Pere Marquette Railroad Company - Michigan 1906

Beautifully engraved specimen certificate from Pere Marquette Railroad Company dated 1906. This historic document was printed by Western Bank Note Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of a steam engine train at a station. This item is over 100 years old.


Certificate Vignette

The Pere Marquette Railway (AAR reporting mark PM) was a railroad that operated in the Great Lakes region of the United States. The railroad had trackage in the states of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and the Canadian province of Ontario. Its primary connections included Buffalo, New York, Toledo, Ohio and Chicago, Illinois.

It was incorporated on January 1, 1900 as the Pere Marquette Railroad Company from the merger of several Michigan railroads, the most prominent being:

Flint and Pere Marquette Railway Detroit, Lansing and Northern Railroad Chicago and West Michigan Railroad The company was reincorporated on March 12, 1917 as the Pere Marquette Railway.

In the 1920s the Pere Marquette came under the control of Cleveland financiers Oris and Mantis Van Sweringen who also controlled the New York, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad, Erie Railroad and Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad and planned to merge the four railroads. The ICC did not approve the merger and the Van Sweringen brothers sold their interest in the Pere Marquette to the C&O;, with which it formally merged on June 6, 1947. The C&O; has since become part of CSX.

In 1984, Amtrak named their passenger rail service between Grand Rapids, Michigan and Chicago the Pere Marquette.

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About Specimens

Specimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".

Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates we made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company.

These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that grown in popularity over the past several years.