Bangor's depot and the daily train to Chicago

You can still catch a train in Bangor. That sentence does most of the work, because almost no town this size in southwest Michigan can say it. The brick depot downtown is a real stop on Amtrak’s Pere Marquette line — one train a day each way, sliding through between Grand Rapids and Chicago, with Holland and St. Joseph-Benton Harbor the only other Michigan stops along the way.

The building dates to 1926, put up by the Pere Marquette Railroad to replace a wooden station that had outgrown its usefulness. Then it nearly died the slow death these depots usually die. Passenger service dried up, the doors closed, and the place sat empty for the better part of thirty years — long enough to land on a national list of most-endangered stations. The city bought it back in 2004 and reopened it the next year, restored, with the trains still calling.

From the platform here you can be in downtown Chicago in roughly four hours — the run from Grand Rapids covers about 176 miles — without ever touching a steering wheel, a parking ramp, or the Borman Expressway at rush hour. For a town of a few thousand, that is a strange and genuine luxury, the kind of thing a city ten times the size would kill for.

Railroad people are fond of the station’s Amtrak code, BAM, which sounds like a punchline and reads like one on a schedule board. Bangor, for its part, leans into the orchard country pressing in on all sides and throws an apple festival every October — so the same depot that points one direction toward Chicago sits in the middle of some of the best apple ground in the state.