MSC dinner train end

John Barnhill Dec 31, 2008

  1. John Barnhill

    John Barnhill TrainBoard Member

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    Dinner train to make last run

    Owner plans to sell 9-mile rail line, transfer ownership to communities for possible use in trail network.

    Jennifer Chambers / The Detroit News

    WALLED LAKE -- After 24 years, the Michigan Star Clipper dinner train is making its last passenger run on New Year's Eve before it embarks on plans to relocate to the East Coast in 2009.
    Plans are also under way to sell the nine-mile-long rail line and eventually transfer the land to local communities, possibly for use in a trail network.
    The Monday announcement by parent company Railmark Holdings Inc. has nothing to do with the dinner train's derailment Friday because of icy roads and tracks, President and CEO B. Allen Brown said.
    The former Grand Trunk Western Railway line, which starts in Wixom and runs east through Walled Lake and Commerce Township and ends in West Bloomfield, is being sold as part of a deal orchestrated by Brown in which the land will eventually be transferred to the communities it served for public use.
    Brown said the state approached him about buying the line years ago, and he has since been working with the four communities on a transfer. Brown would not say who he is selling the land to, although he implied that state and federal grants were to be part of the deal.
    He also refused to disclose his selling price.
    "We are selling, that is for sure," Brown said Monday. "It's getting close."
    The battered economy has made it easier for Brown to move forward with the plans, which include launching a new interactive type of entertainment train in Traverse City, a stronger tourism market than Metro Detroit, he says.
    The coach buses loaded with tourists, the weeks of booked holiday parties and the general tourism market in southeast Michigan have nearly evaporated.
    Brown said all of the parties in the deal had not completed a legal agreement as of Monday, but he expected the deal to be near completion in January.
    Brown said he is working with the Trust for Public Land, a national land conservation group, and with West Bloomfield Parks and Recreation.
    A spokesman for the conservation group said he was unable to confirm details of the deal Monday, and phone lines at West Bloomfield government offices were down amid widespread power outages in Metro Detroit.
    Larry Falardeau, a planner for Oakland County, said West Bloomfield officials did obtain a state grant to purchase their section of the railway. Obtaining the entire nine miles is part of a bigger effort to provide a continuous trail network from Lake Huron to Lake Michigan, he said.
    "That's one the last key gaps in the Oakland County system. This is a larger regional and statewide effort. It could go from coast to coast, lake to lake. There is potential to go to St. Clair and Port Huron and back all the way across western Michigan," Falardeau said.
     

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