Joseph T. Wagner
A Tailing's Tale
A Minnesota landscape sheathed in all of autumn's glory brightly backdrops NorthShore Mining baby blue and white at the MP 5 rock bluffs as two company SD40-2's hammer slowly uphill, bracketing thirty side dumps of loaded "tailings," unwanted discards from the taconite manufacturing process. There unmistakable EMD 645 drone echos off the colorful hillside as the two veteran six-axles are giving it everything they've got to muscle there heavy train upgrade away from Lake Superior's banks as the engineer rips his throttle back into the left corner to keep his old steed from losing the battle against gravity. These tailings trains operate several times a day in a push-pull, bi-directional ease orientation to deposit scraps of iron ore from the processing plant down at Silver Bay up to the outfit's large tailings pile located about two miles further up the line. NSM's 47-mile long stretch of track linking the iron mine at Babbitt with the plant and port of Silver Bay through Minnesota's remote backwoods was once again graced by the turning of steel wheels following an eleven-month operational hiatus which took effect May of 2022, ending recently in April of 2023. As a side note, we were lucky enough to get No. 651 on point here, which is the only locomotive in NSM's fleet to receive company lettering on its white nose.
A Tailing's Tale
A Minnesota landscape sheathed in all of autumn's glory brightly backdrops NorthShore Mining baby blue and white at the MP 5 rock bluffs as two company SD40-2's hammer slowly uphill, bracketing thirty side dumps of loaded "tailings," unwanted discards from the taconite manufacturing process. There unmistakable EMD 645 drone echos off the colorful hillside as the two veteran six-axles are giving it everything they've got to muscle there heavy train upgrade away from Lake Superior's banks as the engineer rips his throttle back into the left corner to keep his old steed from losing the battle against gravity. These tailings trains operate several times a day in a push-pull, bi-directional ease orientation to deposit scraps of iron ore from the processing plant down at Silver Bay up to the outfit's large tailings pile located about two miles further up the line. NSM's 47-mile long stretch of track linking the iron mine at Babbitt with the plant and port of Silver Bay through Minnesota's remote backwoods was once again graced by the turning of steel wheels following an eleven-month operational hiatus which took effect May of 2022, ending recently in April of 2023. As a side note, we were lucky enough to get No. 651 on point here, which is the only locomotive in NSM's fleet to receive company lettering on its white nose.