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Sorry that I don't have a photo but as the wife and I were going by the Amtrak depot this afternoon, we spotted two private passenger cars at the south end of the station platform. There were a couple of crew members in fancy duds hanging out on the car platform. The Wolverine was just leaving the s...

If you're willing to drink a couple of glasses of water mixed with fly ash, then I'll take your word for it that it's safe.

If the selling point for the pro-Badger crowd is that "we don't pollute as much as Chicago does!", you're not going to win over many converts. The Badger owners need to quit dragging their feet and either find a way to dispose of the fly ash that doesn't involve dumping it into Lake Michigan or find...

Didn't a warehouse get built across the old ROW in "downtown" Ottawa Lake?

"I assume they do not have as many idiot environmentalists that try to destroy every project as they do here...." That's a pretty baseless comment since most environmentalists I know have been supportive of more investment in rail projects because of the potential environmental benefits of shifting ...

Don't know what the usual traffic pattern is but the PM managed to clear Porter without having to wait for any freight traffic to clear when we went EB Tuesday and WB on Friday. When I've previously ridden the PM, we've always had to wait at Porter.

The 8th Street crossing doesn't have gates so if the train actually cleared the crossing, all the traffic that's stuck waiting for the train to unload could proceed across as could passengers wanting to cross over to the adjacent lot, which was overfull again. We parked in Long John Silver's because...

Someone forgot to tell the train that fact. It has blocked that crossing every time I've ridden the PM back from Chicago.

Rode the Pere Marquette back from Chicago yesterday. A couple questions: - What's the top speed on the line from Porter to GR? - We disembarked at Holland and they had all the Holland-bound passengers get into the last coach. When we arrived in Holland, I thought - "Ah ha! Amtrak has finally figured...

Any official announcements from Amtrak about these upgrades? We rode the Lincoln back from St. Louis and you could really tell when the 110 MPH section kicked in. We were blowing past traffic on the adjoining interstate. Pretty cool to experience it. I also saw stacks of concrete ties and crossing s...

"Roads like Lake State and LS&I can get away with using cars from the 30s and 40s because they never leave the home road."

Are there really cars that old rolling out there?

I've posted this link before - Troy Strane is with INER and has a lot of great photos and some video of operations on the INER. There's a lot of photos of the facilities and upgrades they've put into the line over the past couple of years. Good stuff.

My father-in-law has told me stories of working summers delivering coal that was delivered by rail car to a trestle somewhere in the Grand Rapids area. He said they usually had 24 - 48 hours to get the car unloaded and get the coal loaded into a truck to homeowners who had coal-fired home heating sy...

How much track maintenance did the MAL get? I don't remember any stories of cars on the ground but the ballast looks pretty sparse in spots.

I take it that this guy turned left at the West Road crossing and headed northwest. He almost made it to Beck Road from the looks of it.

As I previously stated, I just don't think there was much potential seen for the line. It sounds like APT was a solid customer. I know that they were one reason that the grant funding for the rail-trail was postponed a year. But beyond that, it sounds like most of the potential customer base was spe...

That actually happened. I got stuck for at least 30 minutes on M-5 because the crossing got activated and the gates effectively blocked anyone from getting around it. The Oakland County Sheriff's deputies came out and broke off the gates. That's why they are lying beside the crossing. It made for a ...

That's correct. The Commerce/Walled Lake/Wixom segment grant was only for ROW acquisition. The communities need to find funding for the development of the trail. West Bloomfield is supposed to be developing the trail segment east of Haggerty. I haven't seen any recent updates on that.

A provision in the "fiscal cliff" legislation extended a tax credit that's helped finance track work on the nation's railroads. This article mentions the provision and this article discusses the tax credit. It will be interesting to see how many short lines take advantage of these tax credits to inv...

One of the Menards is going to Livonia. The property abuts the CSX tracks but no mention so far of whether they would utilize rail service.

Livonia rezoning request

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