Pere Marquette Railroad
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Template:Railroad The Pere Marquette Railroad (AAR reporting mark: PM) was a railroad that operated in the Great Lakes region of the United States. The railroad had trackage in the states of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and the Canadian province of Ontario. Its primary connections included Buffalo, New York and Chicago, Illinois.
It was incorporated on January 1, 1900 as the Pere Marquette Railroad Company from the merger of several Michigan railroads, the most prominent being:
- Flint and Pere Marquette Railway Company
- Detriot, Lansing and Northern Railroad
- Chicago and West Michigan Railroad
The company was reincorporated on March 12, 1917 as the Pere Marquette Railway.
In the 1920s, the Pere Marquette came under the control of Cleveland financiers Oris and Mantis Van Sweringen who also controlled the Nickel Plate, Erie and Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O) railroads and planned to merge the four railroads. The ICC did not approve the merger and the Van Sweringen brothers sold their interest in the Pere Marquette to the C&O, with which it formally merged on June 6, 1947.
In the 1990s, Amtrak named their passenger rail service between Grand Rapids, Michigan and Chicago the "Pere Marquette".
Car ferries
The Pere Marquette also operated a number of rail car ferries on the Detroit and St. Claire Rivers and on Lake Erie and Lake Michigan. Prior to the construction of the Mackinac Bridge, the PM's fleet of car ferries, which operated on Lake Michigan from Ludington, Michigan to Milwaukee, Kewaunee, and Manitowoc, Wisconsin, were an important transportation link reducing the time required to travel around the southern tip of Lake Michigan.
References
- Pere Marquette Historical Society (http://www.pmhistsoc.org/)