06/12/2026
The Coloma train depot was torn down in 1976—50 years ago! The following recollections are excerpted from a piece written by former Coloma resident Charles Chauncey Wells entitled “Our Town’s Railroad Station, Where Did It Go?”
“In Coloma, the Chicago & West Michigan built the first depot about 1881. It became such an eyesore that when it caught fire in 1910, my great uncle Will Ball, the town banker, told the firemen, “Now, boys, I wouldn’t work too hard putting that out.” They didn’t. Coloma then had two box cars for a depot until a new one was built a year later and called a “credit to the town and the railroad” when it opened.
I became friends with Agent Willard Baker and, beginning the age of 8 in 1952, I hung out at the station nearly every day. He had first worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad in Northern Ohio and then moved to Michigan and joined the Pere Marquette, which became the Chesapeake & Ohio in about 1946. He would let me listen in on conversations between stations along the line and the chief dispatcher in Grand Rapids.
We received Western Union telegrams and Baker would sit at the slot in the bay window and write down the messages from the Morse code clicks. The previous station agent, William H. O'Brien Sr., took the message his son Bill was killed in North Africa during World War II at the same desk. The agent either delivered the messages or called for the recipient to pick them up. At noon, all stations received the standard exact to-the-second Western Union time to set their clocks.
When a passenger or freight train passed, he would go outside with his red flag and inspect the train and then call the dispatcher and tell him: “Train #3 by Coloma at 9:46.” Once I arrived just in time to see him run out and flag down an approaching fast freight. The Watervliet agent had spotted a “hot box,” or overheated journal, and called him to alert the train so it could set it out before the axle burned out and caused a train wreck.
We had two passenger trains each way daily between Grand Rapids/Muskegon and Chicago-—two late at night that carried lots of mail and express, sleepers between Muskegon and Grand Rapids and Chicago, and reclining seat coaches. During the day, No. 3 to Chicago came through with club car and diner, baggage and mail cars, and reclining seat coaches at around 9:45 a.m. at about 30 miles an hour, never stopping. We had lost our passenger stop to Watervliet, two miles away, which was a flag stop.
Floyd Wallace, the taxi man, used to pick up a mail bag at the post office and hang it up in time for the streamliner to pick it up on the fly—while the postal clerk kicked off one or two Coloma-bound mail bags from Grand Rapids. If you posted a letter by 8:15 a.m., it would be put on the train to Chicago that morning. No. 8 with the same equipment came back from Chicago around 8:35 that night. Three scheduled freights and numerous extras passed each way and hot shots No 40 and 41 manifest freights between Chicago and Detroit roared through after midnight, arriving at their destinations before 7 a.m.
Once the passenger train did stop and that was for me. It stopped during a blizzard in December 1962, when I came home from Michigan State for the Christmas holidays and to work in the Coloma Post Office. The snow was so deep I had to walk from the station down the tracks to the main street which had been plowed. Trucks and cars marooned from I-94 were all over town. Knowing the dispatcher in Grand Rapids helped on that one.”
Thank you to Charles for providing insight into the daily operations of the Coloma depot. All images included have been donated by Charles over the years.
