In his book The American Train, by Brian Soloman, there is a little piece about railroads “Resisting the Diesel”. To paraphrase part of it: The staunchest supporters perpetuating steam power at the end where those with the closest link to the coal industry: PRR,C&O, N&W, and DM&IR-the Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range Railroad.
I’ve never heard this before. Did DMIR haul a lot of coal? Also, was PRR realy that slow to change over to diesel?
DM&IR hauled very little coal except for its own use, some, but very little.
…Some of the first railroad diesels I ever saw were on the PRR.
USS’s Bessemer & Lake Erie was involved with hauling coal, certainly more than the Missabe Road. During the spring of 1951, 18 of B&LE’s big Texas type (2-10-4) steam locomotives were transfered to the DM&IR, after the Bessemer acquired a number of F7 diesels. One would think the B&LE would have waited a few more years before deiselizing.
DMIR was an Iron Road not a coal road. What about the B&O it ran steam almost up to the end.
DM&IR might have had a close link to the coal industry without hauling coal. Weren’t they owned by U.S. Steel? Maybe the railroad got a good buy on coal because their parent used a lot of it to make steel.
Well, I didn’t think there were too many coal mines up around Duluth.
From the posts above, I’m wondering if the author just had a brain fade, and really meant some other road than DM&IR. As someone mentioned, maybe B&O?
Illinois Central comes to mind as well.
I don’t know about slow, but the argument could definately be made that the PRR certainly explored a lot of alternatives in steam propulsion until it was very obvious that steam could never compete with the diesel. Think of efforts like the duplexes and the direct drive turbine that they played around with for awhile.
As you expected, NO! Primary $$$$ - minerals, specifically mined ore & taconite.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duluth,_Missabe_and_Iron_Range_Railway
http://www.lsrm.org/Education/steam.asp LSRM steam, including Yellowstone #227
http://members.lsol.net/mollyandmick/D233.htm Yellowstone 2-8-8-4 #233 http://www.steamlocomotive.com/texas/dmir.shtml DMIR Texas 2-8-8-2’s - 3 photos
I hadn’t thought of IC. That brings up a good question: Did steam railroads build their locomotives to specifically use the same coal they hauled?
That is a good question. I’ve read that NP had some of their locomotives built with large fireboxes so they could use the lower quality coal in their territory.
Yes, they did. The cheapest possible source for a railroad to purchase its coal would be on-line coal. The railroad would pay some attention to the characteristics of its coal sources when determining specifications with the builder, the noteworthy examples being NP’s design of the Yellowstones to burn 8,500 BTU sub-bitumimous coal from what would later be called the “Northern Powder River Basin” and D&H and other anthracite roads with the Wooten firebox designed to burn anthracite culm (waste). The caveat is that a locomotive firebox is not a high-efficiency combustion chamber, and that it was more important for the railroad to maintain fuel flexibility than optimal performance for a specific coal. The railroad considered its locomotive might last 40-50 years in service, whereas coal seams are often mined out in 10-15 years, the railroad might be purchasing coal from 10-20 different seams, which change from year to year as mining moves on.
The more important fact about locomotive coal use is that railroads and coal mines were often one and the same company – the Hepburn Act was never fully enforced – and many railroads were in fact a coal company that happened to own a railroad for the purpose of (1) being able to deliver its coal to market at a competitive price and (2) ensuring the owners of adjacent coal lands could not deliver their coal to market at the same price. The N&W and all the anthracite roads were really coal companies first, railroads second, until the 1930s, and most railroads o
DM&IR hauled a lot of inbound “lake coal” to the mines and towns of its service territory to generate heat, light, and power. Duluth was one of the largest anthracite coal ports in the world, in fact! – all inbound. NP and GN distributed lake coal across Minnesota and well into eastern North Dakota and northeastern South Dakota, until it bumped up against Montana coal moving east.
I have never heard that DM&IR clung to steam late because of its interest in protecting the coal industry. Sometimes managers have some pretty strange ideas that persist in screwing up the railroad until 0700 the day after they retire, but that seems the only plausible explanation I can think of.
Roads that clung to steam late generally had very low operating cost steam locomotives, cheaper than typical coal supply, and conservative managements who wished to watch the experience of the early diesel converts, and let them make all the mistakes first. They also understood that once the majority of dieselization was complete, the builders would find themselves with a great deal of slack capacity they would wish to fill and that pricing would get much more attractive. There was never any serious question after 1945 that dieselization was a fait accompli, it was only a question of timing.
DM&IR was probably influenced a little more than most railroads in its territ
Interestingly, years ago Duluth / Superior was a major ‘importer’ of coal, much of it destined for cities beyond like the Twin Cities and Fargo/Moorhead. Today Superior is a huge ‘exporter’ of coal, much of the coal from the Powder River Basin goes thru Superior onto lake boats (and salties) going east. I don’t believe the DMIR was ever a major player in the coal traffic in that area, they may have provided coal to some customers on the iron range, maybe even a smallish power plant, but just as part of their general (“commercial”) freight traffic.
The DM&IR was one of the best run / best managed companies around, so I’m afraid the idea that somebody in charge kept steam around the Missabe for no reason isn’t really valid. Part of the reason steam lasted so long there was because US Steel chose to dieselize their other railroads first, so sent the often relatively-new steam engines of those roads to the DMIR to use, like B&LE 2-10-4’s, Union 0-10-2’s and EJ&E 2-8-2’s (plus the road leased F-unit diesels from GN and B&LE). Remember too that the DMIR’s big Yellowstones were very new then, they were all built in the 1940’s and had a life expectancy of 30-40 years, and were comfortably holding down the mainline ore runs in the fifties.
Also, because the DMIR basically shut down during the winter when Lake Superior froze over, they had the time to do major overhauls on their equipment, so they could do a better job maintaining steam engines than some other roads could.
Another reason for the coal imports into Duluth is that until about 1970 there were a Steel Mill and a good-sized Cement Mill located in the western part of the city, both facilities are now razed. But both locations had their own docks so the railroad never hauled the coal. The coal that the DM&IR hauled would have been first for their own use and then second for the mines and home heating. There are several district heating plants located on the Mesabi Range, they used to receive coal by rail but now most of it is trucked up from the Twin Ports as they only consume a ssmall number of carloads per week.
This leads me to believe, that a slower rate of dieselization on some roads had less to do with upsetting thier big coal interests, than it had to do with losing it’s cheap source of fuel. Perhaps overlooked, somewhat, is that a revolution in home heating helped push a revolution in railroad dieselization?
I’ve never worked for a railroad, nor do I expect to work for a railroad, that does not practice enlightened self-interest. If we take the argument that “dieselizing would upset the coal shippers,” the next question to ask is, What the heck were the coal shippers going to do if they were upset? Truck their non-railway coal? Fold their arms, pout, and refuse to ship it? I don’t think so.
The question whether the decline in demand for domestic coal affected the price of railway fuel is a very interesting question I’ve not seen posed before. A railway fuel model based on the existence of incrementally priced low-cost mine-run and fines, with the lump coal carrying the base cost, could indeed be upset if the base load disappeared. However, looking at EIA historic data, in constant-dollar terms, the average U.S. coal price declined during this period from $29.97/ton in 1949 to $24.06 in 1955 (bituminous). That might obscure what the price to railways was; we’d need to look at actual coal prices paid by a railroad to see what happened during this era – certain railroads might have listed them in their annual reports (anyone want to take a look?). But I expect that railway prices for coal declined overall too, because once the domestic market evaporated the demand for lump coal evaporated, and lump coal is a highly labor-intensive process and thus increasingly expensive as wages escalated rapidly post WWII.
A railway that was
It does sound like a rather silly notion, when you stop and look at it like that. Most books, however, do make it sound like it had to do with some sort of romantic entanglement between some railroads and the coal industry. It would be intersting, to say the least, to read a book, or even a magazine length article, about the parallels between post war industry and postwar railroads both getting out of the coal business.
The reason was simple. The Missabe had plenty of coal for cheap, and even cheaper steam engines.