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Satellite, based on the topo map below.)
Durand Union Station-Michigan Railroad History Museum
posted two photos with the comment:
Today’s featured depot is the Grand Trunk Depot in Perrinton 🚂
Perrinton, located in Gratiot County, was settled around 1886 and quickly grew into a village by 1891.
The town sat about ten miles west of Ashley on the Grand Trunk Western’s Ashley-to-Muskegon line.
Perrinton was home to at least two different Grand Trunk depots over the years. The first photo shows an earlier version of the station. Unfortunately, neither depot appears to remain standing today.
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Sources:
📸 Image 2 is from Durand Union Station's Margaret Zdunic Archives.
Craig Harris: The bottom photo is what it looked like at the end except it was painted in the brown and buff colors. The last time I was there many years ago it was not there. It either had been moved or torn down. I believe the two photos show the same building, the upper one showing the building remodeled into the lower view.
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I could not find a grain elevator in the area. But I did find covered hopper cars in storage on a siding in town.
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| 1965/66 Perrinton Quad @ 24,000 |
My motivation for noting this town is the drovers caboose in the top photo above.
The drovers’ caboose was a unique part of American railroading tied to the shipment of livestock such as cattle and sheep. In 1906 Congress passed a law that required the feeding and watering of livestock on trains every 28 hours. Since most such shipment took longer than that, the railroads had to carry drovers, men who handled the livestock, along with those trains to comply with the law.
The drovers’ caboose was much longer than a typical caboose, because it served not only the train crew, but also the drovers assigned to watch after the livestock in shipment from the ranch to the processing plants. These cabooses had two separate sections. The rear section was the standard railroad crew portion with cooking and sleeping accommodations as well as the cupola or bay window. The front section was reserved for the livestock drovers.
These cabooses appeared usually in stock trains where the entire train was made up of livestock cars. They were also used on occasion when large shipments of livestock were mixed in with other freight. The drovers’ cabooses were always kept on the rear of the train since the cars’ primary purpose was still to serve as quarters for the conductor and brakemen and only secondarily as quarters for the drovers. – Martin E. Hansen
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