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Soo Line Railroad: Map, Logo, History, Rosters
Last revised: October 27, 2026
By: Adam Burns
The Soo Line was the flour millers’ way around Chicago. From Minneapolis it ran east across Wisconsin to Sault Ste. Marie, on the St. Marys River, and handed its cars to the Canadian Pacific for southern Ontario, Montreal, and Boston. It also ran west, across Minnesota and North Dakota to a second Canadian Pacific connection at Portal, and later to a third at Noyes, on the Manitoba line. In 1961 the railroad was 4,719 miles. The Chicago & North Western, the Milwaukee Road, and the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy were larger. The Soo still earned its keep, and for a long stretch of years it paid cash for new locomotives.
The nickname is older than the corporation that finally used it. Sault, the falls at the outlet of Lake Superior, is pronounced “Soo.” The Minneapolis, Sault Ste. Marie & Atlantic was incorporated on September 29, 1883. Three companies became the Minneapolis, St. Paul & Sault Ste. Marie Railway on June 11, 1888. That company came out of bankruptcy as a Railroad on September 1, 1944. On January 1, 1961 the Railroad and the Wisconsin Central were merged into the Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic, and the surviving company took the name Soo Line Railroad. Canadian Pacific had carried the funded debt since 1890 and held about 56 percent of the stock for decades. It took the rest in 1990. The Soo Line Railroad is still the corporation. Since April 14, 2023 the parent system has been Canadian Pacific Kansas City.
Patrick Dorin tells the property in The Soo Line. Mike Schafer, in Classic American Railroads: Volume III, is the one who noticed that the railroad often paid cash when it bought locomotives. W. Kaye Lamb’s history of the Canadian Pacific is the account of why the Sault gateway mattered on the Canadian side of the river.
Soo Line F7A 2229-A at the engine terminal in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, on April 23, 1974. American-Rails.com collection.
On this page: At a glance · Around Chicago · Canadian Pacific · Wisconsin Central · Bankruptcy and the 1961 railroad · Milwaukee Road · Passenger trains
At a glance
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Minneapolis, Minnesota |
| Reporting mark | SOO |
| Slogan | Ship Soo to and through the Upper Midwest |
| Nickname | The Soo, from Sault |
| Incorporated | September 29, 1883. Minneapolis, Sault Ste. Marie & Atlantic Railway |
| Railway | June 11, 1888. Minneapolis, St. Paul & Sault Ste. Marie Railway |
| Railroad | September 1, 1944. The trade name Soo Line, for everything but legal matters, from 1950 |
| Soo Line Railroad | January 1, 1961. The South Shore company took the name |
| States | Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana |
| Mileage | 4,347.95 in 1930, Wisconsin Central included. 3,159 in 1954. 4,719 in 1961 |
| 1930 subsidiaries | Wisconsin Central 1,059.20 miles. Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic 574. Mineral Range 59 |
| Main lines | Chicago–Minneapolis. Sault Ste. Marie–Minneapolis. Minneapolis–Portal. Glenwood–Noyes. The Duluth lines. Chicago–Ashland |
| Gauge | 4 feet, 8½ inches |
| 1954 equipment | 47 steam locomotives and 76 diesels. 8,035 freight cars. 128 passenger cars. A year count |
| Steam | Quantity column 422, built since 1900, with the Wisconsin Central. Roster |
| Diesels | 786 frames, each once. Roster |
| Canadian Pacific | Funded debt, 1890. About 56 percent of the stock. Full control, 1990 |
| Successor system | Canadian Pacific, then Canadian Pacific Kansas City, April 14, 2023. The corporation remains |
Around Chicago
The Falls of St. Anthony made Minneapolis a flour town. Fort Snelling stood above the falls from the 1820s. Franklin Steele opened a sawmill in September 1848. St. Anthony was incorporated on the east bank in 1849, and Minneapolis, on the west bank, in 1867. The wheat came in and the flour went out, and every railroad that arrived in the 1860s and 1870s arrived by way of Chicago. The Minneapolis & St. Louis was the millers’ first railroad of their own, chartered in 1870 and building south in 1871. The Soo was the second idea, and it was the more ambitious of the two: skip Chicago entirely, reach the Canadian lines at Sault Ste. Marie, and put Minneapolis flour on a ship at Boston.
On September 29, 1883 the Minneapolis, Sault Ste. Marie & Atlantic was incorporated by William D. Washburn, who was already in the Minneapolis & St. Louis, H. T. Wells, John Martin, Thomas Lowry, George Newell, Anthony Kelly, C. M. Loring, Clinton Morrison, J. K. Sidel, W. W. Eastman, W. D. Hale, C. J. Martin, and Charles Alfred Pillsbury. Pillsbury and his uncle, John Sargent Pillsbury, had founded C. A. Pillsbury & Company in 1872. Local millers held about three-quarters of the stock. The destination was Sault Ste. Marie, on the south bank of the St. Marys, where a Canadian road could take the cars through Ontario and Quebec.
The Soo Line Railroad logo. Author’s work.
Construction started in April 1884, building west from Cameron, Wisconsin. The railhead soon reached Turtle Lake, 46 miles, and from there the company used the Omaha Road into the Twin Cities. Work to the east reached Rhinelander in 1886 and Sault Ste. Marie on December 10, 1887. Lamb records that the Canadian Pacific opened its own branch from Sudbury to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, in late 1888. The Canadian road wanted that gateway as badly as the millers did. The Grand Trunk was the carrier of old Ontario, and there was a real fear it would reach the Sault first. After a sharp fight, the Canadian Pacific got the crossing.
The Minneapolis & St. Croix, incorporated to close the gap from the Omaha Road connection into Minneapolis, finished that piece in January 1888. The through route was 501 miles. At the same time the Minneapolis & Pacific, chartered in 1884, pushed west for the wheat and reached Boynton and Bismarck, in what was still Dakota Territory, by 1887. The three companies, the Atlantic road, the St. Croix road, and the Pacific road, were consolidated on June 11, 1888 into the Minneapolis, St. Paul & Sault Ste. Marie Railway, 737 miles. On June 3, 1889 the first through train for St. Paul left Boston.
Soo Line GP9 2550 leads a Burlington Northern transfer out of Westminster Junction Tunnel No. 3 in St. Paul, Minnesota, on April 5, 1992. Dan Poitras photo. Author’s collection.
Canadian Pacific
The new railway was already short of money. Canadian Pacific could see its American connection falling to the Vanderbilts or to James J. Hill, and its own treasury could not simply buy the property. Donald Smith and George Stephen, the two men who had carried so much of the Canadian Pacific’s own construction, used their private fortunes and acquired the Soo companies in April 1888. Railroading in those years was a small room. Vanderbilt, Harriman, Gould, and Huntington divided territories and sometimes built a railroad out of spite, the way the New York Central backed the South Pennsylvania against the Pennsylvania Railroad. Smith and Stephen were buying a door into the United States before someone else shut it.
In 1890 the Canadian Pacific’s finances had recovered enough for the company itself to take on the Soo’s funded debt, and it did the same for the Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic, the ore road between Duluth and Superior and the Sault. That is the year Canadian Pacific control begins. The 1888 purchase and the 1890 debt are two steps.
Hill’s Great Northern, finished to the Pacific Northwest in 1893, ended the Northern Pacific’s monopoly on that traffic and also ended a comfortable arrangement in which Hill and the Canadian Pacific had passed cars between the Twin Cities and Vancouver. The Canadian Pacific wanted a line of its own to the border. It financed a Soo extension from Hankinson to Portal, North Dakota, begun in 1891 and finished in 1893, and built the short Canadian piece from Portal to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. A third gate opened in 1903, Glenwood, Minnesota, to Noyes, on the Manitoba border, for Winnipeg.
The branches that followed were wheat branches. Kenmare, North Dakota, in 1905. Drake in 1906. Whitetail, Montana, in 1913, which is why a railroad of the Upper Midwest appears on a Montana map. In the north woods the Soo built for position. A line from Brooten to Duluth, 208 miles, opened in 1909. A second Duluth connection, from Frederic, Wisconsin, was finished in 1912. Plummer to Moose Lake, opened in 1910, was a cutoff between the Duluth line and the Winnipeg gate. The small purchases are a longer list. The one that changed the map was the Wisconsin Central.
Roger Puta captured this scene from the fireman's side of a Soo Line F unit heading northbound through White Lake, Wisconsin in September, 1963. The train is about to cross Bissell Street at the north end of the town's short siding. Today, the line is gone. The depot is preserved but has been moved away from the right-of-way to Lake Street.
Wisconsin Central
The Wisconsin Central was older than the Soo and, for a few years in the 1890s, looked as if it might become the Northern Pacific’s way into Chicago. It was incorporated in 1871 to connect Menasha with Superior, and Congress put nearly 2.4 million acres of land grant behind it. Ground was broken at West Menasha, now Neenah, on June 15, 1871. Stevens Point, 63 miles, was reached in 120 days, and the first train arrived on November 15. Colby came the following September. The north end, begun south of Ashland, had reached Penokee Gap, 30 miles, by October 1873, and the rails from Colby met Worcester on January 6, 1874. The Panic of 1873 stopped the work. The line from Menasha to Ashland opened on May 19, 1877, with Superior service handled for a time over the Northern Pacific.
The 1880s filled in the Twin Cities. The Wisconsin & Minnesota ran from Abbotsford to Chippewa Falls. The St. Croix & Chippewa Falls and the St. Paul & St. Croix reached St. Paul on December 28, 1884. Chicago came by way of the Milwaukee & Lake Winnebago, incorporated in March 1882. Neenah to Slinger opened on December 18 of that year, with the Milwaukee Road carrying the trains the rest of the way into Milwaukee. In February 1886 the Wisconsin Central finished its own line into Chicago. The Northern Pacific leased the property in 1890 and, for a moment, held a Chicago–Puget Sound route that only the Milwaukee Road would later build in its own name. The Panic of 1893 put the Northern Pacific into bankruptcy and the lease ended. The Wisconsin Central stayed independent, opened a 152-mile line to Duluth on January 14, 1909, and peaked at 1,148 miles. The Soo leased it on April 1, 1909.
An official 1969 system map of the Soo Line Railroad. Author’s collection.
On a 1930 statement the Soo family was the parent, the Wisconsin Central at 1,059.20 miles, the Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic at 574, and the Mineral Range at 59. The whole, Wisconsin Central included, was put at 4,347.95 miles. Those are the Soo’s figures for that year. The Wisconsin Central kept its own locomotives, numbered from 2000 up, its own officers, and a good deal of its own pride. It was the busiest piece of the system and it carried the most freight. The Soo’s own Chicago–Minneapolis line was the long way around, and the railroad never matched its neighbors for speed.
Bankruptcy and the 1961 railroad
The hard years were the 1930s. In 1932 the Soo advanced the Wisconsin Central $2.2 million to keep it out of court. The advance was not enough to hold. The Wisconsin Central went into receivership, and the reorganization that followed was so long that it became a kind of record. The company came out only in 1954, as the Wisconsin Central Railroad. The Soo itself filed for bankruptcy on December 31, 1937. The reorganization took effect on September 1, 1944, and the new company was the Minneapolis, St. Paul & Sault Ste. Marie Railroad. From 1950 it used the Soo Line name for everything but the legal papers.
The postwar railroad laid heavier rail, put in centralized traffic control, and bought diesels. The last fire in regular service was dropped on February 15, 1955, when Consolidation 468 came in. Eleven steam locomotives, 2-8-0s, 2-8-2s, and 4-6-2s, were still on the books as late as July 1958, stored serviceable. In 1954 the railroad owned 47 steam locomotives and 76 diesels, 8,035 freight cars, and 128 passenger cars, and it operated 3,159 miles. Those are the counts for that year.
Through all of this the three Canadian Pacific companies in the United States, the Soo, the Wisconsin Central, and the South Shore, had been run as neighbors. On January 1, 1961 the Soo and the Wisconsin Central were merged into the South Shore’s corporation, the company that had been incorporated in Minnesota on October 19, 1949, and that company took the name Soo Line Railroad. Leonard H. Murray, who had been president of the South Shore, became president of the Soo and held the job until 1978. The 1961 railroad was 4,719 miles. Dorin records how the company described itself in those years: the service had to fit the customer, the service had to earn a profit, and a change was worth making only when it was a real one. The unit grain train, the consolidated pulpwood yard, and a direct Chicago interchange with the outbound roads were the examples it liked to give.
Soo Line train No. 4 at Burlington, Wisconsin, in April 1964. Rick Burn photo.
A Soo Line switcher at East Houghton Yard in Houghton, Michigan, on a cold day in January 1977. The yard and the line through Houghton have since been taken up. Rob Kitchen photo.
Milwaukee Road
The Staggers Act of 1980 took the wraps off a business the Soo had played carefully. The railroad went looking for a longer map. It wanted the Rock Island’s Spine Line, Twin Cities to Kansas City, and it bought the Minneapolis, Northfield & Southern as a Twin Cities door to that corridor. Control passed on June 2, 1982. The Chicago & North Western was awarded the Spine Line. The belt line never became the gateway the Soo had paid for.
The Soo turned to the Milwaukee Road, by then a Midwest railroad, the Pacific Extension already gone. The property changed hands shortly before midnight on February 19, 1985, for about $571 million, and it was parked in a new subsidiary, The Milwaukee Road, Inc. The subsidiary, and the Minneapolis, Northfield & Southern with it, merged into the Soo Line Railroad on January 1, 1986. The price and the Milwaukee’s debt were heavy, and the physical plant the Soo had just bought needed millions more. A railroad that had paid cash for locomotives began to lose money.
A pair of Soo Line F7s lead their train over the Milwaukee Road near Grand Avenue in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on August 27, 1966. Roger Puta photo.
In February 1986 the old Soo lines in Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula, together with some former Milwaukee secondary routes, were placed in the Lake States Transportation Division. The through freight between the Twin Cities and Chicago had already gone onto the Milwaukee’s double track. In January 1987 the Soo announced that Lake States was for sale. Wisconsin Central Ltd. was formed that April, with Edward A. Burkhardt at its head, and took those lines. Canadian National bought Wisconsin Central Ltd. on October 9, 2001. That is why a Canadian National train now uses the old Soo through the middle of Wisconsin, while the Milwaukee Road’s Chicago–Twin Cities line stayed with the Soo and, through the Soo, with the Canadian Pacific.
Soo Line SD60s 6019 and 6006 southbound at Blue Island, Illinois, on June 25, 1989. American-Rails.com collection.
Canadian Pacific, which had talked in the late 1980s of selling the 56 percent it held, changed its mind and took full control in 1990. In 1992 the name in public use, for most purposes, became CP Rail System. The corporation did not go away. It is still the Soo Line Railroad, and since April 14, 2023 it has sat inside Canadian Pacific Kansas City. On the side of a locomotive the lettering is the parent system’s. The company that Smith and Stephen bought with their own money, and that the millers built so flour would not have to pass through Chicago, is the paper underneath.
Passenger trains
The Soo’s passenger trains were connections, and the famous ones left the property. The Atlantic Limited ran Minneapolis to Boston with the Canadian Pacific and the Boston & Maine. The Mountaineer and the Soo-Dominion ran St. Paul to Vancouver with the Canadian Pacific. The Winnipeger ran St. Paul to Winnipeg the same way. The Laker was the Chicago train, for Minneapolis, Duluth, and Ashland. The Duluth-Superior Limited was the Minneapolis–Duluth run. The Copper Country Limited reached Calumet, Michigan, with the Milwaukee Road. After 1933 the summer-only Chicago–Vancouver train west of Portal used the Chicago & North Western between Chicago and St. Paul. The railroad was freight-only in 1968. The public timetable for August 1952 is a separate page.
Soo Line F7A 2225-A has the Neenah–Argonne mixed train at the depot in Argonne, Wisconsin, during September 1963. Roger Puta photo.
Related Reading
- Soo Line steam roster
- Soo Line diesel roster
- Wisconsin Central
- Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic
- Milwaukee Road
- Soo Line timetable, August 1952
Sources
- Patrick Dorin, The Soo Line.
- W. Kaye Lamb, History of the Canadian Pacific Railway.
- Mike Schafer, Classic American Railroads: Volume III.
- George H. Drury, Guide to North American Steam Locomotives, revised edition. The Minneapolis, St. Paul & Sault Ste. Marie chapter, including the Wisconsin Central.
- Soo Line Historical & Technical Society, sooline.org.
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