Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range Railway HO Scale Models

The Duluth, Missabe and Iron Range Railway traced its origins to two separate predecessor lines built to serve the iron ranges of northern Minnesota. The older of the two, the Duluth and Iron Range Rail Road, was organized in 1874 by financier Charlemagne Tower with the purpose of moving iron ore from the Minnesota Iron Company's operations at Tower, Minnesota, down to the Lake Superior port at Two Harbors. The railroad carried its first ore shipment from the Soudan Mine on July 31, 1884, and was subsequently acquired by Illinois Steel Company in 1887, which in turn became part of the newly formed United States Steel Corporation in 1901. The other predecessor, the Duluth, Missabe and Northern Railway, came into existence in 1891 when the Merritt family, having discovered rich iron deposits near Mountain Iron on the Mesabi Range, incorporated a line to haul that ore to Superior, Wisconsin, and later to Duluth. Financial difficulties following aggressive expansion brought the DM&N under the control of John D. Rockefeller in 1894, and he sold it to U.S. Steel in 1901 as well. For nearly four decades the two railroads operated as separate entities under common corporate ownership before being united through a series of mergers beginning in 1937, when the Duluth, Missabe and Northern combined with the Spirit Lake Transfer Railway, followed in 1938 by the formal addition of the Duluth and Iron Range and the Interstate Transfer Railway to create the Duluth, Missabe and Iron Range Railway. The newly consolidated railroad, informally known throughout the industry as the Missabe Road, quickly demonstrated its industrial importance as the United States prepared for and entered the Second World War. Ore tonnage climbed steeply through the early 1940s, surpassing 37 million long tons in 1941 and approaching 45 million long tons in 1942. To handle these extraordinary volumes, the railroad took delivery of eighteen Baldwin-built 2-8-8-4 Yellowstone locomotives, the first eight arriving in spring 1941 and ten more following in 1943 after the War Production Board authorized the order. These massive articulated steam locomotives became closely associated with the Missabe Road's identity. Dieselization began modestly in 1953 with the arrival of EMD SW9 switchers, and EMD SD9 road switchers followed in subsequent years. Revenue steam operations continued until 1962, making the DM&IR among the later holdouts for steam power in North American heavy-haul service. Passenger operations, never the railroad's primary business, ended on the Missabe division in 1957 and ceased entirely across the system by 1961. The postwar decades brought new challenges as easily processed natural iron ore grew scarcer on the Minnesota ranges, but a pivotal moment came on November 3, 1963, when Minnesota voters approved the Taconite Amendment to the state constitution, which placed limits on the taxation of the taconite industry for twenty-five years. This measure encouraged large-scale investment in taconite pellet production, and the DM&IR found a new primary commodity to replace the diminishing flows of natural ore. The transition became tangible on April 8, 1966, when the ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald loaded the first shipment of taconite pellets from the Eveleth Taconite Company at the Duluth docks, inaugurating the taconite era on the Missabe Road. The railroad's Two Harbors ore docks, which had briefly closed in 1963, were reopened by 1966 to accommodate this renewed traffic. In 1988, U.S. Steel, operating at that time under the name USX, reorganized its transportation holdings into a subsidiary called Transtar, which grouped the DM&IR together with other ore-hauling and shipping assets. Majority control of Transtar passed to the Blackstone Group in a transaction that left U.S. Steel with a minority stake. By 2001 the DM&IR and associated properties were spun off into a new entity called Great Lakes Transportation, wholly owned by Blackstone, severing a connection to U.S. Steel that had lasted more than a century. Canadian National Railway reached an agreement in late 2003 to purchase Great Lakes Transportation and completed that acquisition on May 10, 2004, bringing the Missabe Road into one of North America's largest rail networks. The DM&IR continued to operate under its own identity and reporting mark for several more years before Canadian National merged it into Wisconsin Central Ltd. in December 2011, ending the independent corporate existence of one of the most tonnage-intensive railroads ever to operate in the United States.