Overview

With 145 color photographs and maps, Northbound Lights: Tracks Across Michigan and Wisconsin presents a visual history of contemporary changes to the railroad networks across these two states in the Great Lakes region. Michigan-born photojournalist, D. C. Jesse Burkhardt, carries readers on a journey that chronicles rail operations in Wisconsin and Michigan. The primary focus extends from the 1970s to 2022. Northbound Lights explores the demise of several historic railroads and spotlights shortline and regional railroads that have moved in to handle operations on routes in danger of being lost. In recent decades, dramatic alterations in the region's transportation maps have taken place as companies including Soo Line, Milwaukee Road, Chicago & NorthWestern, Green Bay & Western, Detroit & Mackinac, Penn Central, and others struggled to survive. Numerous rail lines were abandoned or taken over by expanding shortlines such as Huron & Eastern and Escanaba & Lake Superior, or by regional railroads exemplified by Great Lakes Central and Wisconsin Central. Other railroads and key routes were swallowed up by large carriers including Union Pacific, Canadian Pacific, Canadian National, CSX, and Norfolk Southern.

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9781634994613

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Photojournalist D. C. Jesse Burkhardt, author of Northbound Lights: Tracks Across Michigan and Wisconsin, was born in Jackson, Michigan, in 1953. A New York Central mainline cut through the fields less than a mile from his boyhood home. He graduated from Jackson Community College in his hometown in 1973, moved to Oregon in 1975, and later graduated from the University of Oregon. Burkhardt served as an editor with four community newspapers in the Pacific Northwest in a career spanning twenty-three years and ""semi-retired"" in 2017. Currently, he works part-time transporting train crews for BNSF in Washington. He has published several books on railroad history, including Traces of the Ann Arbor Railroad for America Through Time in 2021 and Backwoods Railroads: Branchlines & Shortlines of Western Oregon for Washington State University Press in 2022.

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