Great Northern Railway Potash Train — Allouez Ore Dock 4 — Superior, WI

Great Northern Railway Potash Train — Allouez Ore Dock 4 — Superior, WI — August 1969

            When dealing with rarest-of-the-rare kinds of pictures a person takes what they are given and does not complain. Eric Hirsimaki did the giving on this one and as he shot this image the slide was nearly black because it was so dark. As we can see, the ore dock is back-lit by the early morning sun. The sky is white with evening fog that has yet to burn off. And the ore dock approach timbers though brown in color, appear black as night. Even with all of that going against this shot Eric was brilliant enough to get into position to take the it with his 35mm camera. And after working on this image on and off for a couple of years in Photoshop I was finally able to figure out how to make it look good enough for prime time.

A very short-lived experiment on the Great Northern during 1968-69 was the bringing in of Canadian potash in unit trains of covered hoppers loaded with potash at International Minerals and Chemical Corporation (IMC) in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, Canada. The potash was trucked from Esterhazy to IMC's loading facility at Northgate, N.D. which was the end of the GN's 55-mile branch line that ran north from Berthold, ND. The trains were routed from Northgate to Minot, then on towards Superior via Grand Forks and Cass Lake. GN began running the unit potash trains in November 1968 but those early trains connected with the Burlington and terminated at either Mendota or Beardstown, IL. or Minneapolis, MN. Later shipments also involved the Norfolk & Western and those trains terminated in either Maumee, OH. or Norfolk, VA. It seems as though that part of the project went according to plan.

Then someone in the marketing department had this idea to sign a contract to ship about 20 train loads of this stuff over the GN's Allouez ore dock number 4. The thinking must have been that the water rates would be better than all-rail rates so why not give it a shot. The first potash shipment to Allouez was a 115-car train of covered hoppers that departed Northgate on June 23, 1969. The balance of trainloads averaged 110-cars and some trains were smaller than that. Lake vessels then took their cargoes to the port terminal of Toledo, OH.

Eric's picture shows sky blue GN SD7 563 shoving 27 loaded potash cars onto dock 4 as the Adam E. Cornelius prepares to take on the cargo of potash. The crew aboard the Cornelius probably has no idea what is in store for them today.

Potash is a dried, powdery potassium compound used as fertilizer. It has a consistency similar to thick flour. When the cars dumped their loads into the dock the powdery potash went everywhere including all over the ship. The gravity outlets on the bottoms of the cars lined up with absolutely nothing on the ore dock. So for the dock workers and the train crew this meant countless, messy hours moving the covered hopper cars from one pocket to the next to have any hope of unloading them. Wind and rain made the project even worse.

This may have been the messiest mistake GN ever made at Allouez. When the contract for the first batch of trains was up the whole thing was scrubbed. These loads of potash were the final loads of any kind loaded into ore dock number 4, and the only commodity loaded into the gravity docks besides iron ore and taconite in the then-70 year history of this transloading facility. The potash left behind such a terrible mess that when BN took over 7 months later in 1970 they closed dock 4. It was never used again because it was too much trouble and expense to clean out all of the potash waste. Over eight million tons of potash were used in the U.S. during 1968 but only about 45,000+ tons of it went through Allouez in 1969.

Taken on: March 26, 2016

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Sets appears in: • Great Northern Railway • Allouez Ore Docks more » • Iron Ore and Taconite • Boats in the Twin Ports • Superior, Wisconsin • Structures « less

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