Hoyt Lakes to Taconite Harbor, MN September 2002
note: links with a file size listed after them are links to my pictures.
links
without file sizes are off-site links that are related.
We left Friday evening for "Sherwood Forest Campground" in Gilbert, MN, and arrived around 9:00 pm. We paid for two nights. We parked our camper (51k) and went to sleep.
Sherwood Forest is a very nice campground. It is nicer than the trailer life rating would lead one to believe. All interior roads are paved, and each campsite pad is paved also. There is grass everywhere, and nice landscaping as well. The campground overlooks "Lake Ore-Be-Gone", an abandoned open-pit iron ore mine. It is the best campground we have stayed at all season, and also one of the least expensive. We give this campground five stars, and hope to visit again someday.
Saturday we woke up and met our friends in the nearby city of Virginia for breakfast. Then we drove about 30 minutes through the iron range cities of Gilbert, Auroa and Hoyt lakes, arriving at the LTV pellet plant at about 9:55. We boarded the train, and the four of us proceeded to search for seats. We finally ended up in the forward most coach in a semi-private area that we shared with a grandfather and his grandson.
The train left on-time at 10:30, and we found the ride to be very smooth. Our speed on our GPS was in the 35-40 MPH range, about the same speed that the pellet trains traveled. The train was traveling on a railroad that was closed about a year ago, and had seen no traffic at all, until the week before our trip when our engineer and other officials hy-railed the line to become familiar with the route (10k), and to look for defects in the railroad.
We ate our box lunches, looked out the window, and visited with friends and acquaintances on the train. When we reached the tunnel at Cramer, the train stopped, and unloaded for a photo runpast (39k).
After the photo stop, it was a short, steep (two percent) ride down the hills of the scenic North Shore of Lake Superior (30kb).
At the lake, we crawled very slowly (32k) over the ore dock (36k). Clearances were very small because of the unique arrangement to automatically unload the ore cars. Over each pocket (34k), there is an inverted rail that can be raised to meet a tire attached to the side of the rail car. The tire then turns as the train moves forward, opening the gates on the bottom of the car. At the end of the dock, there is another rail that closes the gates on the bottom of each car automatically.
Heading back, up the steep grade, we began hearing on our scanner that there were problems with two of the three locomotives pulling our train. One of the locomotives was running hot, and eventually shut down completely (after we made it up the hill...), and the other locomotive would quit pulling at speeds over 19 miles per hour. This meant that we had to make it up the hill, or else. Fortunately the locomotive that was running hot did not shut down until we were at the top of the hill. The second unit also worked well enough to get us all the way up the hill also. However, acceleration was noticeably slower with only one locomotive pulling at speeds of 20 MPH and above.
We arrived back at the pellet plant just before sunset, and a few of us walked up to the head end to take pictures (45k). about 30 minutes after arriving, the sky opened up and it was pouring rain. We had dinner in Virginia at a fine dining establishment with friends, and returned to our camper at about 10:00 pm and went to sleep.
We again met our friends Sunday morning trackside, and photographed a DM&IR train. We had planned to have breakfast, but time was running short; Dawn and I had a commitment back in the twin cities the same afternoon, so we had to hit the road. We gassed up, and were on our way.
