An old but true story:
My brother-in-law Tom and I were up in the Munising area in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan some 35 years ago and went out to Munising Junction to try and catch the Soo switch job we had heard was going to be there that afternoon. Munising Junction is where the LS&I’s isolated Munising branch interchanged with the Soo, the LS&I having abandoned its own line between Marquette and there years before. (The LS&I line was sold to the Soo Line later on, and it is all CN there now.)
3 days earlier I had bought a brand new 4WD Ford Bronco II SUV. It had rained for the last 5 days straight. We figured we could get to the junction thru the mud with this fancy new 4WD but after a hundred yards or so it sank deep into the muck and we just dug it in deeper and deeper by spinning the tires. We got in so deep that we could not open the doors and had to climb out the windows.
Of course, it started to rain again, and there was no way to close the windows after we climbed out so my brand new truck was filling up with water. I climbed back in and got the one window closed to stem the tide but when we arrived back the interior was soaked.
We were a good 8 to 10 miles out of town and since this was the days before cell phones we started hoofing it to town. My brother-in-law’s brother Dan lived in Munising (and worked at the paper mill which provided most of the traffic for the Munising Branch) so we figured we would borrow some shovels to dig out the truck. 3 hours later we made to his house it just as Dan arrived home from work.
When we got to Dan’s house we were soaked to the skin, cold, wet and hungry. We ate a huge dinner, got some dry clothes then got in his pickup truck to go out and rescue my poor sunken Bronco. All the while Dan was laughing at his silly brother and I for what we did and that we drove 500 miles to watch trains. Some people just don’t get it.
After digging for a couple hours we were no closer to getting the truck out of the mud. It oozed back as fast as we could dig it out. We went back into town and bought a couple hundred feet of wire rope and some fittings and with Dan driving his truck and Tom and I pushing my truck we finally got my poor truck unstuck. It made a loud “plwapp” sound as the suction of the mud gave up. Thankfully both trucks had frame hooks. If that hadn’t worked I considered hiring the LS&I crew to come out and pull it out with the plant switcher. I kind of think they would have probably declined that but a couple cases of beer might have convinced them.
The holes were the tires were were knee-deep and my poor truck (with less than 700 miles on the odometer) was coated with mud in places Mr. Ford had never intended. We went to the local National Pride and $8 in quarters later (comparable to $30 or so in today’s quarters) most of it was gone. There was a ton of mud on the floor of the wash bay and I felt bad so we got a snow shovel and cleaned out the mud. There was still mud on (and in) the muffler and catalytic converter however and it stunk horribly as it burned off over the next couple of days. (Try burning a pile of dried mud sometime, you will catch my drift…).
We spent the next few days around Munising and SSM before heading over to Marquette and chasing the LS&I all over town. When we got back to Chicagoland I brought my truck to a restoration place who cleaned the interior as to avoid mildew issues later. I then went to the tire store and bought a set of decent M&S tires for the next trip.
Lessons learned:
1) 4WD just lets you get stuck further away from civilization.
2) Crap tires don’t help in mud.
3) If you get stuck, stop spinning the tires, that just digs a deeper hole.
The trip worked out well though. We got great shots of the RS-3 (1604) working the plant at Munising, and it’s mate (1608) sitting at Eagle Mills. We got a boatload of great shots at the dock in Marquette and at Eagle Mills, some Soo stuff, including a GP-30 and a peek in the roundhouse at Marquette . We listened to Alcos and GE’s working the dock job from the campground in Marquette a couple nights and climbed up the hill overlooking Lake Superior at Presque Isle Park. We took tons of pics of LS&I’s Alcos and first generation GE’s.
I love the U.P. and especially the LS&I but this turned out to be a bit more adventurous than we planned.
