Yesterday’s Trains ACROSS THE COMMONWEALTH
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Illustrated in the seemingly lost art of black and white, Yesterday’s Trains includes over 100 photographs of Vir- ginia railroading, of which thirty are full page. An array of accomplished photographers
tons of premium “Lake” copper annually through the 1870s.
Agassiz, like those before him, knew that the best way to separate copper from rock was to crush the ore into fragments by pounding (or “stamping”) the ore with me- chanical hammers, either gravity or steam powered. By the 1880s C&H had erected a huge stamp mill on the western edge of Torch Lake, an inland body of water eleven miles from Calumet. Stampings from the mill were initially sent to an outside compa- ny for smelting, but in an effort to control costs, C&H soon opened its own smelter at Hubell, south of Lake Linden.
The waste tailings from the stamp mill, known as “stamp sands” or “copper slimes,” were deposited directly into Torch Lake. There was still a large amount of copper in the sands, sometimes as much as a third of the total that had been in the ore — “A mine of wasted copper,” Edwin Hulbert wrote in 1894 — but the technology of the day did not allow for its recovery.
The growth of railroads in the Keweenaw can be directly traced to Calumet & Hecla. When the Caumet mine first opened its doors in 1865, the nearest mill was 13 miles away, and the nearest railroad, over 200 miles. Ore was initially moved with horses and wagons, but in 1867 C&H established a narrow gauge railroad, the Hecla & Torch Lake, to move the ore from mine to mill. Due to a mathematical error, the railroad’s first locomotive was built to the odd gauge of 49″, but it proved easier to convert the tracks to accommodate the engine rather than change the locomotive’s gauge. The rails initially terminated on a hillside overlooking the Traprock Valley, where ore cars were dropped down to the Torch Lake mill via in- cline railway, but eventually the rails were extended into the mill over a tall trestle .At its peak H&TL, which was converted to standard gauge in 1901, operated over 20 miles of track and had 250 40-ton steel rock cars in service.
Over the years H&TL rostered a variety of distinctive motive power, including a fleet of 0-6-4T Mason Bogies, a Baldwin 2-8-0 with Vauclain Compound cylinders, and a pair of Wooten-fireboxed Camelbacks. One Mason Bogie, the 1873 0-6-4T Torch Lake, survived in a shed at Ahmeek until the 1960s and to- day is preserved in running condition at the Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich. Calumet & Hecla also maintained a pri- vate three-foot gauge industrial tramway between the Lake Linden mills and the cop- per smelter, and also served the company dock on Torch Lake. The fleet of steam loco- motives used on the industrial line were small and compact due to the tight clear- ances within the mill.
By the early 1900s mining technology had progressed to the point that substantial profits could be made by the reclamation of fine copper from the stamp sands in Torch Lake. Newly-developed processes meant that the copper left behind in the tailings (estimated at 15 pounds per ton) could be economically removed by regrinding and treating the sands with chemicals. In 1914 C&H purchased a dredge to scrape the ma- terial from the bottom of the lake, and at the same time extended the tracks of its intra- plant industrial railroad.
The records of H.K. Porter show that a pair of 36″ gauge, 12-ton 0-4-0T’s were or- dered by C&H and delivered in May 1915
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just prior to the start of stamp sand recla- mation operations. Numbered 3 and 4, they operated at 170 p.s.i. and sported 9″×14″ cylinders, 27″ drivers, and slide valves. No. 3’s service life was led in relative ob- scurity. It is known to have worked the tracks between the stamp mill and the smelter moving cars of copper ore for crush- ing and copper concentrates for smelting. Its job included the transportation of copper in- gots, the movement of mine tailings, and the hauling of coal from the dock to a 200,000- ton capacity coal shed. It also hauled the stamp sands that were reclaimed from the lake and reprocessed. This project eventual- ly paid off handsomely: In 30 years, over $30 million in copper was recovered. Retirement, followed by a decade in stor-
age, was the fate of engine No. 3 in 1935. By this time many changes had come about in the copper industry, one of which was the re- organization of C&H in 1923 as the Calumet & Hecla Consolidated Copper Co., to reflect the acquisition of several competitors. After the Ahmeek mining properties were pur- chased in the 1920s, C&H moved its stamp- ing operations to Hubbell and the Lake Lin- den mill was closed down as the company concentrated its efforts mostly on stamp sand reclamation after 1935; mining of the Calumet Conglomerate ended in 1939 after most of its rich ore was depleted. C&H sol- diered on for another three decades, but the Great Depression, union unrest, and an in- creasing lack of high-grade copper ore all contributed to its closure in 1968. No. 3 was not around for the end of C&H. After many years in storage, the 0-4-0T start- ed a new life in 1949 when it was borrowed by the Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic and backdated to loosely resemble that railroad’s original No. 3, a Taunton-built 0-4-0. For this, No. 3’s saddle tank was removed and a new boiler jacket was installed, along with a fake diamond stack, box headlight, steam dome cover, and cowcatcher. In this configu- ration and sporting DSS&A emblems on its cab, it appeared under steam on the back of a flatbed truck during Marquette, Michigan’s 1949 centennial parade. It was shown off again in 1955 at Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., dur- ing that town’s Soo Locks Centennial Cele- bration.
After its use by DSS&A, No. 3 was re- turned to Calumet & Hecla, which in turn loaned it in 1956 to the Arcadian Copper Mine, a tourist attraction at Ripley, Mich. For decades it sat on display at the entrance to the mine, more or less used a billboard to advertise Arcadian’s underground tours. When Calumet & Hecla began to divest its assets, No. 3 was gifted to the Houghton County Historical Society in 1969. It re- mained on display at Ripley until 1978 when the Arcadian mine closed, at which time it was trucked to the Society’s Lake Linden museum campus and refurbished as a static display. Its saddle tank, off the engine since 1949, was reinstalled, but the fake cow- catcher and diamond stack were retained. It sat this way until 1997 when Adam S. Wright, a steam enthusiast and mechanical engineering student at Michigan Technolog- ical University, approached the museum board with a plan to restore No. 3 to service. The board agreed, feeling that an operating narrow gauge train would help attract visi- tors. Richard “Dick” Taylor, a museum board member and the CEO of RailDreams, a custom model railroad fabricator, agreed
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