Saginaw Valley

Company History: The SGVY ran from Buena Vista to Denmark Junction, Michigan. The locomotive fleet consisted of an SW1200 and an SW9. RailAmerica merged the line into sister railroad Huron & Eastern in 2004. All but 2 miles of the line was abandoned not long after that.

Successor/Parent History: The Huron & Eastern began service in 1986 on a line from Kinde to Croswell, Michigan that they purchased from CSX. Two years later, they bought the adjoining route from Saginaw to Bad Axe, also from CSX (these were former Pere Marquette routes.) At that point, the HESR was 141 miles long. Three years later, in 1991 they took over as designated operator of 48 miles of former New York Central trackage that had been operated by Tuscola & Saginaw Bay.

For more than a decade, the HESR was powered by a half dozen geeps (one 7 and five 9’s.) These units were painted in something very similar to Pere Marquette’s passenger paint scheme. Around 1999, they began to acquire variations of EMD’s GP38 model to assist with the growing traffic. Each of the locomotives has a name in addition to a road number: County of Huron, County of Sanilac, City of Bad Axe, County of Tuscola, County of Saginaw, and so on.

In March of 1992, Huron & Eastern became the first railroad in the RailAmerica family of shortlines (Saginaw Valley Railway was acquired the same month.) In 2004, the Saginaw Valley and the Central Michigan Railway were merged into Huron & Eastern bringing the HESR mileage up to 384 making it a bit longer than Central Vermont in relative size. HESR joined the Genesee & Wyoming family of shortlines, along with the rest of the RailAmerica group, in 2012. HESR moves around 650 cars in a typical week.

Brief History: The U.S. is a country of 50 states covering a vast swath of North America, with Alaska in the northwest and Hawaii extending the nation’s presence into the Pacific Ocean. Major Atlantic Coast cities are New York, a global finance and culture center, and capital Washington, DC. Midwestern metropolis Chicago is known for influential architecture and on the west coast, Los Angeles' Hollywood is famed for filmmaking.