Inventor Thomas Edison is alive along the rail corridor in which he prospered as a cantankerous and inquisitive 19th Century youth.
The Edison Rail Station, home to the Michigan Transit Museum, marked its 140th anniversary last year, and the affection for Edison remains surprisingly strong.
The station hasn’t seen a passenger train stop along the tracks here since the mid-1950s, but it remains an important stop in Midwest rail history. Some 12 to 14 freight trains, carrying auto parts, car frames and assembled vehicles, whiz by the stop every day on the live tracks now run by Canadian National, parent corporation of Grand Trunk.
“The station was built in 1859 by the Grand Trunk as part of a system of stations from Montreal to Detroit. Then they had connections on to Chicago on the Michigan Central Railroad,” said transit museum club President Tim Backhurst.
The Edison Rail Station was built in English cottage style by an English crew as part of Grand Trunk’s 19th Century East-to-Midwest rail line that eventually took passengers, mail and freight from Montreal to Toronto to Port Huron and Detroit and eventually to Chicago.
As a youngster, Edison, born in Ohio but reared in the Port Huron area, would come to ride these rails during the Civil War years and later.
“Edison was living up in Port Huron quite close to the Port Huron train station, which is now under the Blue Water Bridge (between the U.S. and Canada there). He earned money by selling candy and fruit on the train,” Backhurst said.
“He also produced a little newspaper that he distributed. He also sold the Detroit daily newspapers that he would sell on the return trip out of Detroit.
“One day he picked up the child of the station master here in Mt. Clemens who was playing on the tracks. He could see some freight cars that had been cut loose and began rolling toward the child.
“He saved the child’s life and it led to the station agent offering to teach him the basics of telegraphy, which was used as a means of controlling trains between Port Huron and Detroit.”
Learning Morse Code would pay off for Edison at both ends of his life. It helped him earn his keep on the Grand Trunk line as a youngster as well as later in life; after he became deaf, fellow inventors like Charles Steinmetz and Harvey Firestone would communicate with him by tapping Morse Code on his knee.
Mt. Clemens native Norman Griffith, 76, popped into the retired rail station for the first time in years and he recalled when Mickey Rooney rode the “MGM Special” local train run from Detroit to Port Huron to promote the film.
“I was 16 years old in 1940. We were over on the other side of the tracks, Mickey Rooney was standing there in the back end of the caboose. I love Mickey Rooney from way, way back, and I try to see every doggone thing he’s ever done,” recalled Griffith, a retired technical illustrator for the former Chrysler Corp.
“My dad worked at Detroit Edison in Detroit in the display department. Of course, he loved Thomas Edison very much because he loved to tinker (with science) . . . but nothing like Thomas Edison. My dad took a 16-mm film of Mickey Rooney’s visit to the train station and, you know, now that I think about it, I’ve probably still got that film somewhere in my basement.”
