Escanaba & Lake Superior

AAR Reporting Marks - ELS.
Official Website
E&LS Route Map

1 Escanaba & Lake Superior Overview
- 1.1 Car Storage Operations
2 History
- 2.1 Founding to 1978
- 2.2 The Larkin Era (1978 to Present)
3 Escanaba & Lake Superior Locomotive Roster
4 Escanaba & Lake Superior Main Division Customers
5 Escanaba & Lake Superior Escanaba Division Customers
6 Escanaba & Lake Superior Menominee & Marinette Division Customers

Escanaba & Lake Superior Overview

The Escanaba & Lake Superior Railroad is a Class III shortline railroad that operates 347 miles of track in Northeastern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Its main line runs 208 miles from Rockland, Michigan, to Green Bay, Wisconsin, and it also owns various branch lines (including the Oconto Falls branch) and out-of-service track. The current operation was founded in 1978, after John Larkin purchased the original railroad from the Hanna Mining Company.

The railroad also provides switching services to both E&LS and CN customers in Marinette, WI and Menominee, MI and operates a bustling car repair and paint shops in both Escanaba and Wells.

To access its Escanaba operations and shops from its Mainline, E&LS has trackage rights on CN from Pembine, WI to Escanaba, MI. This agreement reportedly allows E&LS to run 1-2 trains a week over CN between Pembine and North Escanaba.

E&LS interchanges with CN at Green Bay, WI, North Escanaba, MI, Pembine, WI, and Marinette, WI.

Car Storage Operations

The line from Mass City, MI to Rockland, MI is used for car storage.
The line from Sidnaw, MI to Nestoria, MI is used for car storage.
The old E&LS mainline from Channing, MI to Wells, MI line is used for car storage. Most of this line is in derelict condition.
The line from Crivitz, WI to Marinette, WI is used for car storage. The line is severed at Grasser Road near Porterfield.
The line from Channing, MI to Republic, MI is used for car storage. There was also a cement transload on this line located in Floodwood, but that is now inactive. The line is OOS, even for car storage, past the Michigamme River north of Floodwood.
The former Groveland Mine Spur is also used for car storage.
All together, these lines have capacity for storing over 5,000 rail cars.

History

Founding to 1978

The original E&LS was founded in 1897 when the Escanaba River Company built a 7-mile railroad from Wells, to tap a large hardwood timber stand at LaFave’s Hill. In 1898, the company name was changed to the Escanaba & Lake Superior Railway. Work began in 1898 to extend the track 31 miles from Wells northwest to Watson and was completed in 1899. In 1902, the E&LS built 3 miles of track southeast out of Wells into the center of Escanaba and from 1900 to 1903 the railroad was extended to Channing. This established a connection with the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific railroad and began their haulage rights agreement to their ore dock in Escanaba. At this time, the CMStP&P operated just north of 100 miles in Michigan. As part of the agreement that allowed the CMStP&P (Milwaukee Road) access to its line, the E&LS was reincorporated as the Escanaba & Lake Superior Railroad for its agreement, which allowed it to reach Ontonagon, on Lake Superior; it has used this name ever since. This agreement ran from February 12, 1900 to March 15, 1937. In 1935, the Milwaukee Road moved its ore trains off the E&LS and entered into an agreement with the Chicago & North Western Railroad to jointly operate ore trains into Escanaba. Though the E&LS petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission and later the US Supreme Court to be allowed to join the joint operations, it was blocked from doing so in 1938 by the Supreme Court. In the 1940s, two major sources of traffic were developed near Escanaba—the Harnischfeger Corporation, which built large cranes for mining operations, and the Escanaba Paper Company. The railroad's transportation of logs ended in 1943 with the closure of the Stephenson mill in Wells. In the early 1960s, the E&LS was purchased by the Hanna Mining Company. In 1969, the E&LS stopped serving the Escanaba Paper Company during a strike on July 1, 1969 at the mill. In response, the mill's owners built a new connection to the C&NW and Soo Line and cut car movements on the E&LS more than five-fold in two years, from 2,200 carloads in 1968 to 449 in 1970. The E&LS continued skeleton service during the 1970s. In 1978, Hanna requested permission from the ICC to abandon the railroad.

The Larkin Era (1978 to Present)

On October 6, 1978, Hanna Mining Company sold the E&LS to John C. Larkin and his father Wade Larkin, businessmen from Minneapolis who had organized a National Railway Historical Society passenger excursion on the railroad earlier in the decade. Larkin planned to return the railroad to profitability by reducing labor costs and entering the business of leasing boxcars to other railroads. Shortly thereafter, the boxcar leasing market collapsed. Additionally, with the Milwaukee Road going bankrupt in 1977, it planned to abandon its trackage in Michigan, consisting largely of a route between Ontonagon and Green Bay, Wisconsin. This plan would break the E&LS's connections at Channing, as well as end rail service to the shippers on the Milwaukee Road lines. One of these shippers, Champion Paper, which operated a mill in Ontonagon, approached the E&LS with a proposal for the railroad to buy the Milwaukee Road track to Ontonagon.

E&LS was able to reach an agreement with the Milwaukee Road's bankruptcy court to take control of the Ontonagon route, as well as additional trackage south. They were backed by many of the line's shippers and the states of Michigan and Wisconsin, but opposed by the C&NW, which wanted to retain iron ore transport from the Groveland Mine in Randville, Michigan, and also by Hanna Mining, the former owner of the E&LS and owner of the Groveland Mine. The C&NW and Milwaukee Road had previously shared service to the Groveland Mine under a decades-long agreement between the two, called the Menominee Range Iron Ore Pool. By 1979, the mine impacted 31,000 of the 50,000 cars moved over the Milwaukee Road's tracks in the area, a level of traffic so high that Larkin publicly stated that the E&LS would not make a profit without it. The ICC, and a US court, ruled in E&LS' favor.

On March 10, 1980, the E&LS formally bought the ex-Milwaukee Road between Ontonagon through Channing south to Iron Mountain. It also obtained a lease-to-own agreement of the tracks south from Iron Mountain to Green Bay; this section was purchased in 1982. Upon purchase, the E&LS immediately began rebuilding its new trackage, which had been neglected by the Milwaukee Road in the years leading up to its bankruptcy. Major funding came from the state of Michigan, which paid $1.6 million ($4.3 million in 2020) to install new ties on the track to Ontonagon.

In November 1981, the E&LS bought additional trackage, this time a branch line from Channing north to Republic. In 1985, it bought a branch from Crivitz, Wisconsin, on the Green Bay line, east to Marinette, Wisconsin, and Menominee, Michigan. During 1987 and 1988, the line to Ontonagon had its lightweight rails replaced with new, heavier rails.

In 1986 the E&LS connection track to the C&NW was built from a switch just south of Lineville Road in Howard, Wisconsin, to the C&NW Howard Industrial Park siding line. This ultimately allowed the E&LS to discontinue operations south of Bond Road in Green Bay in 1993. This connection was the result of a construction agreement between the E&LS and the C&NW that was executed on November 27, 1985, which provided joint access to the Howard Industrial Park. Two of the contracts executed then allowed tenants of Howard Industrial Park a choice of competing railroads for shipping service.

On June 24, 1991, E&LS bought a 23-mile ex-Soo Line Railroad Soo Line/DSS&A branch line from Sidnaw, on the Ontonagon line, east to Nestoria.

In 1992, the E&LS mainline from Channing to Wells was taken out of service, with access to Escanaba retained via a new trackage rights agreement with the Wisconsin Central Railroad (now CN), under which the E&LS was granted access their main line from Pembine, Wisconsin, to North Escanaba. As of 2022 this agreement allows E&LS to run 1-2 trains per week between Pembine and North Escanaba.

On April 20, 1995, E&LS bought a short branch line between Stiles Junction, Wisconsin, just north of Green Bay, to Oconto Falls from the C&NW. In 2005, the Wisconsin DOT provided a $2.01 million grant to rebuild E&LS trackage from Crivitz north to the Michigan state line. This was the last section of mainline track that had not seen a complete rebuild since it was bought in 1980.

Most of these recent branch line acquisitions are used by the E&LS to store rolling stock for third parties.

After the 2009 closure of the Smurfit-Stone Paper Mill in Ontonagon, the Escanaba and Lake Superior abandoned 15 miles of track between Ontonagon and milepost 395 one mile east of Rockland in 2011, severing the railroad's closest trackage to Lake Superior. The remaining track between Rockland and Mass City is used for third-party long term car storage. The former mainline between Escanaba and Channing is also used for long term car storage, and is in derelict condition.