The S.S. City of Milwaukee, a railroad ferry that swallowed whole trains

Before there were bridges or interstates, the fastest way to move a freight train across Lake Michigan was to drive it onto a boat. The S.S. City of Milwaukee, tied up today on Manistee Lake, is the last ship of its kind still afloat — a steel railroad car ferry built in 1931 that backed whole loaded boxcars onto rails laid across her deck, then carried them across open water to the other side.

She was built by the Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company in Wisconsin for the Grand Trunk railroad and ran for half a century, mostly hauling freight cars between Michigan and Milwaukee. When the Grand Trunk’s last ferries were retired she went to the Ann Arbor Railroad and kept working until 1982. Crossing Lake Michigan in a December gale, low to the water with a deck full of iron, was not gentle work — these ships ran in weather that closed other traffic, and a few of her sister ferries didn’t come home.

What makes her rare is that she’s old. Plenty of car ferries sailed the lakes, but she’s the only one left from before 1940, which earned her the rank of National Historic Landmark in 1990. A nonprofit, the Society for the Preservation of the S.S. City of Milwaukee, keeps her up.

You can go aboard. From spring into early fall the ship runs tours and even rents out cabins overnight, so you can sleep in a working crew bunk on a landmark. Around Halloween she turns into a “Ghost Ship,” with the dark engine room and long passageways doing most of the scaring for free. Climb down to the car deck and you can still see the rails — wide enough for a train, on a boat.