Eastern Railroad Discussion > Michigan railroads

Traveling to Michigan, plan to photograph the Lake states around Saginaw, any info on their operations? What others should I check out? Thank in advance.

DSMTM Wrote:
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> Traveling to Michigan, plan to photograph the Lake
> states around Saginaw, any info on their
> operations? What others should I check out?
> Thank in advance.


Besides the Lake State/Saginaw Bay Southern, the only other significant player left in the Saginaw area is Huron & Eastern, the original RailAmerica property that absorbed the Central Michigan a few years back and now belongs to the Genesee & Wyoming family. I'm not sure if the ex-C&O west out of Saginaw, which at some point becomes the Mid-Michigan, is active but it's somewhat academic since that's also an RA/Genesee & Wyoming line.

It has been a few years since I have been up there, but in times past, the CMGN/HESR pretty reliably ran a Bay City-Durand road freight southbound in the morning that arrived in Durand around lunchtime Monday through Saturday. It was pretty chaseable through Zilwaukee and Saginaw, which is where I got the most pictures of it. On other occasions I got some good tips about where Huron & Eastern sugar-beet trains were moving, but this would not be the time of year for those.

As for what the Lake State does, it used to be that they ran a day crew out of Grayling that went south MoWeFr and north TuTh, while the Alpena side ran at night with crews originating at Alpena and around Pinconning and swapping trains near Tawas City. I have not heard about that changing, but it may have; nor do I know if the SBS road train from Saginaw down to the CSX interchange at Flint still runs at night, which it used to do. If that has become a daytime job, and Lake State has painted up more of its EMD power, I could see myself heading up there sometime. And if they have continued the CSX operating pattern, there should be a daytime local up to Midland and back to switch Dow Chemical.

Overall, the Saginaw area is pretty dead railroad-wise these days, and since I no longer have a grandmother-in-law living up that way, I don't get there on an incidental basis much any more. But nobody else answered right away, so I figured I'd offer what I could.

P.S. One thing I can say with virtual certainty is that the Alcos on the LSRC are all gone now.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/16/14 14:43 by toledopatch.