Joel Dinda's photos with the keyword: tracks

Explored! #260 on Friday, September 21, 2007. Thanks! At the Sleeping Bear Lifesaving Station. The tracks made it simpler to get the boats from the boathouse to the water. That's Joan, of course. Another picture from our trip north in late February.

Sunfield's about four miles down the way from Mulliken (Michigan, in both cases). The two towns are about the same size, and both live mostly between the tracks (CSX, these days) and highway M-43. Historically both are grain elevator towns and provided services to local farmers. The biggest physical difference between the villages is that our town spills over to the north of the railroad, while in Sunfield the rails define the town's northern boundry. As this photo shows.

Taken in August of 1992 on a trip from Duluth to Mountain Iron and back. The excursion was to celebrate the centennial of the founding of Mountain Iron , and many of the passengers had Merritt family connections. We attended as members of the Missabe Railroad Historical Society . Mountain Iron threw a nice party. I'm glad I went.

We spent a couple days in Duluth, last week. This photo taken from the Vista Queen .

Best LARGE , methinks; shows off my fancy camera, anyway. Canadian National Railway's Cory Yard, just south of Billwood Highway near Dimondale and Potterville, Michigan. This location's on my route to work; it's an easy walk from my office. Cory's not an exciting yard, operationally; all the sorting is done at the GM Delta Assembly Plant's loading facility, which is a couple hundred yards north from where I took this photo. This yard's purpose is to break long trains into shorter segments for GM's purposes, then to reassemble the train after the the cars have been filled with small vans. I presume the yard's named after CN Vice President Mike Cory , who was running their Michigan operations when construction of this facility began.

A few days ago I shared a picture of the abandoned Lake Shore & Michigan Southern (New York Central) line behind my former residence at Waverly Park Apartments. This is the same right-of-way a couple miles away, cutting diagonally across Lansing; we're at the end of track, near what was then Logan Center but is now Logan Square. The structure on the left is part of a foundry complex; don't know what's still at the location. Dunno if the tracks have been pulled, either. At the time this photo was taken, these were Conrail tracks. Shot this with my Minolta Zoom 110 SLR in 1988 or 1989. Wouldn't have guessed it was a 110 pic if I hadn't seen the negatives; most of my 110 photos show far less detail than this.

The tracks are still here, but the trains no longer stop, and much of the elevator complex has been demolished. Mulliken was a farm town for about a century. There was a grocery store, a lumberyard, a hardware store. A church, a school, a barber, a library, a beauty shop, a couple bars, a restaurant that served breakfast. A gas station. A post office. And this grain elevator. The lumberyard was already gone when I moved here in 1991. This feed, grain, & seed operation closed two or three years after I took these photos. The hardware failed around 2000. The school's been gone for years, as have the hair cutters. Boyer's no longer serves gasoline, though John can still fix your pickup. The grocery's evolved into a party store, and Farmers Tavern's been a full-service restaurant since the 80s. In many ways, now, we've become a rather distant Lansing suburb. We aren't entirely commuters--a surprising number of my neighbors work as plumbers, and these days our biggest local business is a general contractor. But the farmers ship grain, and buy seed, at Sunfield , or Grand Ledge, or Woodbury. I miss 'em.

Rails, of course: The Pere Marquette mainline from Mulliken, Michigan. Long since part of the Chessie system, and now also in regular use by Canadian Pacific

The CSX (originally Pere Marquette) Michigan mainline at Mulliken, Michigan.

Took my camera along when I went to pick up the mail this morning. This is the view across the vacant lot next to our post office.

This was taken from Mulliken's Main Street, next to the Post Office, looking across the tracks. A perfect scene for a model railroad. Uploaded a differently processed version of this photo on 3/10/06. Still too grainy, but the colors are perhaps better.

Another view of the building--addition, I suppose--behind CCD Engineering in Mulliken, Michigan. I'm not sure what CCD builds, but the building's interior looks like a machine shop. When this was a hardware store , the back room was your typical hardware-store back room--full of miscellaneous odds and ends, accumulated over the course of decades of selling tools and parts to the community. Neat building, in its way....

The former PM mainline--now the CSX line between Chicago and Detroit--through Mulliken, Michigan. Shot from Railroad Street, looking west.

It's a beautiful day in downtown Mulliken, Michigan.

The backside of Mulliken's Main Street in the background, shot from Railroad Street. That's the CSX (formerly Pere Marquette) mainline running off toward the horizon. After a (necessary) break I'm starting to take photography seriously again. I can tell because I've started thinking of photos as technical problems, even with the fairly limiting camera that took this photo. (FWIW: That's a reaction to the light-colored stripe at the bottom of the sky....) And early on my framing turns weird for a while.