Durand throws a festival for the railroad every May

In Durand, the town’s story and the railroad’s story are the same story. Two big lines — the Grand Trunk Western and the Ann Arbor — crossed here, and at its peak Durand worked one of the busiest railroad “diamonds” in Michigan, the spot where two sets of tracks cut across each other at grade. So many households kept a paycheck coming from the railroad that you couldn’t really separate the place from the trains running through it.

That’s what Railroad Days celebrates, and the festival was born from a single rescued railcar. In November 1975, an old Grand Trunk Western baggage car was hauled into Iron Horse Park to serve as the town’s first railroad-history museum. Setting that one car down on the grass was enough to spark the idea of an annual celebration, and Durand has held one ever since.

The festival lands on the weekend after Mother’s Day. The streets near the depot fill with a parade, food, music, and vendors — and with railfans, the people who plan whole weekends around photographing trains, who come because the diamond is still live. The freights haven’t stopped. You can be standing in the middle of the festival and feel the ground shift as a real train works through, which is more than most heritage festivals can offer.

Anchoring the whole thing is the depot itself: Durand Union Station, a turreted 1903 building grand enough that it’s been called the “Queen of the Rails,” the kind of station a much bigger city would have been proud of. Durand never grew into a big city. It just kept the trains, and once a year it throws them a party.