 | |
| Overview | |
|---|---|
| Coordinates | 47°32′12″N91°04′41″W / 47.53667°N 91.07815°W |
| Status | Abandoned |
| Operation | |
| Opened | 1957 |
| Closed | 2008 |
| Technical | |
| Length | 1,800 feet |
| No. of tracks | Single |
Cramer Tunnel is a disused railroad tunnel near Cramer, Minnesota. It is the longest railway tunnel in Minnesota. [1]
Cramer Tunnel opened in 1957 after LTV Steel blasted a tunnel to connect Hoyt Lakes taconite plant and the location of its ore dock at Taconite Harbor on Lake Superior, from which the taconite was shipped to eastern steel mills. [2] The tunnel was used consistently from its opening to 2001, when LTV Steel went bankrupt and closed their ore dock in Taconite Harbor. When the location was bought by Cleveland Cliffs in 2002, cleanup trains ran on the line to pick up leftover chips and pellets until 2008. [1]
Lake County is a county in the U.S. state of Minnesota. As of the 2020 census, the population was 10,905. Its county seat is Two Harbors.
The Mesabi Iron Range is a mining district in northeastern Minnesota following an elongate trend containing large deposits of iron ore. It is the largest of four major iron ranges in the region collectively known as the Iron Range of Minnesota. First described in 1866, it is the chief iron ore mining district in the United States. The district is located largely in Itasca and Saint Louis counties. It has been extensively worked since 1892, and has seen a transition from high-grade direct shipping ores through gravity concentrates to the current industry exclusively producing iron ore (taconite) pellets. Production has been dominantly controlled by vertically integrated steelmakers since 1901, and therefore is dictated largely by US ironmaking capacity and demand.
Taconite is a variety of banded iron formation, an iron-bearing sedimentary rock, in which the iron minerals are interlayered with quartz, chert, or carbonate. The name "taconyte" was coined by Horace Vaughn Winchell (1865–1923) – son of Newton Horace Winchell, the Minnesota State Geologist – during their pioneering investigations of the Precambrian Biwabik Iron Formation of northeastern Minnesota. He believed the sedimentary rock sequence hosting the iron-formation was correlative with the Taconic orogeny of New England, and referred to the unfamiliar and as-yet-unnamed iron-bearing rock as the 'taconic rock' or taconyte.
The Iron Range is collectively or individually a number of elongated iron-ore mining districts around Lake Superior in the United States and Canada. Much of the ore-bearing region lies alongside the range of granite hills formed by the Giants Range batholith. These cherty iron ore deposits are Precambrian in the Vermilion Range and middle Precambrian in the Mesabi and Cuyuna ranges, all in Minnesota. The Gogebic Range in Wisconsin and the Marquette Iron Range and Menominee Range in Michigan have similar characteristics and are of similar age. Natural ores and concentrates were produced from 1848 until the mid-1950s, when taconites and jaspers were concentrated and pelletized, and started to become the major source of iron production.
The Bessemer and Lake Erie Railroad is a class II railroad that operates in northwestern Pennsylvania and northeastern Ohio.
The Duluth, Missabe and Iron Range Railway (DM&IR), informally known as the Missabe Road, was a railroad operating in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin that used to haul iron ore and later taconite to the Great Lakes ports of Duluth and Two Harbors, Minnesota. Control of the railway was acquired on May 10, 2004, by the Canadian National Railway (CN) when it purchased the assets of Great Lakes Transportation.
The Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal is an artificial waterway on the southwest shore of Lake Michigan, in East Chicago, Indiana, which connects the Grand Calumet River to Lake Michigan. It consists of two branch canals, the 1.25 miles (2.01 km) Lake George Branch and the 2 miles (3.2 km) long Grand Calumet River Branch which join to form the main Indiana Harbor Canal.
The North Shore of Lake Superior runs from Duluth, Minnesota, United States, at the western end of the lake, to Thunder Bay and Nipigon, Ontario, Canada, in the north, to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario in the east. The shore is characterized by alternating rocky cliffs and cobblestone beaches, with forested hills and ridges through which scenic rivers and waterfalls descend as they flow to Lake Superior.
The Hull–Rust–Mahoning Open Pit Iron Mine in Hibbing, Minnesota, United States, is the largest operating open-pit iron mine in Minnesota. The pit stretches more than three miles (5 km) long, two miles (3 km) wide, and 535 feet (163 m) deep. It was established in 1895 and was one of the world's first mechanized open-pit mines.
Cleveland-Cliffs Inc., formerly Cliffs Natural Resources, is a Cleveland, Ohio-based company that specializes in the mining, beneficiation, and pelletizing of iron ore, as well as steelmaking, including stamping and tooling. It is the largest flat-rolled steel producer in North America.
SS William A. Irvin is a lake freighter, named for William A. Irvin, that sailed as a bulk freighter on the Great Lakes as part US Steel's lake fleet. She was flagship of the company fleet from her launch in the depths of the Great Depression in 1938 until 1975 and then was a general workhorse of the fleet until her retirement in 1978.
Edna G is a tugboat which worked the Great Lakes and is now preserved as a museum ship. Edna G was built by the Cleveland Shipbuilding Company in 1896 for the Duluth and Iron Range Railroad at a cost $35,397.50. She was named for the daughter of J. L. Greatsinger, president of the railroad.
An ore dock is a large structure used for loading ore onto ships, which then carry the ore to steelworks or to transshipment points. Most known ore docks were constructed near iron mines on the upper Great Lakes and served the lower Great Lakes. Ore docks still in existence are typically about 60 feet (18 m) wide, 80 feet (24 m) high, and vary from 900 feet (270 m) to 2,400 feet (730 m) in length. They are commonly constructed from wood, steel, reinforced concrete, or combinations of these materials.
Samuel P. Ely is a shipwreck in Two Harbors, Minnesota listed on the National Register of Historic Places. She was a schooner that sailed the Great Lakes carrying iron ore, coal, and other bulk freight. She was built in 1869 and was a fairly typical example of the 200-foot schooner built in the 1870s, though she was reinforced for the demands of carrying iron ore.
The Oliver Iron Mining Company was a mining company operating in Minnesota, United States. It was one of the most prominent companies in the early decades of mining on the Mesabi Range. As a division of U.S. Steel, Oliver dwarfed its competitors—in 1920, it operated 128 mines across the region, while its largest competitor operated only 65.
Elcor is a ghost town, or more properly, an extinct town, in the U.S. state of Minnesota that was inhabited between 1897 and 1956. It was built on the Mesabi Iron Range near the city of Gilbert in St. Louis County. Elcor was its own unincorporated community before it was abandoned and was never a neighborhood proper of the city of Gilbert. Not rating a figure in the national census, the people of Elcor were only generally considered to be citizens of Gilbert. The area where Elcor was located was annexed by Gilbert when its existing city boundaries were expanded after 1969.
The Cliffs Erie Railroad was a railroad that operated from Hoyt Lakes to Taconite Harbor, Minnesota. The railroad opened in 1956 by Erie Mining Company to transport taconite from Hoyt Lakes to Taconite Harbor. In 1989, LTV Steel purchased Erie Mining and the railroad was renamed LTV Mining Railroad. The railroad closed in early 2001 when the LTV company ended the operations of the harbor. In 2002 Cleveland Cliffs bought the plant, and again renamed the railroad The Cliffs Erie Railroad. In 2004 Cliffs Erie hired a contractor to claim leftover chips and pellets from the mine due to the high iron prices. They used the only unsold locomotives, EMD F9s. The cleanup trains ran until 2008 when the last train ran. In 2014, the F9s were sold off. The railroad is now sitting, unlikely to ever see activity again.
The Pickands Mather Group is an American company which provides shipping of coal and other bulk commodities, and the purchase, sale, and marketing of bulk coal. Founded in 1883 as Pickands Mather & Company, it once had the second largest shipping fleet on the Great Lakes in the 1910s and 1920s. The company was purchased by the Diamond Shamrock Corporation in 1968, which in turn sold it to the Moore-McCormack Resources in 1973. Moore-McCormack sold Pickands Mather's mining interests to Cleveland-Cliffs in 1986. Moore-McCormack then spun off the Interlake Steamship Company to James Barker and Paul R. Tregurtha in 1987. Pickands Mather was sold to a management group in 1992, and continues to operate as a private company.
SS Robert Wallace was a wooden-hulled American bulk freighter that served on the Great Lakes of North America from her construction in 1882 to her sinking in 1902 on Lake Superior near the town of Palmers, St. Louis County, Minnesota, United States. On November 17, 1902 shortly after leaving Superior, Wisconsin with a cargo of iron ore, Robert Wallace sprang a leak and sank. Her wreck was found in 2006, and on October 14, 2009, the wreck of Robert Wallace was listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Michipicoten is a self-discharging lake freighter owned and operated by Canadian shipping firm Lower Lakes Towing. Michipicoten primarily hauls taconite from Marquette, Michigan, to the Algoma Steel Mill in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. It has a capacity of 22,300 tons, a speed of 12 knots (14 mph), and a length of 689 feet 6 inches (210.2 m).
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