The track through Blissfield is one of the oldest in America

The rails that run through the middle of Blissfield are not just old — they are about as old as railroading in this part of the country gets. The line traces the route of the Erie and Kalamazoo, chartered in the 1830s and the first railroad to reach into Michigan Territory. It is reportedly the first railroad of any kind built west of the Allegheny Mountains, which is a strange and large thing to be true of a quiet farm town near the Ohio line.

In its earliest days the Erie and Kalamazoo barely resembled what we picture as a train. The first cars were pulled by horses along strap-iron rails — flat bars of metal spiked to wooden stringers — running between Toledo and Adrian, with Blissfield sitting on the line between them. Steam came soon after, but for a brief window Michigan’s pioneer railroad was, essentially, a horse and a wagon riding on iron.

Today a Class III short line, the Adrian and Blissfield Rail Road, works about twenty miles of this historic route between Adrian and Riga, hauling the grain that pours out of these fields. For years the same rails carried something gentler too — an excursion dinner train out of Blissfield, where you ate a slow meal while the country rolled past the windows.

It is easy to forget, watching a covered-hopper grain car squeal through a crossing, that the steel under it is laid where the very idea of a Michigan railroad began. The wagons and the strap iron are long gone, the timetable now belongs to soybeans and corn, but the line itself has simply never stopped being a railroad.