A Cincinnati Union Terminal worker drives a cart in front of New York Central Hudson no. 5300, which had just brought in the Midnight Special from Cleveland on the morning of September 24, 1952. The train made a seven-hour overnight run via Columbus, one of several NYC passenger trains that linked Ohio’s three major cities at the time.
Burlington Route and Union Pacific diesels shuffle freight cars at Omaha Union Station in Nebraska, next to one of the Burlington’s streamlined E-units on a Chicago–Denver passenger train. The view looks west from the South 10th Street overpass on the afternoon of February 5, 1957. The station’s tracks were still busy with both freight and passenger traffic, but the latter was in decline.
Crew members of a Baltimore & Ohio passenger train chat on the platform of Cincinnati Union Terminal in September of 1952. Of the seven railroads serving CUT, the B&O was the only one whose trains ran through the terminal; trains of the six other railroads began or ended their journeys in Cincinnati.
1950s streamliners of the roads and the rails stand together at Cincinnati Union Terminal in September of 1952. Joining the Buick in the foreground are E-units of three of the seven railroads serving CUT: Chesapeake & Ohio E8 no. 4003, Pennsylvania E8 no. 5885, and New York Central E7 no. 4028. Barely visible beyond them is a C&O steam locomotive.
Santa Fe track worker building up worn spots on a “frog,” the track component that lets one rail line pass over another, “without spilling trains all over the countryside,” in Abbey’s words. The location is Holliday, Kansas, 13 miles west of Kansas City, Missouri, on the Santa Fe’s main line. The place was named for Cyrus K. Holliday, the entrepreneur who served as the railroad’s first president from 1860 to 1863; except for a one-year hiatus, he served on its board of directors until his death in 1900.
A Baltimore & Ohio Railroad worker washes the streamlined nose of Electro-Motive diesel no. 368 at Cumberland, Maryland, on an overcast September day in 1952. Near the end of his life, Abbey selected this photograph for his collection of twenty-five favorites. Not one to mourn the demise of steam, he wrote, “Now, this proves that railroads are cleaning up their act. More to the point, diesels are doing it for them.”
At the Beech Grove Shops of the New York Central near Indianapolis in 1953, a driving wheel from steam locomotive no. 6844, an 0-6-0 switcher, gets a new tire. The tire ring is expanded slightly by a gas flame and is then pounded into place by men with sledge hammers; when the ring cools, it shrinks tightly around the wheel. The NYC created the community in 1906 to serve as a railroad shop town. Amtrak operates the shops today.
School tours were a staple event for Soo Line public relations during Abbey’s tenure with the railroad. This view from 1959 shows an elementary class from Hopkins Public Schools in suburban Minneapolis touring the diesel shop at Shoreham Yard. Maroon and gold FA-1 no. 211B towers behind them. The Soo had acquired the 1,500-horsepower Alco a decade earlier and would retire it in just a little more than three years.
THREE
SOO LINE STORYTELLER
BY 1959, ABBEY WAS READY TO MOVE ON TO SOMETHING NEW. He’d proven himself as a transportation journalist in both the consumer market at Trains and the trade arena at Railway Age. He’d had success at an industry association. Now he was ready to work in the middle of the action, the executive suite of a major railroad.
His first opportunity was unexpected: an offer from a vice president of the Soo Line, who had admired Abbey’s Railway Age coverage of a landmark rate case Soo had before the Interstate Commerce Commission. Surprised and perhaps a bit flattered, Abbey embraced the opportunity, taking over as special assistant to the president and director of public relations at the Soo Line Building in Minneapolis.
Abbey’s arrival was timely. The old Soo Line, a stalwart carrier in the upper Midwest, was in the throes of becoming the “new Soo” via the 1961 merger of its three key related entities, the Minneapolis, St. Paul & Sault Ste. Marie; Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic; and Wisconsin Central. In truth, it wasn’t all that much of a groundbreaking merger. All three properties were wards of the Canadian Pacific, and all shared enough operating practices that, in many ways, they functioned as a single railroad.
But it was an old-fashioned operation, a barely profitable company still stuck in the world of written train orders and loose-car railroading. The Soo owned 5,000 miles of railroad, but too much of the system was light-density branch lines. The railroad was heavily dependent on overhead Canadian traffic. The only salvation lay in the economies of scale available in a merger, a turnaround ultimately fed by new high-horsepower diesels, hundreds of miles of welded rail and centralized traffic control, and intelligent cost cutting.
The Soo Line had never been high on Wally Abbey’s list of favorite railroads. He wasn’t even aware of the company until high school, when, after church on Sundays, his dad would take the family to a barbecue chicken place near Deerfield, a far northwest suburb of Chicago. “I remember us bouncing across a single-track railroad and me asking Dad, what railroad is this? ‘The Soo Line,’ he said. ‘Goes up into Wisconsin somewhere.’”
Now, suddenly, Abbey was a Soo executive, and what he found wasn’t altogether encouraging. Before Abbey, the company appeared to treat modern corporate public relations as an afterthought, leaving it to a clunky three-man department headed up by a vice president whose responsibilities also included personnel and safety. There was only minimal contact with the local news media.
Abbey would change all that. “I found that it wasn’t so much that the Soo Line was misunderstood in the world at large but that the Soo was hardly understood at all. I soon began to hear how, should a train be derailed or some other misfortune occur to cause reporters to begin calling (someone) at home, the fellow who should have handled the calls would unplug his phone. Very little in the way of the mechanisms of a public relations operation were in place. There was not even a reliable mailing list.”
The company’s handling of those derailments gave Abbey an opportunity to school upper management. Rather than wait for the news media to call, Abbey suggested the railroad be proactive and contact the press first. “My superiors didn’t think that was an altogether wise move. But sooner or later they grudgingly, but tacitly, agreed that the news reports on the accident were factual and non-inflammatory. And sooner or later they quit arguing with me when I suggested that the only way to not have derailments show up in the newspapers was to not have derailments.”
Abbey’s efforts began to be appreciated by people across the industry, not least by his successor, John Bergene, whom Abbey hired initially to edit the company magazine. Bergene went on to oversee the Soo’s public affairs for many years and recalls Abbey’s role as critical in the company’s history.
“Wally was the first professional PR type at the Soo,” said Bergene in a 2017 interview. “When he came in they had a former passenger agent acting as an advertising manager who also edited an employee publication—both in old-school fashion. In just the short time we worked side-by-side, he was constantly on the phone working with national media and trades to gin up some press about the new Soo. And he was good at it, as the files were full of stories about the ‘New Soo.’ We were small, but he kept us in the public arena.”
The Soo Line’s higher public profile also owed something to a new corporate image, largely concocted by Abbey. Convinced that Soo’s traditional maroon-and-gold paint scheme was dated, Abbey began experimenting with various new approaches on scale-model plaster locomotives. Soon he came up with a winner. The new paint scheme began appearing on diesels in February 1962: a stunning combination of light-gray flanks and bright red front and rear end, with the word SOO emblazoned in black across the hood in 48-inch-high Venus Bold Extended. It was a clean, stark New Frontier design very much in tune with the times.
Abbey never explicitly said so, but his job at the Soo had a deeply personal benefit because he got to take his camera with him wherever he went. Along the way he created a portfolio of work quite unlike anything seen previ
ously in railroad public relations. Certainly he performed the usual duties: photographing company officers standing stiffly on the running board of the newest diesel, making serviceable images of new yards and buildings, shooting sterile portraits of freight cars and other equipment.
But out on the road, Abbey also found the time and had the necessary access to continue his work as an objective documentarian, even if the intent was unstated. In a word, his portrayal of the 1960s Soo Line was vivid. Far from making just sanitized views to fit corporate purposes, he focused on the railroad as it was, shooting trains on the North Dakota prairie in bad weather, recording the work of diesel mechanics amid the gritty interior of Shoreham Shops, demonstrating that light-gray hood units didn’t always look pretty.
Much of this work surfaced in 1984 in the hardcover book The Little Jewel, a pithy, irreverent memoir Abbey published under his own Pinon Productions imprint. The book is a useful, functional history of the Soo during Abbey’s time there. More importantly, it’s a showcase for Abbey’s brand of photojournalism, proving that, as Abbey writes, “railroading can be enjoyable as well as useful.”
Last run of train no. 8, remnant of the Atlantic Limited that had become a nameless night train from Minneapolis to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, crossing the Milwaukee Road’s Short Line Bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis on March 4, 1960. Westbound counterpart no. 7 arrived two days later for the final time, closing the book on this service. Before the decade ended, no dedicated passenger trains would be left on the Soo Line.
Train no. 7 has just arrived for the last time at the Milwaukee Road depot in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota, on March 6, 1960. The nameless night train from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, was a remnant of the Atlantic Limited that had once linked Minneapolis directly with Montreal and Saint John, New Brunswick. Eastbound counterpart no. 8 had departed two days earlier for the final time.
The Wisconsin Central Railroad’s ore dock in Ashland, Wisconsin, with the lake boat Denmark in April of 1960. WC built the dock in 1916 to transload iron ore from rail-served mines in northern Wisconsin to lake boats for shipment to steel mills located farther down the lakes. The original dock was 900 feet long; WC lengthened it to 1,800 feet in 1925. The dock became part of the Soo Line in 1961 but operated for just four more years, handling its last ore in 1965. It would sit idle for nearly half a century before most of it was demolished in 2013, with only the concrete base left standing.
Close-up view of a “piggyback” load—a truck trailer on a flatcar—on eastbound freight train no. 24 leaving Minneapolis’s Shoreham Yard in 1960. Piggyback business comprised less than 1 percent of U.S. rail freight in the 1950s, but managers of the Soo and many other railroads saw an opportunity for growth. Today, intermodal traffic—both truck trailers and shipping containers—comprises nearly one-quarter of all revenues of North America’s freight railroads.
Westbound freight train crossing the Camden Place Bridge over the Mississippi River on May 4, 1961. Located on the north side of Minneapolis, the 904-foot-long bridge opened in 1905 and carried the Soo’s main line out of the Twin Cities to the Canadian border. It remains a vital link today on the Canadian Pacific Railway’s route between Chicago and the West Coast.
The conductor of a westbound freight train grabs orders “on the fly” from the operator at New Richmond, Wisconsin, during a summer downpour in 1961. From this end of the train, the scene nearly looks as if it could have taken place in the 1930s. Modernization was coming soon to the railroad, though, and Abbey would document much of it.
Trains magazine editor David P. Morgan watches from inside Abbey’s Studebaker as an eastbound Soo Line freight train bears down on the depot at Boyd, Wisconsin, on a gloomy summer day in 1961. Following his departure from Trains in 1954, Abbey maintained a friendship with Morgan that more than once led to the editor visiting Abbey on the Soo Line.
Very few aspects of the Soo Line escaped Abbey’s attention during his eleven-year stint with the railroad. It should come as no surprise, then, that he accompanied the Soo’s bowling team to the lanes one October evening in 1961 for photographs.
The moon shines above the snowy tracks at Camden Place, on the north side of Minneapolis, on a winter night in 1962. The main line curves to the left to cross the Mississippi River and enter Shoreham Yard. This view looks south, toward Minneapolis, down a branch line that served industries clustered along the west bank of the river.
A Fairbanks Morse switcher shuffles freight cars at Shoreham Yard in Minneapolis on a June day in 1962. Abbey made this view from the ice house platform, used to load fresh blocks of ice into refrigerator cars with rooftop hatches—several are visible on one of the tracks at far right. By the 1970s, mechanical “reefers” had replaced most icing operations.
On an August afternoon in 1962, westbound freight train no. 125 rumbles across the Camden Place Bridge over the Mississippi River on Minneapolis’s north side, taking empty grain cars back to the prairies. Part of the Great Northern Railway’s Northtown Yard is visible in the distance. The view is from the top of a concrete elevator along the Mississippi’s western bank. The bridge remains a vital link on Canadian Pacific’s main line from Chicago to the West Coast, although the leg branching off to the right is no longer in service.
Tony Kunst, the relief operator at Mundelein, Illinois, holds up a hoop with a train order for a westbound freight, led by F3 no. 203A, on November 10, 1962. Kunst received the order over the phone from the railroad’s dispatcher and then copied it onto the paper he is handing up to the train crew. Mundelein is 40 miles north of downtown Chicago and is today a passenger stop on Metra’s North Central Service commuter operation.
The “New Soo’s” first new locomotives, Alco RS-27s nos. 415 and 416, blast through Wendell, Minnesota, with train no. 26 from the Canadian border town of Portal, North Dakota, on April 23, 1963. Abbey recorded that railroaders called these locomotives the “Dolly Sisters.” The 2,400-horsepower units served the Soo for nineteen years, but ultimately the railroad would order most of its locomotives from the Electro-Motive Division of General Motors.
Geese take flight as Soo Line RS-27s nos. 415 and 416 lead eastbound freight train no. 26 across the Crow River at Rockford, Minnesota, on April 23, 1963. Today this route is part of Canadian Pacific Railway’s main line between Chicago and western Canada.
Two boys in New Richmond, Wisconsin, watch as two-car train no. 6 pauses at the depot on the evening of August 5, 1964. No. 6 originated in St. Paul and connected in Owen, Wisconsin, with the Laker, which ran between Duluth and Chicago. Beset with a longer route between the Twin Cities and Chicago, the Soo never attempted to compete with the streamliners of the Burlington, Milwaukee, and North Western. After losing its mail contract, the Laker and its connections made their last runs in January of 1965.
Inside the diesel shop at Shoreham Yard in Minneapolis, a worker inspects the trucks from an Alco locomotive on a December evening in 1964. When the Soo ordered new GP30s and GP35s from EMD in the early 1960s, it opted to have EMD rebuild and reuse the trucks from older Alcos, a decision, Abbey wrote, “the Soo would soon regret.” Eventually, second-generation EMD power allowed the retirement of venerable F-units like the one in the background.
After delivering cars to the Illinois Central, SW1200 no. 2121 and caboose head back to the Soo’s yard at Schiller Park via the St. Charles Air Line in downtown Chicago on an April evening in 1962. The elevated tracks of the Air Line connect the IC tracks along Lake Michigan with the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy main line to the west, passing above congested streets, several busy railroads, and the Chicago River.
A dog watches from the banks of the St. Croix River as two brand-new GP30 locomotives and an F-unit lead westbound train no. 25 across the Arcola High Bridge at Somerset, Wisconsin, on April 26, 1963. No. 25 ran from Schiller Park in Chicago to Shoreham Yard in Minneapolis. The GP30s had just arrived on the property as part of the “New Soo’s” first major order for new locomotives.
SD45 no. 4353 departs Shoreham Yard on the night of April 3, 1967, with a transfer for St. Paul. In the early spring of 1967, three of EMD’s “demonstrator” SD45s spent several days proving their capabilities to the Soo Line, which was in the market for new, six-axle locomotives. Ultimately, the Soo’s first order went to General Electric, but the railroad came back to EMD in late 1968 with an order for ten SD40s—followed by several more orders for SD40s and SD40-2s.
Fresh out of the General Electric erecting shop in Erie, Pennsylvania, U30C no. 800 poses in Minneapolis on Shoreham Yard’s turntable on April 27, 1968. The railroad acquired ten of the big 3,000-horsepower locomotives that year, the first new, six-axle power for the “New Soo.” The Soo leased these locomotives for fifteen years from the State Mutual Life Assurance Company of America, and would ultimately buy out the lease and trade them in to EMD in the early 1980s.
Wallace W. Abbey Page 5
