train linking Chicago and Port Huron, Michigan.

No. 365 is scheduled into Durand at 8:04 a.m. The good news is that it arrives in daylight. The bad news is that it arrives in daylight.

Say what? At 8 a.m. in the summer the sunlight in Durand does not favor a westbound train on the former Grand Trunk Western’s Flint Subdivision. It’s not even all that favorable for a glint shot.

But I worked with what I had and converted the image to black and white, which often is a good move to make with a digital image if the color is less than spectacular.

No. 365 operates with a locomotive on each end so it doesn’t have to be turned in Port Huron. That made for a nice going away image in good light.

As the Blue Water came into view, I thought for a few moments that it might have one of those new Charger locomotives that Amtrak is using on Midwest corridor service.

But that was not the case. The Blue Water and Wolverine Service trains that serve Detroit use a stretch of Amtrak-owned track between Kalamazoo, Michigan, and Porter, Indiana, that is equipped with a positive train control system that is not yet compatible with the Chargers.

The issue is getting the PTC software of the Siemens-built Chargers to talk with the Wabtec PTC software.

That is not likely to happen until at least fall, so P42DC units are pulling  Amtrak trains in Michigan except the Pere Marquette, which doesn’t use the Amtrak-owned track.

No. 365 was followed by less than a half-hour two CN westbounds, a stack train and a manifest freight, but still arrived in Durand on time.

There is a fence that separates Durand Union Station from the passenger platform and a station caretaker must unlock and open it.

Despite being a town of 2,500, Durand has good passenger loads based on my experience.

The Blue Water had the standard Midwest Corridor consist of mostly Horizon Fleet coaches with a couple of Amfleet cars, one of them a cafe car with a herald for Illinois high-speed rail service.

Amtrak would prefer the trains be three or four cars, but CN imposes a minimum axle count on Amtrak trains using its tracks to ensure that the trains will activate grade crossing signals.

In Illinois, some Chicago-Carbondale trains run with retired baggage cars, but I’ve never seen that done on the Blue Water.

The train halted and the conductor and assistant conductor both opened doors and put down step boxes.

It didn’t take long for the boarding to be completed, so the conductor radioed a highball and No. 365 was on its way. Next stop, East Lansing.

Anyone Want to Board Here?

An Amtrak conductor stands by an open vestibule of the westbound Blue Water in Durand, Michigan, but all of the passengers are lined up at another vestibule father down.

That’s because the far vestibule aligned with the gate allowing passengers through a fence that separates the tracks of Canadian National (former Grand Trunk Western) and Durand Union Station.

Eventually, a few passengers were directed to board here, perhaps because they were holding business class tickets. The cafe car on Train No. 365 was located toward the rear.

The Blue Water departed Durand on time en route to Chicago.

Day in Durand: 2

One in a periodic series of images that I made last summer

Shortly before the crew that had taken the coal train into the yard in Durand, Michigan, finished its work, an eastbound Canadian National manifest freight rumbled through town.

Then the coal train crew left for Flint with a cut of cars it had picked up in Durand in tow of its BNSF motive power set and things got rather quiet.

A Great Lakes Central yard job was chattering on the radio, but otherwise there was no sign of activity. Some railfans came and went, but that was about all that was happening.

At one point a member of the Michigan Railroad Museum staff came out and said that the Port Huron connection wye was lined for a movement.

That would turn out to be the Huron & Eastern job that comes down to Durand and sets off and picks up cars for interchange to CN and the GLC.

The lull was finally broken at 2:17 p.m. when the H&E job showed up and backed into the yard, using the Port Huron connection.

About 15 minutes later, CN sprang to life but not without some complications. A Pontiac-bound train had stopped west of Durand to await yarding instructions from the CN RTC (rail traffic controller).

The RTC had two challenges. With the H&E job working in the yard, the tracks available to CN to set out cars was limited, lest the CN crew set out cars on a track the H&E crew needed to get out of the yard.

The other challenge was that not all of the Durand set out cars on the CN train were located in a single block within the train.

If the H&E job wasn’t working in the yard, the CN train could take the two blocks of Durand cars along with the cars between them, set out the latter on a yard track, and then pick them up and take them back to its train.

The RTC decided that the CN crew would take the second block of Durand cars to Pontiac and a westbound would take them to Durand that evening and set them off.

The CN crew dutifully set off its Durand cars and came out of the yard running light.

It got back onto its train and told the RTC it was ready to head for Pontiac. Instead, it wound up sitting for more than hour waiting for other CN traffic to clear.

That included another eastbound manifest freight heading toward Flint and a train that came up from Pontiac on the Holly Subdivision and would turn west onto the Flint Sub in Durand.

By the time all of this got sorted out, it was about 4:15 p.m. and I had seen my last CN train for the day.

I stayed around to watch the H&E job back out of the yard and then head onto its home rails to leave town.

I had to get back to the home of my wife’s cousin for dinner so I left Durand not long after the H&E job left.

On the day, I had seen 12 movements involving three railroads, counting Amtrak. That is probably a good day for Durand lulls and all.

Article and Photographs by Craig Sanders

A nearly two-hour lull was broken by the arrival of a Huron & Eastern train from the Saginaw-Bay City region.

 

GP40-2LW was built for CN in 1976 but now works for the Huron & Eastern.

Getting a close up look at the trailing unit, which features a different livery than the leader. The GP30AC was built in 1971 for the Louisville & Nashville.

Next stop is the yard in Durand.

The CN train to Pontiac had a long cut of cars to set off in Durand.

The conductor is on the point and the CN job is ready to back into the yard in Durand.

Two generations of owners in Durand. The Grand Trunk Western caboose is on static display.

Backing around the Port Huron wye to make a set out in the yard in Durand.

After making a set out in the yard in Durand, the CN job came out light.

The light power move passes Durand Union Station.

An eastbound manifest freight clatters across the diamonds in Durand.

Coming up the Holly Sub from Pontiac and Detroit.

Someone had fun drawing in the dirt on the nose of CN No. 2338.

A cut of auto racks clears the signals on the Chicago wye in Durand.

Moving from the Flint Sub to the Holly Sub on the Chicago wye.

With opposing traffic having cleared, the CN train for Pontiac gets underway and heads to the Holly Sub. The Durand depot is on the left.

A Huron & Eastern crew member guides his train out of the yard in Durand and onto the CN Port Huron wye as it prepares to leave town.