I spent this weekend exploring Manitowish, Mercer and Hurley, WI (and other railroad sights along the way during my drive there and back to the Twin Cities). I was very impressed by how well maintained the ex-SOO depots are in Ladysmith, Prentice and Park Falls. Way to go WC & CN! I was in Hurley early Sat. morning and I ventured across the state line into Ironwood, MI.
Good Lord - that was in a minor sense like going from West to East Berlin (I saw an awful lot of really run-down homes, businesses, and severely pot-holed and cracked streets in Ironwood). I happened-upon the ex-CNW depot in town (now a nicely preserved museum) and I was surprised to see a CN MOW truck parked near a small building maybe 30 yards north (?) of the depot. Nearby I found several stacks of new ties, a pair of crossbucks on their post laying on the ground, and quite a number of cans of creosote or whatever the chemical is they now use for preserving ties (I didn’t look close). There were also stacks of tie plates.
This is all the usual material you’d find near a MOW office but there were no tracks there! The CNW rails had been pulled decades ago, and the CN’s ex-WC trackage ran well north of that location at North Ironwood. From how things looked I think the SOO may also have had a parallel track coming into that location north of the CNW’s (judging from the look of the path through the trees and houses to the east and west of where the CN truck was) but I’m not certain.
Can anyone explain this strange arrangement of materials? Curious minds need to know.
I also hiked the CNW’s route of the Flambeau 400 south out of Manitowish after breakfasting at the famous Little Bohemia Inn (I can see why Dillinger went there - beautiful place and great food). I was out maybe 1.
Didn’t see any hodags, but it was prime hodag habitat where I was.
The SOO did have a branch off their Ashland-Prentice line near Marengo Jct. that went into Hurley and Ironwood, and that appears to be the pulled ROW I saw just north of the CNW depot in Ironwood. It seems odd that CN would still be using that property for storing materials so far from any trackage. I was pleased to find that the ex-WC/ex-SOO trackage I crossed at North Ironwood during my driving around was some of the only remaining rails of the DSS&A that are still in-service (that CN is still operating it to serve the copper mine at White Pine, MI).
WIAR has it exactly right. I know for sure the White Pine crews do their on-duty paperwork at the Ironwood station, then cab up to their train. When I gave chase a couple years ago, they were tying the train down at North Bessemer. They’d go to White Pine and back one day, then to Marengo and back the next, o/d six days per week. And, I’m assuming, the MOW crews use the depot as well.
Railroad on-duty points are generally next to where a crew will tie up, but not always. When I worked for DM&E, our on-duty point in Winona, Minn., was a room in the same hotel where we took our rest. The railroad apparently rented the room long term and kept a fax machine, a phone, and a coffee machine in it. That’s all you really need. Likewise, we used the IC&E (ex-MILW) depot in Mason City, Iowa, as an on-duty point, even when our power was tied down at the UP West Yard. Long as you’re going to call a cab to get to your train anyway, these off-site on-duty points aren’t impractical.
Going back to Ironwood, I should point out that the ex-Soo route through Ironwood went to a short line for a while before it was abandoned; the railroad was known as the Wisconsin & Michigan. Our good friend Steve Smedley snagged this shot of them in January 1995, just before the railroad shut down and the line was salvaged:
I remember hearing, while I was in the U.P., that a couple of counties up there have the highest unemployment rates in the country. I don’t remember now which counties they were, and I’d have to look up which county Ironwood is in, but there may be a connection there to the rough condition. (Marquette didn’t look so bad.)
Just about anywhere in the Upper Peninsula is getting away from it all fairly quickly. My brother- and sister-in-law have to drive three or four miles just to get to the center of their town (which consists of a restaurant, a bar (post office in same building) and a blinker light, because it’s a state highway crossing a county road. Before getting there from the east, we had driven through at least an hour worth of woody swamps–very green, but very monotonous.
The yard that sat next to the CNW depot in Ironwood was a joint Soo Line- CNW facility.Since there is no yard office building at North Ironwood on the old DSSA- the Soo Line (and later WC) retained the Soo offices and maintenance base at Ironwood even after their own trackage into Ironwood proper was abandoned/sold. The Soo’s line in Ironwood was primarily to serve the iron ore mines in the region (note the most recent Trains Map of the Month). The CNW pulled out of Ironwood in 1981- the Soo branch hung on a little longer as noted before by Andy. Here is a shot of the yard in Ironwood when the CNW still operated there- taken by my dad in 1976.