Great Northern Railway Unit Potash Train — Fargo Junction — Feb. 1970
It's February 21, 1970 and the Burlington Northern merger is less than ten days away. Unit potash trains are rolling from North Dakota to the Twin Cities and everyone at Allouez is happy that the Great Lakes are frozen so that these things don't come near Superior, Wisconsin again. It wasn't unusual for these trains to weigh as much as 15,000 tons. Just a few months earlier GN tried running these train loads of potash through ore dock 4 at Allouez for trans-loading into lake boats. That was akin to dumping flour into a blender, leaving off the cover, and pushing the button to blend. Marketing didn't always take into consideration all aspects of moving things across the entire system. So potash moving through Ore Dock 4 was what we would call today, an epic fail.
Great Northern Railway Unit Potash Train — Fargo Junction — Feb. 1970
It's February 21, 1970 and the Burlington Northern merger is less than ten days away. Unit potash trains are rolling from North Dakota to the Twin Cities and everyone at Allouez is happy that the Great Lakes are frozen so that these things don't come near Superior, Wisconsin again. It wasn't unusual for these trains to weigh as much as 15,000 tons. Just a few months earlier GN tried running these train loads of potash through ore dock 4 at Allouez for trans-loading into lake boats. That was akin to dumping flour into a blender, leaving off the cover, and pushing the button to blend. Marketing didn't always take into consideration all aspects of moving things across the entire system. So potash moving through Ore Dock 4 was what we would call today, an epic fail.