Michigan Rail History Conference Lineup Set

The program schedule has been announced for the biennial Michigan Railroad History Conference to be held Sept. 16-17 in Ludington, Michigan.

The event is being held at the United Methodist Church of Ludington. The registration fee is $70 if received before Sept. 1 and $75 if paid after that date.

The fee includes morning coffee and refreshments on the Saturday or the conference, and lunch that day.

Scheduled presenters and their programs include Railroad Logging in Manistee Co. & Mapping Abandoned Lines, James Hannum, physician/mapmaker; Technological Evolution of Lake Michigan Carferries, Art Chavez, historian/author; Life and Times Aboard the Carferries by former carferry employees; Lake Michigan Carferry: Vision for the Future, Sara Spore, general manager, SS Badger; Geocaching along the Manistee and North Eastern Railroad, Kevin Springsteen, geocacher; Renaissance for Passenger Trains? Kay Chase, rail passenger advocate; Getting It Done at Ludington, Sean Atteberry, engineer/conductor; James F Joy: We Finally See You, Nick Marsh, biographer; Eber Brock Ward: Michigan’s Forgotten Steamboat, Railroad, and Iron King, Mike Nagle, biographer; Last of the Mohegan: Michigan’s First Logging Locomotive, Jeff Seaver, historian; Epworth Heights/Ludington & Northern Railroad, Paul Trap, historian.

Other events scheduled during the conference include a tour and social hour aboard the S.S. Badger on Saturday night.

That event will feature a tour of the public spaces aboard and a brief presentation of its history. Light refreshments will be provided with a cash bar.

On Friday there will be a field trip to the terminal of the Mason & Oceana Railroad. Attendees will view artifacts from the line at White Pine Village, and trace sites and right-of-way related to the Pere Marquette and its successors.

Lunch will be provided at the Mason County Historical Society Research Center.

Following that will be a tour of the Epworth League/Ludington & Northern to Epworth Heights and its hotel/museum and Hamlin Lake and return. The Friday tours are limited to 40 participants.
For more information and updates see www.michiganrailroadhistory.org. Questions contact mrhc16.2022@gmail.com.

Michigan History Conference Seeks Presenters

The Michigan Railroad History Conference has issued a call for papers for its 2022 conference to be held in Sept. 17 in Ludington, Michigan.

The conference is seeking six presenters to talk about various aspects of Michigan’s railroad heritage.

Each presentation should be 30 to 45 minutes long and be content oriented rather than simply a collection of  photographs.

Interested individuals should contact Doug Johnson, chairperson, by March 15 at mrhc16.2022@gmail.com or at Chair at MRHC, P.O. Box  16235, Lansing, MI 48901. 

Presentation proposals should include a suggested title and brief description of the topic to be covered. The conference committee will review submissions and select presentations to provide a well-rounded quality program.

Michigan Conference Seeking Presenters

The Michigan Railroad History Conference has issued a call for papers for its 2022 event to be held Sept. 17 in Ludington, Michigan.

Papers may focus on any aspect of Michigan railroad history with presenters giving a 30-to-50 minute presentation about their topic.

The presentation should be content oriented rather than photography oriented. Presentation proposals are being accepted through March 1, 2022.

Those interested in presenting should submit a suggested title, a brief description of the topic to be covered in the paper, and brief background information on the author(s) to MRHC16.2021@gmail.com or by mail to MRHC, PO Box 16325, Lansing MI 48901.

A selection committee will review all submissions and select presentations to provide a well-rounded quality program.

The conference will be held at the United Methodist Church of Ludington. Although the conference is usually held every other year, the 2021 conference was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This will be the 16^th conference with the 15^th conference in Ann Arbor drawing more than 100 attendees.

Michigan Conference Set For Sept. 18

The Michigan Railroad History Conference will be held online on Sept. 18 from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

The conference is free but attendees must register. The link to registration is https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMvdemqqjIjGNA9Q8xoGNm9fGYfzquMaS1K

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Two presenters will be discussing Michigan railroad history during the conference.

Paul Trap will describe where Michigan’s earliest railroads were located, who built them and for what purposes. He will illustrate his presentation with numerous maps and illustrations.

Mark Worrall will explore logging railroads, high speed interurbans, Class 1 lines, and short lines.

The conference is being held in an abbreviated online format this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Plans are being made to resume the traditional all day format next year on Sept. 17 in Ludington.

Michigan Rail History Conference Delayed Until 2022

The annual Michigan Railroad History Conference has been postponed until Fall 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The event, which would have been its 16^th, will be held in Ludington, Michigan.

Organizers of the event said they elected to cancel the 2021 conference out of a fear that COVID-19 will still be a concern this September. 

The 2021 conference also was slated to be held in Ludington.

In lieu of a live conference, the conference organizers might hold a limited virtual event in Fall 2021 on a date to be determined.

Michigan Rail History Conference Set for 2021

Although it was canceled this year the annual Michigan Railroad History Conference has announced plans to meet on Sept. 18, 2021, in Ludington, Michigan.

An announcement said all plans are tentative, but organizers are optimistic the 16^th conference will be able to be held as scheduled.

The conference is set to be held at the Ludington Methodist Church.

A call for presenters will go out in early January and be accepted through Feb. 10.

Registration information will be available in March.

Lunch will be provided to conference attendees but may be limited by health and safety protocols.

Other events being planned are an early evening reception and a tour of the Great Lakes boat the Badger.

On Friday, Sept, 17, a bus fieldtrip is being planned focusing on Ludington railroad sites including those of the Pere Marquette, Epworth League Railway and the Ludington & Northern Railway. 

A notebook with information about the railroads and sites will be provided to those making the tour.

Michigan History Conference to be in Ann Arbor

The 15^th Michigan Railroad History Conference will be held on Sept. 20-22 in Ann Arbor at Washtenaw Community College.

The registration fee is $65 if paid before Sept. 1 and $75 after that date.

Headlining the conference on Sept. 21 will be featured speaker Kevin Keefe, former editor of Trains magazine and the author of the Mileposts column published on the Classic Trains website.

Keefe’s presentation is titled: How the Michigan Central got to Chicago and Personal and Professional Reflections on a Life with Trains.

Other presenters and their programs include: Mark Hildebrandt, Electric Trolleys of Washtenaw County; Nick Korstange, Wood, Water and Wheels–Logging by Rail and Water; Jefferson Seaver,  A Peculiar Lumber Tramway; E. Ray Lichty, History and Sale of the Pere Marquette/C&O/CSX Carferry Services; Ford Cotton, Rail Service Through Ewen from the DSS&A to the Soo Line and into History; Rahn Stokes, Jackson Yard: Viewpoint of the Second Shift Yardmaster in the Early Seventies; and Dean Pyers, Train Robberies in Michigan.

There will be two field trips, both of which have additional charges.

On Sept. 20 there will be a tour of railroad operations at Greenfield Village and the Michigan Central Depot in Detroit that is limited to 25 people.

It will begin at The Henry Ford where the curator of transportation will discuss the role of railroad history at Greenfield Village.

There will be a walk through the DT&M roundhouse moved from Marshall, Michigan, where an active shop performs collection maintenance and restoration.

Additional structures that tour attendees will see include the coaling tower, water tower, manually-operated turntable and ash dump.

Lunch will be at the Cork and Gabel Restaurant in Detroit (included in the field trip fee of $75) where the construction manager for the Michigan Central Station project will describe plans for rehabilitation of Michigan Central Station.

The depot is now owned by Ford Motor Company and is the focus of its facilities devoted to development of autonomous vehicles.

There will be a brief walk through parts of the station with the points to be seen dependent on construction work underway.

On Sunday, another field trip will be held to view the remains of the Jackson-Ann Arbor electric railways.

Two companies (Hawks–Angus and Boland–Foote syndicates) competed to provide interurban service between Ann Arbor and Jackson

Their tracks were never more than three miles apart and crossed each other in five places.

This tour, led by Norm Krentel and Doug Johnson, will follow one line from Ann Arbor to Jackson and the other back to Ann Arbor.

There will be a stop at the Lost Railway Museum in Grass Lake.

The fee for this bus tour is $30 and it will depart from the Washtenaw Community College parking lot at 8:30 a.m.

For more information visit www.michiganrailroadhistory.org or contact mrhc2019@gmail.com.

Sanders Presents at Michigan Conference

Akron Railroad Club President Craig Sanders gave a presentation at the 14th Michigan Railroad History Conference titled Michigan’s Bootstrap Campaign: Passenger Rail Development in the Amtrak Era.

The conference was held on Sept. 23 at the Maas Conference Center of Hope College in Holland, Michigan.

Sanders described how the now-named Michigan Department of Transportation sought to improve rail passenger in the state following the inauguration of Amtrak on May 1, 1971.

Michigan’s intercity rail service in the early Amtrak years was limited to two daily roundtrips between Chicago and Detroit.

Since then service in the state has expanded to three routes linking Chicago with Detroit, Grand Rapids and Port Huron. The Detroit corridor also reaches north to suburban Pontiac.

The state has purchased much of the Chicago-Detroit corridor within Michigan, buying from Norfolk Southern 135 miles between Kalamazoo and Dearborn, and landing $511 million in federal funding to upgrade the line for higher speed service.

The state and communities served by Amtrak have also invested in station rehabilitation and many cities not served by Amtrak are linked to it by connecting bus service.

Despite these successes, the state has also had some misses. It stopped funding an Ann Arbor-Detroit commuter operation after ridership fell substantially, and a Detroit-New York train funded in part with the state of New York ended in 1979, in part due to lower ridership between Detroit and Buffalo, New York.

Several proposals to establish service between Detroit and Grand Rapids have failed to come to fruition.

The Michigan Railroad History Conference began 30 years ago at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn as an educational outreach program of the Bluewater Michigan chapter of the National Railway Historical Society.

The conference features a full day of presentations on Michigan’s railroad history and is rotated among various cities in the state.