Soo Line Railroad HO Scale Models

The Soo Line Railroad traces its origins to the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Sault Ste. Marie Railroad, a Canadian Pacific subsidiary whose nickname derived from the phonetic spelling of Sault Ste. Marie. The present corporate entity was actually incorporated in Minnesota on October 19, 1949, under the name Duluth, South Shore and Atlantic Railroad as part of a reorganization plan for the Duluth, South Shore and Atlantic Railway and its subsidiary the Mineral Range Railroad. On January 1, 1961, Canadian Pacific consolidated several of its American subsidiaries by merging the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Sault Ste. Marie Railroad and the Wisconsin Central Railway into this entity and renaming it the Soo Line Railroad. The resulting system carried the reporting mark SOO and was headquartered in Minneapolis, giving Canadian Pacific a coherent regional presence across the upper Midwest and Great Lakes territory. The railroad expanded significantly in the early 1980s. In June 1982 the Soo Line acquired control of the Minneapolis, Northfield and Southern Railway, a short line operating in the Twin Cities area. A far more consequential acquisition came on February 19, 1985, when the Soo Line purchased the property of the bankrupt Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, commonly known as the Milwaukee Road, assigning those assets to a newly created subsidiary called The Milwaukee Road, Inc. Both that subsidiary and the Minneapolis, Northfield and Southern were merged directly into the Soo Line Railroad effective January 1, 1986. This brought the Soo Line's network to include important former Milwaukee Road trackage connecting the Twin Cities to Chicago via Milwaukee, as well as additional routes through Wisconsin and the upper Midwest. To manage costs on lower-traffic lines, the Soo Line created the Lake States Transportation Division in February 1986, but after failing to achieve desired labor rule changes it sold that approximately 2,000-mile division to the newly formed Wisconsin Central Ltd. in 1987 for approximately 133 million dollars. Wisconsin Central itself was eventually absorbed into the Canadian National Railway in 2001. Canadian Pacific had long maintained a controlling interest in the Soo Line Corporation, the holding company incorporated in 1984 to oversee the railroad, and by 1990 CP had acquired full ownership of that entity. The Soo Line's main line ran from Portal, North Dakota, at the Canadian border southeast through the Twin Cities and then over former Milwaukee Road trackage to Chicago, with onward connections to Detroit via trackage and haulage rights over Norfolk Southern and CSX respectively. The system also maintained a connection from Noyes, Minnesota, southward and served Duluth through trackage rights over BNSF Railway. Passenger service, already much reduced by the 1961 consolidation, ended entirely on May 8, 1968, when the Copper Country Limited, a joint operation with the Milwaukee Road inherited from the Duluth, South Shore and Atlantic, was discontinued. Although the Soo Line Railroad continued to exist as a legal entity and retained its SOO reporting mark, it was progressively integrated into Canadian Pacific operations during the 1990s and into the 2000s. The U.S. Surface Transportation Board continued to group Canadian Pacific's American subsidiaries under the Soo Line name for regulatory reporting purposes, and the Minneapolis headquarters remained in the Canadian Pacific Plaza building. The railroad's significance in North American railroading lies in its role as the primary vehicle through which Canadian Pacific built and consolidated its presence in the United States upper Midwest, absorbing several historic predecessor roads and ultimately providing CP with a through route from the Canadian border to Chicago that remains a core part of the CPKC system today.