A Complex Post Card

There are two parts to the front of this post card. The first part is the train in

the background. It is a Great Northern train. This is what https://www.american-rails.com/great.html has to say about the Great Northern. What became the Great Northern Railway (GN) was the work of a singe individual, James Jerome Hill. The legendary "Empire Builder" pieced together one of America's great transportation companies over the span of nearly four decades. It all began with the small St. Paul & Pacific and, by the time of his passing in 1917, the GN was a transcontinental carrier of more than 8,000 miles. Over time, the company's traffic became highly diversified; what began as an agricultural hauler transformed into a transcontinental carrier handling every type of freight imaginable. It was merged into Burlington Northern Railroad on March 2, 1970. The second part of the post card is the large sphere in the foreground. It is a monument to David Thompson erected by the Great Northern Railway. Here is some information about David Thompson as found in The Canadian Encyclopedia on line. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/david-thompson David Thompson, explorer, and cartographer was born 30 April 1770 in London, England. He died 10 February 1857 in Longueuil, Canada East (what is now Quebec). David Thomson was called “the greatest land geographer who ever lived.” He walked or paddled 80,000 km or more in his life, mapping most of western Canada, parts of the east and the northwestern United States. And like so many geniuses, his achievements were only recognized after his death. Thompson learned to speak several Indigenous languages and was an acute and sympathetic observer at a time when most Europeans still saw Indigenous people as savages. His journals (which numbered hundreds of pages) and his maps provided the most complete record of a territory that was more than 3.9 million square km and contained dozens of different First Nations bands. In all, he spent 27 years mapping the west. “The age of guessing is passed away,” he wrote. Thompson predicted the changes that would come to the west, that it would become farmland and Indigenous peoples would be pushed from their land. As the one who mapped it, he was aware that he was contributing to that future. Wikipedia also tells us about the place in which this monument to David Thompson is situated: Today, Verendrye is an unincorporated community in McHenry County, North Dakota, United States, located approximately eight miles northwest of Karlsruhe and 13 miles northeast of Velva within Falsen Township. Although classified by the USGS as a populated place, it is considered a ghost town. The community was first known as Falsen, founded in 1912 by Norwegian settlers, who named it for Norwegian statesman Christian Magnus Falsen. Falsen was also the name of the station on the Great Northern Railway. The post office was established with the name Falsen in 1913, but the name was changed in 1925 to honor Pierre de la Verendrye, an early French-Canadian explorer who was to tour the North Dakota prairies. The population of Falsen in 1920 was 75. The population of Verendrye in 1938 was 100. The post office closed in 1965, with mail being redirected to Bergen. The last original resident moved away in December 1970 and the townsite sat vacant until it was purchased in 1990 and developed by the current owners into a farmstead, leaving the remains of the school building as the last true remnant of the town. A monument to the later North West Company fur trader and explorer, David Thompson, erected by the Great Northern Railway in 1925, remains on a hilltop overlooking the former townsite.

This post card was posted on February 7, 1957. It was published by the Great Northern Railway. It was printed by The Meriden Gravure Company in Meriden, Connecticut. They were a printer of many fine art books and black & white national view-cards in a deep rich collotype. They abandoned this process in 1967 when they began using offset lithography. They also issued cards printed in a dull blue-green monotone that they called Dutone.

Still Going Strong After All These Years!

The locomotive shown on the front of this post card is a “Consolidation” 2-8-0 built by Baldwin in 1925, that once belonged to the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway. You can see that by looking at the number board

on the front of the engine. It is shown, in the picture, during its working days with the Mississippian Railroad. When this post card was published, long after this picture was taken, this locomotive was then doing tourist excursions on the Gettysburg Railroad in Pennsylvania. If the locomotive is still working at the time of this posting, it is 98 years old!!! This website gives some history of the Mississippian Railroad http://www.msrailroads.com/Mississippian.htm The Mississippian was incorporated in 1923 and built a railroad from Amory to Fulton, MS. John T Cochrane, who had just finished completing the Alabama Tennessee & Northern RR, was the major promoter and builder of the railroad. The discovery of large deposits of Bentonite clay in the 1950's bolstered the Mississippian's carloadings and ensured the survival of the railroad for many more years. It continues to operate in 2009 serving an industrial park in the south part of Fulton. Wikipedia tells us this about the Gettysburg Railroad: On March 4, 1851, Robert McCurdy, Josiah Benner, and Henry Myers secured a charter for the Gettysburg Railroad Company. The ground breaking was on February 22, 1856 and the railroad opened with the first passenger train entering Adams County on September 14, 1857. A locomotive first entered the Gettysburg borough on November 29. The line was "completed" at Gettysburg on December 1, 1858, with operations over the Gettysburg Railroad Company tracks managed from that date by the Hanover Branch RR until June 12, 1859. The last spike was driven at Gettysburg on December 16, 1858 (12:30 a.m.); and that day at Hanover, company representatives met an official "party of Baltimoreans" with the Blues Band from Calvert railway station. Civil War: On June 27 prior to the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg, the line at Gettysburg was disabled when the nearby Rock Creek bridge was demolished by Confederate forces. On November 18, 1863, President Lincoln used the line to attend the consecration of the Soldiers' National Cemetery where he delivered the Gettysburg Address. Successor Lines: In December 1870, the Susquehanna, Gettysburg & Potomac Railway company purchased the Gettysburg Railway Company's trackage to Hanover Junction, 2 steam locomotives, 1 passenger car, and 2 freight cars. The railway line between Gettysburg and Hanover Junction became part of the Hanover Junction, Hanover and Gettysburg Railroad in 1874, the Baltimore and Harrisburg Railway in 1886, and the Western Maryland Railway in 1917. In 1973, the Western Maryland became a part of the Chessie System, which later became CSX Transportation on November 1, 1980. Today: Pioneer Lines, operates approximately 27 miles of track from Gettysburg to Mount Holly Springs, Pennsylvania called THE GETTYSBURG AND NORTHERN RAILWAY (GET). It is located 200 miles East of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pioneer Lines Scenic Railway Pioneer Lines Scenic Railway operates scenic train rides through portions of the Civil War battlefield and the Pennsylvania countryside. Other excursions include the Gettysburg Ghost Train, a Murder Mystery Train, an Evening Paradise Dinner Train and a Santa Train ride.

The post card was published by Audio-Visual Designs in Earlton, New York after 1963. The photo credit is given to Mac Owen. He was a prolific railroad photographer and a videographer.

You Need to be Big to Carry All of that Weight

The locomotive on the front of this post card is a very large, M4 class locomotive. In the Whyte Classification it is a Yellowstone Type steam locomotive design, of the 2-8-8-4 wheel arrangement and an articulated

design featured many of the peak technological advances of the motive power being developed in the late 1920s. The 2-8-8-4's late development also meant that few, in comparison to other types, were ever built. In total 72 of these massive machines were manufactured for four different railroads: the Baltimore & Ohio; Northern Pacific; Southern Pacific and the railroad featured on this post card, the Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range Railway (DM&IR). This website gives a history of how the DM&IR came to be. It is a long history that starts in the 1880s and continues to its birth in the 1930s and its disappearance in the 2000s. https://www.american-rails.com/missabe.html The Duluth, Missabe and Iron Range Railway (DM&IR) was a Minnesota institution that played a vital role in our country's steel production. It is the result of a merger of two previously existing railroads. The two railroads remained separate corporate entities until a series of transactions in the late 1930s; first, the Duluth, Missabe & Northern (DM&N) and Spirit Lake Transfer Railway were merged on July 1, 1937 to form the Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range Railway. The Spirit Lake Transfer Railway was formed in 1907, this DM&N subsidiary eventually constructed 11 miles in the West Duluth area to serve a steel mill owned by the Minnesota Steel Company. While several Midwestern carriers moved iron ore in some capacity only the Missabe Road did so on a grand scale along a condensed network of just a few hundred miles. Its main lines fanned out northward from docks situated at Duluth and Two Harbors to serve the bountiful Mesabi and Vermilion Ranges. The discovery of this important resource predates the Civil War although contemporary mining operations did not begin until the early 1880's. In time, two railroads came to serve the region; the Duluth & Iron Range and Duluth, Missabe & Northern. After many years as separate entities the two merged in the late 1930's to form the modern Missabe Road. Over the years its system map constantly changed as it built, then removed, trackage while following the iron. As time passed the natural ore fields were exhausted which gave rise to the taconite pellet, a sort of man-made ore created from natural deposits. In May of 2004 Canadian National purchased Great Lakes Transportation, which owned the DM&IR, and within a decade its corporate identity vanished.

The post card was published by Audio Visual Designs (AVD) out of Earlton, New York. This post card is one of three hunred and thirty three in my collection that were published by AVD. The photo credit is given to Bob Lorenz. I found this article on line about a Bob Lorenz. I will not be surprised if this is the man who took the photo. This is from: https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/20-artist-designer-bob-lorenz-dies-at-95/ "It’s not a brash claim to say that no railroad artist or designer has ever reached as large an audience as Robert “Bob” H. Lorenz, thanks to his memorable paint scheme for the American Freedom Train of 1975-76. Millions of people witnessed his patriotic flourish as the Freedom Train rolled through hundreds of towns and cities across the U.S. That’s quite a legacy for Lorenz, who died peacefully on Tuesday in Fremont, the place he called home since childhood. He was 95."

The "Copper Country Limited" at Rest

The photo on the front of this post card is of a painting by Russ Porter. It depicts the “Copper Country Limited” pausing at Republic, Michigan in the early 1920s. Republic is about 300 miles from Chicago, Illinois as the train travels toward Calumet, Michigan. This website provides information about the “Copper Country Limited”. https://www.american-rails.com/copper-country.html The Copper Country Limited was one of many secondary trains operating on the Milwaukee Road. It certainly carried an appropriate name with service provided from Chicago to the northern fringes of Michigan's Upper Peninsula (copper country) in conjunction with the Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic (later a Soo Line subsidiary). Its first appearance was during March of 1907 listed as trains #2 (southbound) and #3 (northbound). The route it plied required a little more than 12 hours departing Chicago late in the evening, running through Green Bay, and arriving at Calumet, Michigan the following morning. Interchange with the DSS&A was carried out at Champion, Michigan, (a Milwaukee-Marquette sleeper was interchanged 10 miles south at Republic, Michigan) which operated the train to its northward destination near the shores of Lake Superior. During its early years the Copper Country provided a consist including coaches, sleepers running through between Milwaukee and Marquette (Michigan) as well as Chicago and Calumet. Considering the rurality of this part of the country it is quite amazing a railroad provided such high class services; but the Milwaukee was not alone, such trains could be found running to similar out-of-the-way areas all across the country well into the 1960's.

I could find a few articles on line that told us that his artwork was used in Trains Magazine, but I could not find any biographical information on this person. It does seem, though, that he owned his own wooden railroad car. There were some people on a chat room site asking about the car, since the artist has died.