Boyne Valley RR's Last Run

[AARR]

Posted by Alex Huff on 11/28/2014, 10:12 pm, in reply to "Boyne City"

From an email from Art Single,
"I was the last General Manager of the Boyne Valley, running six weekends in Fall, 1981 with a borrowed GE 45-tonner and the two ex-D&SL/DRGW(Algoma Central) coaches which were by then painted MIGN green. For a couple of weekends, we borrowed an ex-GTW coach and also used one of the open flat cars. Ultimately, we took in enough to pay for the fuel and the insurance, but that was it."

The borrowed GE was freshly overhauled by GE and had been at Penn-Dixie Cement in Petoskey, it moved on to new owner Dundee Cement. It is a different unit than the one shown in the advertising newsletter shown earlier.

"..., the last runs were in October, 1981 and the rails were pulled in 1982. The gas station and oil dealer owner just down the street from the RR station (Mel Howard, I think was his name) was the trustee who closed the company as I recall."

Art remembers a third sister coach which was never used by the Boyne Valley. It may not have had seats. My dim recollection is that it was an all wood car, purchased for a boy scout troop. Parked by the office building, it was moved to Boyne Falls for interchange before the line was scrapped. Art doesn't know what happened to it.

Art remembers that when the office building was sold, the new owners "put all the contents of the RR safe out for garbage day. Apparently the RR never threw anything out. I scooped up some and called the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn. (They) were interested and sent up a truck, which they filled and took to the museum. Their interest was not so much in the RR as a RR, but rather as an intact story of lumbering in the early days of Michigan, since the Whites, who owned the BCG&A, were really the White Lumber Co and had the RR as a tool to harvest their wood."