SS City of Milwaukee
Great Lakes railroad car ferry
SS City of Milwaukee is a Great Lakes railroad car ferry that once plied Lake Michigan, often between Muskegon, Michigan and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She was built in 1931 for the Grand Trunk Milwaukee Car Ferry Company and is the only pre-1940s ship of this type to survive. She now serves as a museum ship, bed and breakfast, and event venue on the waterfront of Manistee Lake in Manistee, Michigan. She was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1990.
Description
The City of Milwaukee is a steel-hulled ship with a carrying capacity of 28–30 fully loaded rail cars. She was powered by four Scotch marine boilers, producing 185 psi (1,280 kPa) of pressure. The boilers were fueled by coal until 1947, when the COM was converted to No.5 (Bunker C) fuel oil, and was routinely topped off with 1,200 US gallons (4,500 L) of it. Two of the four boilers powered the two triple-expansion reciprocating steam engines rated at 1,350 horsepower (1,010 kW) each, for a combined horsepower of 2,700 hp (2,000 kW), while the third powered the generator and other steam-powered equipment on board, and the fourth would stay idle, switching off with the others. The two engines drove the twin cast-steel 4-bladed propellers; each at 12 ft (3.7 m) in diameter and over 10,000 pounds (4,500 kg). She has a relatively shallow draft, determined in part because ships carrying railroad vehicles needed to have a flat deck.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “SS City of Milwaukee” is great Lakes railroad car ferry. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through City, Milwaukee and Great, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1094141. VIAF identifies the subject as 175701187. The Library of Congress control number is no2011120877. Authority coordinates are 44.259, -86.315. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1931, 1990 and 1947.
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This entry incorporates text from “SS City of Milwaukee” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.