A mid-winter thaw

Last week, I was reading Slate Magazine’s Moneybox column by Daniel Gross, in which he makes the case that recovery will come sooner and stronger than we expect. Much as I’d like to believe him, I think we all have doubts right now about how long it’ll be before the economy we live on returns to normal. This is certainly true at the railroads, where overall traffic is down more than 20 percent from pre-recession levels.
 
For the first weekend of the new year, I got my first feel for a thaw in an ironic place: the Mesabi Iron Range in northern Minnesota. Yes, the high temperature for Saturday still hovered below zero Fahrenheit, but the taconite pellets were hot. My party logged ore trains on Northshore Mining Co., Canadian National/Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range, and BNSF Railway. It’s the last one I want to note, though.
 
There are currently six taconite processing plants in northern Minnesota: two on BNSF, three on CN, plus Northshore, which operates its own railroad. During the heat of summer, the recession pushed all six to shut down. For fans of ore trains, there wasn’t much to celebrate.
 
Gradually, though, things have been getting better. U.S. Steel’s Minntac plant at Mountain Iron, Minn., the largest plant on the range, returned to full production, and is now pushing out trains as fast as CN can provide empties. Through late summer and fall, the United Taconite, Minorca, and Northshore plants reopened. The two holdouts: U.S. Steel’s Keewatin Taconite, and Cleveland Cliffs’ Hibbing Taconite, the two that BNSF serves. Even as a resurgence enlivened the range farther east, BNSF’s Casco Subdivision remained quiet.
 
Finally, in early December, the Keewatin plant asked its workers to return. The first pellets emerged before 2009 ended, and our Jan. 2 shots show perhaps the second or third load. This photo comes from atop the abandoned DM&IR bridge over BNSF’s ex-Great Northern ore line at Baden, Minn., and the train is hauling 161 loads of steaming iron ore pellets, hot from the furnaces at Keewatin.
 
You can call it a taconite train if you’d like. I’d prefer to call it 15,000 tons of hot-baked recovery. Still, I think we all know that, for the more than 10,000 railroaders who are out of work in this country, it’s cold comfort indeed.