SS Spartan - The Badger's Forgotten Sister

Tied up in Ludington since being taken out of service in 1979 is the SS Spartan. The sister ship to the world famous steam ship Badger, they was built for the Chesapeake and Ohio railroad in 1952. These twin "train ferries" were designed to carry railroad cars across Lake Michigan to several ports in Wisconsin. During construction, many cities on both sides of Lake Michigan lobbied for their names to go on the new ships, as was the tradition with previous Pere Marquette car ferries (i.e. City of Midland 41). C&O decided that fewer feelings would be hurt if the twin ferries were named Spartan and Badger, after the mascots of Michigan State University (then Michigan State College) and the University of Wisconsin. In the mid-1970s, the C&O railway decided that the car ferries were no longer profitable to operate and petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission to allow them to abandon the ferry routes. There were only three ferries left in service by this point: the City of Midland 41 (built in 1940), the Badger, and the Spartan. In 1978, C&O was granted permission to systematically eliminate its ferry routes. There was no longer a need for three ferries, and in September 1979 the Spartan was laid up in Ludington. In spring 1980 she was steamed up again to run as part of a lease agreement with the Ann Arbor Railroad, then operated by the Michigan Interstate Railway, out of Frankfort, Michigan, but was abandoned after it was discovered Frankfort harbor was too shallow for the Spartan. The ship was tied up at Ludington's number 3-1⁄2 slip for many years. She has since been moved to number 2-1⁄2 slip. I shot this footage in April of 2025 with my DJI Flip drone. The information in this description and in the video come from Wikipedia as well as several books that I own about Ludington's carferries, including the 1965 Pictorial History of the C&O Train and Auto Ferries.