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."