Here is a list of the 79 railroads that once operated in the upper Michigan Copper Country:
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dssa.habitant.org]
It includes common carriers, mining railroads, electrified interurbans, and logging railroads. Most were standard gage, but some were three-foot-gage. Some are so obscure that the gage cannot be determined.
There were upwards of 500 copper mines in this area of the Keweenaw Peninsula. Some of them began and ended prior to 1850. The Calumet & Hecla, Quincy, and White Pine became mining giants and survived into the post-WWII era. Most of the mines milled their ore some distance from the mine, so rail transport was often used for getting the ore to the mill. In some cases this was provided by common carriers, and in other cases, a private railroad was used.
In addition to the railroads on the list, which includes the private mine-to-mill railroads, there was intra plant railroad trackage. Most of the mines used underground tramways, some of which extended to a small surface operation. The Atlantic Mine, for instance, used an invention called the “Automatic Railway,” which collected the output of multiple mineshafts and hauled it to a common rockhouse. There were also incline cable trams that were used by the Quincy, Franklin, and C&H mines. Those were mine-to-mill trams, and there were also underground trams operating in many of the shafts, which followed the inclined mineral deposits of many of the mines. The Quincy No. 2 shaft was served by an incline tram extending almost two miles below the surface, measured along the incline. Ore was hoisted up this incline in 10-ton skips at speeds over 40 mph.
This website states that the oddball gage of 4’-1” was used for four different railroads in the Copper Country. See the paragraph titled “Lake Mine” on this page:
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www.pasty.com]
We know that one of these was the H&TL. The website states that one of them was the Lake Mine Railroad, but does not identify the other two. My research has shown that the Globe Tram Railway was also 4’-1” gage. However, I cannot find any historical information confirming the gage of the Lake Mine RR.
The H&TL stumbled into the oddball gage of 4’-1” by mistake, and the only likely explanation for that gage to have been repeated would have been to use second-hand equipment from the H&TL. However, the dates for origination of the Globe Tram and the Lake Mine RR would seem to precede the origination of the H&TL, so there is no reasonable explanation why they would have chosen the oddball gage.
