The Burr Oak farmer who put the railroad on three wheels

George Sheffield had a commuting problem. He lived in Burr Oak and worked about ten miles up the line in Three Rivers, and the trains didn’t run when he needed them. So in the late 1870s he built himself a small three-wheeled car that ran on the railroad tracks, powered by his own hands and feet, and rode it to work.

One night the contraption made him a minor hero. Riding home in the dark, he felt his little car bump over a broken rail — a break a locomotive would have hit at full speed. He flagged down the oncoming train in time to stop a wreck. The railroad, instead of fining him for trespassing on the rails, asked him to build more of these things.

He patented the design on March 11, 1879 — U.S. Patent No. 213,254, an “improvement in railway hand-cars” — and went into business with a Three Rivers man named Warren Willits as the ”& Co.” The thing he’d built to dodge a bad train schedule turned into the velocipede, then a whole catalog of track inspection and maintenance cars, made by the thousand in a Three Rivers factory and shipped across America and Europe. Within a few years the operation eventually folded into Fairbanks-Morse.

For decades after, a section gang anywhere in the country could be seen pumping down the line on a hand car that traced straight back to a Burr Oak man who just wanted to get to work on time.