Michigan Star Clipper Dinner Train

The Michigan Star Clipper Dinner Train was a dinner train that operated for 24 years out of Walled Lake, MI, with trips heading from West Bloomfield, Michigan to Wixom, Michigan, where it connects to the CSX mainline and then back to West Bloomfield, MI. On December 31, 2008 the operators of the dinner train announced that they would be shutting down the route due to poor ridership and increased costs in fuel and other various expenses.

The Michigan Star Clipper dinner train operated for several years out of Walled Lake on approximately 8.07 miles of the Michigan Air-Line Railway rail line. It was the brain child of one of the legendary short line and regional railroad operators in the United States, Mr. Jack Haley. The Star Clipper first operated out of Osage, Iowa in 1984. In 1985 Mr. Haley first teamed up with the KLS&C Railway in Paw Paw, Michigan. Mark Campbell, Kevin McKinney, and Jerry Pilcher, owners, who brought the train to Michigan, first to Paw Paw in 1985 and then to Walled Lake in 1986, where it has been ever since. The Iowa operations were discontinued in December 1987 with Mr. Haley’s decision to sell the railroad to an up-and-coming freight railroad conglomerate. The Star Clipper made a brief appearance in the Fort Worth, Texas area, running two seasons, 1999 and 2000. In 2006 the Star Clipper Dinner Train was sold to Railmark Holdings who increased and expanded both its programming and advertising in order to meet an ever changing and diverse ridership demographic in a world of internet communications. The trip started and finished from the historic Walled Lake CoeRail depot, in operation since 1887 on Pontiac Trail Rd. in Walled Lake, MI. The trip was on the Michigan Air-Line Railway which dead-ended into the Main line (railway) owned by CSX. The Locomotive for the Michigan Star Clipper is a General Motors EMD F7 1,500-horsepower engine, built in 1950 for the Erie Lackawanna Railroad. The engine, rebuilt and computerized, is electric and operated the train so smoothly, at a top speed of 10 m.p.h., that even the drinks on the dining tables did not spill out.

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