The Lake Superior & Ishpeming is an ore-hauling line in the Upper Peninsula. Serving several mines west of Marquette, it provides daily service to bring literally millions of tons of iron ore and taconite into its Marquette facilities to be transloaded onto Great Lakes Freighters for shipment to steel mills and auto plants in the Lower Peninsula, Indiana, Ohio, and points beyond.

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Now scaled back to approximately 30 miles of active track in and around Ishpeming and Negaunee, in the late 1960s and early 1970s the LS&I once had a network that covered well over 100 miles, ranging south and east of Marquette. It was in this era of the mid-late 1960s where the LS&I interchanged with Ann Arbor subsidiary Manistique & Lake Superior, in the now-defunct RR spot known as Doty, near Munising. In an effort to take advantage of the year-round capabilities of AA car ferries out of Manistique, LS&I shipped significant quantities of ore through the M&LS to the AA, until the tonnage overwhelmed the aging infrastructure of the M&LS and the experiment (and the ML&S) came to an end.

 

Other than ore cars, not much LS&I equipment is available in N-Scale, so it was off to the paint bench and parts bin. See stories and photo links: