Ron,
Thanks for initiating this interesting discussion, and for the good overview of the railroads in the Copper Country. It certainly is an interesting place in many ways, including its rich railroad history (which was essential to, but is often overshadowed by its copper mining history).
The mines there were quite unlike any other. They mined native metallic copper (not copper sulfide or other ore that had to be chemically processed, but malleable metal). It simply had to be separated from the surrounding rock via mechanical means (e.g., stamp mills).
Some of the mines were very large ( C&H had ~450 miles of underground workings, Quincy had ~250, iirc), and in some cases extremly deep. The Quicy #2 shaft you mentioned was the deepest in the region, and for a time the deepest in the western hemisphere (9,620 ft if my memory holds). While a geological engineering student at Michigan Tech, I was fortunate to spend three of my summers conducting underground tours in the Quincy Mine. We would drive about a half mile into the steep hillside via a slightly inclining drainage adit to intersect the main workings on level 7 of 92. At this point we'd be about 450 feet below the surface, in an area that was worked around the 1870's. As mentioned, the mine is huge, with hundreds of miles of workings, however this adit access point happens to be within a few hundred yards of the #2 shaft. The tours we gave stayed in a relatively small area where a lot could be seen with a minimal walk. But of course, being adventurous college students, the other guides and I explored all we could reach beyond the tour area, and the #2 shaft was a prime destination (another was the man-shaft, where we could see daylight streaming down thru the welded grate of old rail covering it at the surface, 450' above).
The temperature on the 7th level stays constant at around 45 degrees, but at the bottom it was near 100 degrees (one of several factors leading to the mine closing at the end of WWII). This hot air natually rises up some shafts (updraft shafts) and is replaced by cool surface air that sinks down the rest of the shafts (downdraft shafts). Shaft #2 was a downdraft shaft, and some time a few decades after the mine shut down, a fire started on the 7th level and was spread by the downdraft, burning out all the crossties from beneath the rails from the 7th level down to where the water level was at the time (during operations, the mine was kept dry by a massive dewatering operation, but over the ensuing decades it has gradually flooded up to the natural water table). So the four rails for the inclined (~57 deg.) counterbalanced skip road are hanging in air, pulled tight by the weight of thousands of feet of rail below. Basically they're four huge guitar strings, in a 25' diameter linear resonance chamber. A rock tossed into the shaft makes quite the racket as it tumbles downward, and when it hits the rails they really sing. Pretty soon the rock reaches the water and slows considerably, but after the chaos fades you can still hear the rails ring out occasionally two or three minutes later when the rock, still tumbling thru the water, hits a rail.
At the time I worked there, tourists would get a van ride from the surface plant to the adit, but now there is a steep standard guage cog railway that drops directly down the hillside from the hoist house to the adit, so there's at least one bit of area railroad currently operating. Just noticed the latest Quincy Mine Hoist Association (www.quincymine.com) newsletter is in the pile on the desk in front of me, and in it are pictures of a recently restored Quincy and Torch Lake poor-rock car, placed on newly-relaid 3' ng track in the poor-rock bay of the towering #2 shaft-rockhouse. Though some Q&TL rolling stock still exists much has been reduced to rust and rot by the harsh environment, but from what I can tell the restored car is beautiful (at least to those of us who appreciate rusty rolling relics!).
Cheers,
Nick
